Absolute Authority

"God’s authority is also absolute in the sense that his covenant transcends all other loyalties . We are to have no other gods before the Lord (Ex. 20:3). We are to love him with all our heart; there should be no competing loyalties (Deut. 6:4–5; Matt. 22:37). The Lord is the head of the covenant, and he forbids us to grant lordship to anyone else.  

Jesus strikingly claims deity by demanding the same kind of exclusive loyalty for himself. “Honor your father and your mother” (Ex. 20:12) is one of the fundamental commandments of the law, one that Jesus fully honors and urges against those who would dilute its force (Matt. 15:1–9). Nevertheless, Jesus demands of his disciples a loyalty that transcends the loyalty that we owe to our parents. In Matthew 8:19–22 and 10:34–38, he teaches that the demands of discipleship take priority over duties to our parents. Only God can legitimately make such a demand.  

The principle sola Scriptura follows from this teaching. No other authority may compete with God’s own words. No words may be added to God’s or put on the same level of authority (Deut. 4:2; 12:32; Isa. 29:13; Matt. 15:8–9). It is wrong to bind the consciences of God’s people by mere human traditions. Only the word of God has ultimate authority."

John Frame - Systematic Theology

The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown

I didn’t know the first thing about competitive rowing. I never have rowed and never will. But that didn’t stop me from loving this book. I heard Alistair Begg mention the book in a sermon and I spotted it at a library sale for $1 – so I took a chance and am glad I did. In fact, my heart was racing with the thrill of the race when reading about Joe Rantz and the University of Washington crew as they overcame seemingly insurmountable odds. I teared up reading of their physical, personal, and emotional trials. As I was reading one section on my lunch break, I sat the book down because I anticipated what was about to happen and couldn’t bear to read on if what I thought was about to happen did. A few minutes later I picked it back up, and sure enough, another tragedy.

This was a really well told story. Daniel James Brown gratifyingly weaves the story of these men and their struggles with the struggle that the United States faced in the great depression, and with the struggle the world was about to face with Nazi Germany. He also did great job describing the ins and outs of the sport of rowing for the novice, like me, who comes to the book having only rowed a joh boat and canoe looking for bluegill. The art and skill of the master craftsmen, George Pocock as he meticulously crafted the best racing shells in the world was fascinating to me.  

This was good book and a wonderful story about an amazing time in history.

A speech, not a sermon

"The end, I repeat, of every oration is to make men do. But the things which the sermon would make men do, are only the things of God. Therefore it must apply to them the authority of God. If your discourse urges the hearer merely with excellent reasons and inducements, natural, ethical, social, legal, political, self-interested, philanthropic, if it does not end by bringing their wills under the direct grasp of a " thus saith the Lord," it is not a sermon ; it has degenerated into a speech."

RL Dabney Sacred Rhetoric

Silence, Brazen not Golden

A MISCELLANY OF MEN
By G. K. Chesterton

"It is the final sign of imbecility in a people that it calls cats dogs and describes the sun as the moon—and is very particular about the preciseness of these pseudonyms. To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence. The disease called aphasia, in which people begin by saying tea when they mean coffee, commonly ends in their silence. Silence of this stiff sort is the chief mark of the powerful parts of modern society. They all seem straining to keep things in rather than to let things out. For the kings of finance speechlessness is counted a way of being strong, though it should rather be counted a way of being sly. By this time the Parliament does not parley any more than the Speaker speaks. Even the newspaper editors and proprietors are more despotic and dangerous by what they do not utter than by what they do. We have all heard the expression "golden silence." The expression "brazen silence" is the only adequate phrase for our editors. If we wake out of this throttled, gaping, and wordless nightmare, we must awake with a yell."

It's from the essay The Nameless Man and you can read the whole thing here. It's a short essay about British politics from 100 years ago, but I did find the principles addressed relevant in several applications. 

Bible Doctrine in Bible Dress

R.L. Dabney made a good point in book Sacred Rhetoric:

"And it is exceedingly instructive to note, that there are three stages through which preaching has repeatedly passed with the same results. The first is that in which scriptural truth is faithfully presented in scriptural garb—that is to say, not only are all the doctrines asserted which truly belong to the revealed system of redemption, but they are presented in that dress and connection in which the Holy Spirit has presented them, without seeking any other from human science. This state of the pulpit marks the golden age of the Church. The second is the transition stage. In this the doctrines taught are still those of the Scriptures, but their relations are moulded into conformity with the prevalent human dialectics. God's truth is now shorn of a part of its power over the soul. The third stage is then near, in which not only are the methods and explanations conformed to the philosophy of the day, but the doctrines themselves contradict the truth of the Word. Again and again have the clergy traveled this descending scale, and always with the same disastrous result."

