The Epistemological Import of Good Friday

Today is Good Friday, commemorated by Christians as the day when Christ offered Himself up as the penal-substitutionary atonement for the sins of the elect—arising from the Covenant of Redemption, in fulfillment of the stipulations of the Covenant of Works, and the ground for the inauguration of the substantial Covenant of Grace.

In light of this, I believe it would be beneficial to review an aspect of Christology that bears upon the way we know things: Christ's offices:

"Christ is true prophet, priest, and king. The Westminster Shorter Catechism asks,'How doth Christ execute the office of a prophet?' (Q.24). The answer is: 'Christ executeth the office of a prophet, in revealing to us, by his word and Spirit, the will of God for our salvation,' Man set for himself a false ideal of knowledge when he became a sinner, that is, he lost true wisdom. In Christ man was reinstated to true knowledge. In Christ man realizes that he is a creature of God and that he should not seek underived comprehensive knowledge. Christ is our wisdom. He is our wisdom not only in the sense that he tells us how to get to heaven. He is our wisdom too in teaching us true knowledge about everything about which we should have knowledge.

Again the catechism asks: 'How doth Christ execute the office of a priest?' (Q.25). The answer is: 'Christ executeth the office of a priest, in his once offering up of himself a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice, and reconcile us to God, and making continual intercession for us.' We need not discuss this point except to indicate that Christ's work as priest cannot be separated from his work as a prophet. Christ could not give us true knowledge of God and of the universe unless he died for us as priest. The question of knowledge is an ethical question. It is indeed possible to have theoretically correct knowledge about God without loving God. The devil illustrates this point. Yet what is meant by knowing God in Scripture is knowing and loving God: this is true knowledge of God; all other knowledge of God is false.

In the third place the catechism asks: 'How doth Christ execute the office of a king?' (Q.26). The answer is: 'Christ executeth the office of a king, in subduing us to himself, in ruling and defending us, and in restraining and conquering all of his and our enemies.' Again we observe that this work of Christ as King must be brought into organic connection with his work as Prophet and Priest. To give us true wisdom or knowledge Christ must subdue us. He died for us to subdue us and thus gave us wisdom. It is only by emphasizing this organic connection of the aspects of the work of Christ that we can avoid all mechanical separation of the intellectual and the moral in the question of knowledge" (Cornelius Van Til, Christian Apologetics [New Jersey: P & R, 2003], ed. William Edgar, 47-48).

Hebrews 9 Bible Study

Posted below is the content of the handout I gave to the participants of the Hebrews 9 Bible study that I led this afternoon:

HEBREWS 9 Bible Study (Date: June 12, 2010)

9:1: The "first covenant" refers to the Sinaitic Covenant which was destined to be abrogated by the new covenant in Christ. This old covenant had prescriptions for worship particularly suited to that time of types, shadows, and prefigures, with its reference to "earthly" pointing to its role in signifying the "heavenly."


9:2—5: The tabernacle set up in the desert, prior to entering the Promised Land, had 3 parts according to Calvin (1st: the court of the people, 2nd: commonly called the sanctuary; 3rd: inner sanctuary), and 2 parts by most commentators (1st: The Holy Place, 2nd: The Most Holy Place or "Holy of Holies").

The Holy Place contained The Golden Lampstand, The Table for the Bread of the Presence, and The Altar of Incense.

The Most Holy Place contained only The Ark of the Covenant. The current passage states that the Ark contained an urn holding the manna, Aaron's staff, and the tablets of the covenant, but the OT states that only the latter were contained therein. It is not unlikely that the two prior items were placed inside the Ark in a subsequent time.

These two sanctuaries were divided by a veil made from blue, purple, and scarlet dyed yarns woven with fine twined linen and embroidered with cherubim.


9:6—10: The priests of the Levitical tribe (narrowly, only the sons of Aaron)  went regularly into the Holy Place, dispensing of their priestly duties (changing the lamp oil, the bread of the presence, and the incense fire). However, for any given time, there was only a single High Priest, who had the right of access to the Most Holy Place. He would enter The Most Holy Place once a year, on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), offering up a blood sacrifice for himself and the people.

