Tag Archive for 'Grudem'

God’s Covenant With Mankind

Written by Colin. Published on October 26, 2009 ago in Religion and Theology. Closed
This entry is part 2 of 6 in the series Christianity and Covenants

God and Man

This topic is one which, even in beginning to think about it, overwhelms me with gratitude towards God. This is because the contract between God and man is completely and utterly one sided – it is a unilateral contract initiated by God towards people who have wanted absolutely nothing to do with him and, in fact, have been openly hostile and at war with God.

But this is a difficult concept to grasp – especially in light of the fact that we see nothing like this in our world, in our church and even in ourselves. Each and every day, we hold grudges, remember wrongs, complain, gossip, slander one another and set up all kinds of conditions for our relationships. We love those whom we perceive as loving us and we scorn and dislike those who we believe (real or imagined) have wronged us. Our “love” is drowned with conditions and clauses – and all of these are rooted in sinful, selfish, self-righteous pride which is quick to condemn and slow to forgive.

I can think of no better contrast then Ephesians 2:4-9 (NKJV). After laying out the pure and perfect wretchedness of mankind, Paul contrasts this with the great mercy and grace of God:

But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.

God, in order to demonstrate his grace and kindness, has chosen to save us – despite our being completely dead.

For the purposes of covenants, this is an apt image of a unilateral act – a corpse being raised to life. A corpse cannot make contracts – it is dead. There is no life in it. A dead thing, in order to act, must first be acted upon – it must be made alive. God, in his grace, made us alive, and thus enabled us to have faith and receive his grace.

Contrasting God and Man
As sinful people, what is it that we would do with our enemies? If we could avoid the consequences, we would see them made dead, not alive. We desire vengeance, justice (by our own hypocritical standards) and often enduring punishment through ostracism, exile and exclusion. When someone has wronged us, even as Christians who have experienced God’s grace, we find ourselves incapable of generating the godly characteristics to forgive – it is never our first response. This is because we are obsessed, by nature, with conditional covenants.

But God has instead chosen to act upon man, making promises to him about what he, as a sovereign free being, will do. Moreover he has followed through on those promises in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who provided the promised deliverance of sins. God made the promise and then did all of the work himself.

There is no greater example of a unilateral covenant.

The Benefits of a Unilateral Covenant
If God’s covenant with man is a unilateral covenant, then man can breathe a little easier. If salvation is dependent upon the grace of God, and not on conditional works of man, then salvation is held by God. The bible reveals that God is just, honest, forgiving, loving, unchanging and keeps his word – therefore, his promise and delivery of saving grace is not revocable by man. Those who have placed their faith in Christ are protected by Christ and “sealed” by God the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 1:22 and Ephesians 1:13, 4:30).

Another benefit of a unilateral covenant is a right perspective of sin. Knowing that it was God who saved us, and that our works and decisions are not conditions of grace, frees us from seeing our sin as putting us in jeopardy of breaking any covenants. Rather it stimulates us towards deeper worship, knowing that in spite of our sin, God has still graciously saved us. Our thanks to God is not tainted by any sense of accomplishment.

Moreover, it points us towards a sustainable and powerful solution for our sins – God himself, rather than our own initiative, methods and tricks to simply change our behaviour or external appearances. A lot of Christians go through cycles of guilt and and self-righteousness as they temporarily adjust their behaviour and put away some sin – and then it comes roaring back and the cycle starts again. But if we realise that it is only God who can completely deal with sin, then we acknowledge that our abilities are meaningless and we stop trying to simply change our behaviour and appearance of sin. We can go to God and petition him for his grace and ask him to change us from the inside out, as only he can.

Also, knowing this should trickle down to our relationships with each other. If grace is of God, then we need not compare ourselves to each other and seek to judge one another. We can be honest and open about our sin, and we can receive rebuke, encouragement and correction without being “hurt”, “exposed” or “wounded”(which is really just our pride and self-righteousness revealing itself). Knowing that our sin is not going to rob us of grace, allows us to be used by God to help one another confront and cut-away sin.