And then said:

"The generation, unwittingly introduced by the great and good Jonathan Edwards, marks the second; during which the doctrines of grace were not openly impugned, but they were successively stretched into the schemes of metaphysics—the "exercise scheme," the "light scheme," the "greatest benevolence scheme"—which fascinated a people of narrow and partial culture and self-confident temper. The next generation was called to witness the apostasy which turned the truth of God into a lie, and took both the methods and the dogmas of the Socinian and the Pelagian. Let us, my brethren, eschew the ill-starred ambition which seeks to make the body of God's truth a "lay figure" on which to parade the drapery of human philosophy. May we ever be content to exhibit Bible doctrine in its own Bible dress!" 

The Centrality of Divine Lordship

From John Frame's Systematic Theology

"Having read many theologies based on themes mentioned above, I started wondering why nobody had employed God’s lordship as a central theological theme.18 Certainly God himself is central to the biblical story, and he indicates in many contexts that he wants to be known as the Lord. In Exodus 3, he met with Moses in the burning bush. And when Moses impertinently asked his name, God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.”And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.”(Ex. 3:14–15) Here, God gives Moses his mysterious name in three forms: long (I AM WHO I AM), medium (I AM), and short (Heb. Yahweh, translated “LORD”). These are all related to the name Yahweh, which in turn has some relation to the verb to be (ehyeh). In the ESV the term Lord (representing both Yahweh and ’adon in Hebrew and kyrios in Greek) is found 7,776 times, in 6,603 out of 31,086 verses of the Bible.19 Most of these refer to God, or (significantly) to Christ. Clearly, this is a term to be reckoned with. In the passage above, God tells Moses that Yahweh is the name by which he wishes to be remembered forever. And throughout Scripture, the term takes on important theological meaning. Over and over, we are told that God performs his mighty deeds, so that people “shall know that I am the LORD”(Ex. 14:4; cf. 6:7; 7:5, 17; 8:22; 10:2; 14:18; 16:6, 12; 29:46; 31:13; Deut. 4:35; 29:6; 1 Kings 8:43, 60; 18:37; 20:13, 28; 2 Kings 19:19; Ps. 83:18; Isa. 37:20;20 Jer. 16:21; 24:7; Ezek. 6:7, 10, 13, 14; 7:4, 9, 27; 11:10; etc.), or so that “my name may be proclaimed in all the earth”(Ex. 9:16; see also Rom. 9:17). We find name and Lord throughout the Scriptures, in contexts central to God’s nature, uniqueness, dignity, actions, and relation to his people. The name Lord is as central to the message of the NT as it is to the OT. Remarkably, in the NT, the word kyrios, “Lord,”which translates Yahweh in the Greek translation of the OT, is regularly applied to Jesus. If the shema (Deut. 6:4–5) summarizes the message of the OT by teaching that Yahweh is Lord over all, so the confession “Jesus is Lord”(Rom. 10:9; 1 Cor. 12:3; Phil. 2:11; cf. John 20:28; Acts 2:36) summarizes the message of the NT."

Then later he adds:

"So despite the 7,776 references to divine lordship and the obviously central role it plays in the biblical story, a theologian should not expect to appeal to this concept without being criticized. The main problem is that we live in a world obsessed by autonomy. As with Adam and Eve in the garden, people today do not want to bow the knee to someone other than themselves. God’s lordship confronts and opposes autonomy from the outset. It demands our recognition that all things belong to him and are subject to his control and authority. That demand is unacceptable to people who are outside of Christ, and to some extent even believers chafe when the demand is clearly made."

A Conservative Case for Freedom

by: M. Stanton Evans

"The conservative believes man should be free; he does not believe being free is the end of human existence."

Very interesting piece and good to consider. This is a good and needed debate for American conservatism. I don't think you can have true freedom without virtue.


HT: Prufrock Newsletter

Hail Sovereign Love by Jehoida Brewer

Hail sovereign love, that first began
The scheme to rescue fallen man;
Hail, matchless free eternal grace,
That gave my soul a hiding place.

Against the God that built the sky,
I fought with hands uplifted high;
Despised the mansions of his grace,
Too proud to seek a hiding place.

Enwrapt in dark Egyptian night,
And fond of darkness more that light,
Madly I ran the sinful race,
Secure without a hiding place.

But lo! the eternal council rang,
Almighty love arrests the man;
I felt the arrows of distress,
And found I had no hiding place!

Vindictive justice stood in view,
To Sinai's fiery mount I flew;
But justice cried with frowning face,
This mountain is no hiding place!

But lo! a heavenly voice I heard,
And mercy's angel soon appeared:
He lead me on a pleasing pace,
To Jesus Christ, my hiding place!

Should seven fold storms of vengeance roll,
And shake this globe from pole to pole:
No thunder-bolt shall daunt my face,
While Jesus is my hiding place!

On him almighty vengeance fell,
Which else had sunk a world to hell;
He bore it for his chosen race,
And thus became a hiding place!

Roll on, thou sun, in rapid haste,
And bring me to that constant feast,
Where mirthful songs of sovereign grace,
Are sung to him the hiding place.