It is notable that mention is made of "unintentional" sins. This is not to say that voluntary sins cannot be forgiven but that sins of an apostate nature are unforgivable in that sin that is not repented of cannot be forgiven. Anyone who does not look to Christ for the forgiveness of sin is intentionally sinning and in a state of rejection of the only way of forgiveness and restoration of a right standing with God.

While the old system was still in place, no one was permitted access to God except the priests, and the said system was a type, shadow, or prefigure of the antitype or substance that is to be found in the sacrifice of Christ, by which the way was made for those who look to Him in faith to come into the Most Holy Place, i.e., the actual presence of God.

The sacrifices of the old system are incapable of reaching the conscience, of conferring forgiveness of sins and righteousness before God—benefits received in faith only through the sacrifice of Christ.


9:11—12: We now come to the discussion of the reality itself, the substance to which the old covenant system pointed to.

Parallels:
1.) Only the High Priest entered the Most Holy Place. Only Christ was suited to enter the Most Holy Place of God's presence in heaven.

2.) The High Priest offered the blood sacrifice and entered entered the Most Holy Place only once a year. Christ, in the fullness of time, offered Himself up and, bearing the ultimate efficacy of His own blood as sacrifice, needed to offer it but once for all time.

3.) The High Priest offered the blood sacrifice before entering the Most Holy Place. Christ offered up His own blood on earth before entering the Most Holy Place in heaven.

4.) The High Priest offered the blood of animals as a sacrificial offering. Christ offered His own blood.

The redemption that Christ, by His blood, secured for His people is eternal, efficacious for the saints prior to His coming and for those after, and unalterable.


9:13—14: The blood of animals availed not in the cleansing of the conscience. However, Christ having lived a perfectly righteous and sinless life, empowered by the Holy Spirit, offered up His own blood which served to justify and sanctify before God. The cleansing of the conscience entails both these concepts of justification and sanctification in that we are declared as not guilty in the sight of God in justification and we are enabled to serve Him in the gift of a new nature in sanctification.


9:15: Moses, as a type of Christ, was the mediator of the old covenant, as Christ is the mediator of the new. Moses' mediatorial work presented the Law to the people but could not guarantee obedience to it and hence the promised inheritance. Christ's mediation, however, secures for His people the inheritance promised to Abraham in Gen. 15 by virtue of His having kept the Law perfectly on our behalf and the payment of the penalty of our breaking of the Law through His atoning death.

Only the called, or the elect, are the beneficiaries of Christ's mediatorial work.

Our eternal inheritance in Christ has two aspects, the "already" and the "not yet." We now already enjoy the benefits of justification and sanctification; and thus having the Holy Spirit as the guarantee of our future glorification, we eagerly await the second coming of Christ for the consummation of all things.


9:16—22: The term, "covenant", used in the current passage, denotes two meanings: the traditional meaning whereby an agreement between two living parties is ratified  with blood, and the second meaning as referring to a "last will and testament", whereby the beneficiary receives the blessing only after the death of the testator. Both meanings are applicable to the sacrificial death of Christ, whereby in the first sense, Christ died, taking upon Himself the curse for the breaking of the covenant stipulations by His people, and in the latter sense, the benefits of Christ being conferred on His people only upon His death.


9:23: If the implements used in the old covenant system were purified with the blood of animals, being typological and pointing to the heavenly things, i.e. Christ and His mediatorial death, how much more shall the substance, the real thing, the heavenly things be put in place by the blood of Christ, the testator.


9:24—26: Christ, after having lived a perfectly sinless, righteous life and dying on the cross, shedding His blood on behalf of His people, has entered the Most Holy Place in heaven, God's presence, having purchased their redemption in the satisfaction of God's justice in a once-and-for-all act, as the True High Priest and Mediator of the New Covenant.  


9:27—28: Just as man is destined to die once and face the judgment of God, so Christ was offered up once-and-for-all and faced the judgment of God for our sins. Christ will come back again not to deal with sin once more, for He has already done that in His first coming, but to complete the work of redemption in bringing many sons to glory.