Summary
God’s covenant with man is one-sided. Unlike men, who are vengeful and unforgiving towards our enemies, God is forgiving and merciful to those who have wronged him. The bible says we are “dead” in transgressions, and therefore, we are the receivers of grace and cannot initiate or seek out a contract with God – rather, God seeks out us.

Being the recipient of God’s promises gives us a right view of sin, a deeper worship and provides complete and total assurance of our salvation. It also provides us the opportunity to have healthy and intimate relationships with other Christians where we can pursue holiness together.

Stepping Back – What Is A Sacrament, And Does It Do Away With “Faith Alone”?

Written by Bryan. Published on June 24, 2008 ago in Essays, Religion and Theology. 10 Comments
This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series The Lord's Supper

About The Series In General
This will be the final entry directly on the subject of sanctifying grace being given in the Lord’s Supper. In past entries we have looked at: The Frequency Of The Lord’s Supper, If The Lord’s Supper Is Magic?, and Calvin’s View Of The Lord’s Supper. In the next few entries we will be turning to other aspects of the Lord’s Supper before moving on to baptism. Today we will examine the objection to the view that sanctifying grace is given in the Lord’s Supper which argues that such a view does away with the Protestant doctrine of “Faith Alone”.

Stating The Objection
The objection has been stated on here in the following form:

Our FAITH is what bestows grace (and that faith is also a gift from God). Belief in magic rituals that “force” God to bestow grace is unbiblical. Grace is not something we do acts to earn, it is a gift granted despite our complete inability to do anything to deserve it…

And summed up as

Grace granted as the result of an act isn’t grace, it is a wage that was earned.

Since sacraments have already been distinguished from “magic” in a previous post in which were given biblical examples of acts brining about God’s grace not being considered magic, I will first only briefly address the magic comment before moving onto the main trust of the argument.

What Is Magic?
Magic is the act of relying on a supernatural force to bring about some desired end. The supernatural force is under the command of the magician and in popular cultural is usually brought about by some kind of ritual.

A Christian sacrament on the other hand is a gift given by God to help the church perform it’s mission on earth. It is God who brings about the result of the sacrament, it does not rely on any power in the one who performs it. Whereas magic attempts to either appease or control of a supernatural power or being into performing the whim of the magician, there is no appeasement or control in a sacrament. Man does not force God to given grace in a sacrament, God freely gives it because it is a gift to the church.

A Comparison To Prayer
Why sacraments are accused on being magic, and doing away with “Faith Alone” and not prayer confuses me. One way to think of sacraments are prayers of physical matter. In prayer Christians ask for grace to be given them (Lord give me the strength to overcome XYZ so I can conform more to Christ) and in the Lord’s Supper one takes the bread and wine expecting help to become more like Christ. The only major difference in this respect is that one is spoken, and the other a physical action. If sacraments are magic rituals, then prayer is magic enchantments. We will return to this comparison of prayer later.

The Doctrine Of Faith Alone
No Protestant will argue with the importance of faith in the life of the believer. No Protestant will argue with the statement that “It is by faith alone that one is justified.” However, Protestants will differ on what that statement means. The first Reformers who championed the doctrine saw no contradiction between that doctrine and the belief the the sacraments bestow grace.

As we saw in the last entry, that was Calvin’s view, and it was also Luther’s, the greatest champion of the doctrine to to mention the hundreds of other Reformers who held similar views. One could argue, and it often is, that those Reformers were still caught up in some Roman Catholic doctrine and it was left to others to shed the remaining Roman Catholic doctrines. While such an argument may be made, futility I believe, all I wish to point out is that historically we need not see a break between sacramental grace and the doctrine of faith alone.

How Is That Possible
One modern evangelical writer who has bucked the trend of seeing the Lord’s Supper only as an act of remembrance, and has made room for grace being given in it is Wayne Grudem. Chapter 48 of Grudem’s Systematic Theology is entitled “Means of Grace Within The Church” and will be used to explain why sacraments and the doctrine of “faith alone” are not mutually contradictory.