D.A. Carson on a Species of Perfectionism

D.A. Carson recognizes a strain of perfectionism "that owes no connection to Keswick or Wesley," but yet often rears its ugly head in the lives of more orthodox Christians. He appears to appeal to a misappropriation of two ages theology in describing a plausible explanation for this predicament, which he describes as "a species of over-realized eschatology," not intending to lump it alongside the hubris that Paul lambasts in 1 Cor. 4 nor the inanity of the prosperity gospel.

What he describes, it seems to me, is the classic struggle with assurance of salvation, borne out of the failure to make the biblical distinction between justification and sanctification and a low view of the nature of sin, that leaves the believer in despair over what he knows he must do based on what he also knows he already is—but does not do!

Carson offers two considerations:

1.) The narrative testimony of Scriptue to the Romans 7 reality of the sanctified life in the lives of some "heroes of the faith":

"First, the Bible itself speaks to this issue in various ways, and some of those ways are cast as stark antitheses. In apocalyptic literature, for example, there are faithful followers of Christ, and there are diabolical opponents. People wear either the mark of the beast or the sign of Christ; there is nothing in between. Similarly in wisdom literature: one follows Dame Folly or Lady Wisdom, but not both. That is why a wisdom psalm like Ps 1 casts the choice in absolute antithesis: either one does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly, stand in the path of sinners, and sit in the seat of mockers, while delighting in the law of the Lord day and night and meditating on it, finding one's life before God is like a wellwatered fruit-bearing tree, or the wicked are simply 'not so.' The Lord recognizes and owns one path, while the other perishes. There is nothing in between. The Lord Jesus can preach in many different styles, but included among them is wisdom polarity: reflect on the antitheses at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. On the other hand, over against such antithetical presentations of holiness and sin, of faithfulness and unbelief, are the many narrative portions of the Bible where God's people are depicted with all their inconsistencies, their times of spectacular faithfulness and their ugliest warts. Abraham the friend of God repeatedly tells half truths; Moses the meekest man loses his temper and consequently does not get into the promised land; David the man after God's own heart commits adultery and murder; Peter the primus inter pares, the confessor of Caesarea Philippi and the preacher of Pentecost, acts and speaks with such little understanding that he earns a rebuke from Jesus and another from Paul. In such narratives there is no trace of the moral polarities of apocalyptic and of wisdom. There is instead an utterly frank depiction of the moral compromises that make up the lives of even the 'heroes' of Scripture. In short, the Bible itself includes genres and passages that foster absolutist thinking and others that warn us to recognize how flawed and inconsistent are even those we recognize as the fathers of the faithful. Certainly we need both species of biblical literature, and most Christians see a sign of God's kindness in the Bible that provides us with both. The narratives without the absolutes might seem to sanction moral indifference: 'If even a man after God's own heart like David can fall so disastrously, it cannot be too surprising if we lesser mortals tumble from time to time.' The absolutes without the narratives might either generate despair ('Who can live up to the impossibly high standards of Ps 1?') or produce self-righteous fools ('It's a good thing the Bible has standards, and I have to say I thank God I am not as other people are.'). We need the unflinching standards of the absolute polarities to keep us from moral flabbiness, and in this broken world, we need the candid realism of the narratives to keep us from both arrogance and despair. Most of us, I suspect, muddle along with a merely intuitive sense of how these twin biblical heritages ought to shape our lives."

2.) The objectivity of Christ and His benefits:

"The second factor is how we attach the cross of Christ to all this. The intensity of the struggle against sin easily generates boundless distortions when we do not return, again and again, to God's love for us manifested in the cross. There alone is the hope we need, the cleansing we need, the grace we need. Any pursuit of perfection that is not awash in the grace of God displayed on a little hill outside Jerusalem is bound to trip us up."