Grudem begins by asking the question:

All of the blessings we experience in this life are ultimately undeserved – they are all of grace. In fact, for Peter, the entire Christian life is lived by grace (1 Peter 5:12).
But are there any special means that God uses to give additional grace to us? Specifically, within the fellowship of the church are there certain means – that is, activities, ceremonies, or functions – that God uses to give more grace to us? Another way of formulating that question is to ask whether there are certain means through which the Holy Spirit works to convey blessings into the life of the believer. Of course, personal prayer, worship, and Bible study, and personal faith, are all means through which God works to bring grace to us as individual Christians. But in this chapter we are dealing with the doctrine of the church, and we are asking specifically within the fellowship of the church what the means of grace are that God uses to bring blessing to us.

Grudem identifies 11 activities, ceremonies and functions that God uses to bestow grace on the believer (For example; teaching the word, prayer, worship, giving…etc). Two of them are ceremonies (Baptist and the Lord’s Supper) which are which are the sacraments. It is important to note that in Grudem’s understanding, and all orthodox Christians, these means are only avenues that the Holy Spirit uses. The ritual in and of itself does not bring about grace, but it is the Holy Spirit working through them that does.

On the Holy Spirit working through the sacraments Grudem is lock step with Calvin who said in section 19 of his Short Treatise On The Lord’s Supper:

But to understand this advantage properly, we must not suppose that our Lord warns, incites, and inflames our hearts by the external sign merely; for the principal point is, that he operates in us inwardly by his Holy Spirit, in order to give efficacy to his ordinance, which he has destined for that purpose, as an instrument by which he wishes to do his work in us.

Not Ex Opere Operato
Ex Opere Operato is a Latin term that means that the work of the sacrament being performed confers the grace to the recipient, for the sake of our discussion, regardless of their faith. Such a belief would do away with the Protestant doctrine of “faith alone”, but Grudem is clear that this is not what he means:

But on a Protestant view, the means of grace are simply means of additional blessing within the Christian life, and do not add to our fitness to receive justification from God (However, the Anglican Church teaches that baptism is “generally necessary” for Salvation [My Note: We will deal with this in a later post if we get to baptism]). Catholics teach that the means of grace impart grace whether or not there is subjective faith on the part of the minister or the recipient, while Protestants hold that God only imparts grace when there is faith on the part of the persons receiving these means.

Once again we can turn to prayer to see a correlation. Prayer must be made in faith, in fact prayer is an act of faith. It must be made by someone who is trusting in God, and they put that trust into action by, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism says “…offering up of our desires unto God, for things agreeable to his will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgement of his mercies.” The fact that the faith of a person is acted on in a way commanded by God to receive grace does not do away with the supremacy of faith in prayer just as it does not do away with it in the Sacraments. In the sacraments the faith of the person is acted on through the means that God has ordained (Baptism or the Lord’s Supper) and it is because of faith that the grace is given, just as in prayer.

Why Then External Ritual?
The obvious question at this point should be; “If it is faith that is what matters in the sacraments, why bother with the external sign?” This is a huge question and one that I can only deal with in part in this entry. For an excellent extended answer see Evangelical Is not Enough by Thomas Howard The simple answer, and one that I heard given this past weekend, is because God commands it, but such a view seems to make the sacraments into a burden instead of the gift that they are. Yes God commands participation in Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, but He does it for our own good. To base participation in them on a command is akin to saying the reason your use a gift is because your dad who gave it to you our of love forces you to. God knows that humans enjoy ritual, that the physical is something that humans need to connect with, and there is so much meaning locked up in the sacraments that participating in them makes the gospel come alive in ways that reading about them can not bring about.

Conclusion
Are sacraments magical? No, they are means that the Holy Spirit use to bring grace to the Church. Do sacraments do away with faith? No, faith is the heartbeat of them. They are nothing without faith on part of the recipient. Is there nothing then to the external ritual of them? No, God has ordained the rituals of the sacraments, they are the means that our faith is expressed. Will this explanation satisfy everyone? No the debate that been going on in Protestant churches since Luther and Zwingli, but I hope at least to have done away with some misconceptions on the topic.