Source: D.A. Carson, Perfectionisms, Themelios 35.1, 1-3

The Old Cross and the New

"The cross where Jesus died became also the cross where His apostle died. The loss, the rejection, the shame, belong both to Christ and to all who in very truth are His. The cross that saves them also slays them, and anything short of this is a pseudo-faith and not true faith at all. But what are we to say when the great majority of our evangelical leaders walk not as crucified men but as those who accept the world at its own value—rejecting only its grosser elements? How can we face Him who was crucified and slain when we see His followers accepted and praised? Yet they preach the cross and protest loudly that they are true believers. Are there then two crosses? And did Paul mean one thing and they another? I fear that it is so, that there are two crosses, the old cross and the new.

.....

The old cross slew men; the new cross entertains them. The old cross condemned; the new cross amuses. The old cross destroyed confidence in the flesh; the new cross encourages it. The old cross brought tears and blood; the new cross brings laughter."

- A.W. Tozer, The Radical Cross, ch. 30, pp. 137-138

The Humble Tenacity of Looking to Christ

Indeed, if gameness and heart are character traits that are valued highly in the prizefighter, so are they in the Christian.

"Jonathan Edwards just laid me bare in 1971 and '72 when I was reading his book Religious Affections. I can remember several nights where, in his chapter on evangelical humiliation, he began to peel back the onion layers of my soul. He would say, 'So you think you're humble? What if you're boasting in your humility?' And you admit, 'Yes, I probably am boasting in my humility.' And he would ask, 'Well, what if your confession that you are boasting in your humility is really a pose, and you're still boasting in your humility?'

He gave question after question that made you realize, 'There's no center to this onion.' You peel and peel and peel, and the last peel just disappears, because you can always ask yourself, 'How do you know?' You can always doubt yourself. There's no way, by mere self-analysis, to come to a point where you're looking at something that you can say, 'Definitely authentic!' Because the capacity of the human brain to doubt is always there.

So where in the world does assurance come from? The answer is that, even though introspection is commended and wise up to a point, the bottom line of assurance comes when you stop analyzing and you look to Christ and you look and you look and you look until Christ himself in his glory and his sufficiency by reflex, as it were, awakens a self-forgetful 'Yes!' to him.

Your best moments of assurance are not the moments when you're thinking about your assurance. Because the very moment that you're thinking about your assurance, you have the capacity at that moment to doubt your assurance. This little voice, whether it's your conscience or the devil, is saying, 'You think you have assurance, but...'

And so the answer comes, 'Look to the cross! Look to Christ!' And if you're able to look to the cross, if you're able to see him as sufficient and satisfying and powerfully able to carry all your sins, and you find yourself drawn out of yourself to say 'Yes' to him, that's what you want. You are assured. He is your assurance at that moment."

- John Piper, How can I know if my repentance is genuine?

Look

"If you’re a Calvinist you might ask, am I elect? If you’re not a Calvinist you just might ask, is my faith authentic? It’s the same kind of problem experienced at the same level. And the bottomline answer to that is not a simple little “here it says, ‘If you believe, you have the Holy Spirit.’” Have you believed? Yes. Where’s the Holy Spirit? He’s in my heart. That does not work. That simply does not work. That is so superficial, because the issue is, am I really believing? Because the Bible says there are going to be some people in the last day who are stunned when he says, “I never knew you; depart from me” (Matt. 7:23). They’re going to think they were believing all the time, but they were not believing. So how do I know if I am believing? That’s the kind of terror that will keep you awake at night and make life really hard. The bottom-line answer is: Look to Christ. Look to Christ. Look to Christ. Only in looking to Christ and the cross does Romans 8:16 powerfully happen. “The Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.” I can’t give anybody assurance that they’re truly saved.

I can’t give anybody assurance that they’re elect. But God can. And it’s a miracle. You pray for it and you wait for it, and you don’t stand in front of the mirror looking endlessly into your soul with introspection. That comes periodically, but mainly you stand in front of the cross and you keep looking and looking and looking. And in looking you are saved." (emphases mine)

- John Piper, Suffering and the Sovereignty of God, Appendix: An Interview with John Piper, pp. 229

Who Does the Cross Invite?

Matt 11:28
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

To whom does the invitation of the cross come? It comes to failures, the people who know they have gone wrong, the people who are filled with a sense of shame, the people who are weary and tired and forlorn in the struggle. "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." You know He is talking about people who are laboring to live a good and clean and straight life. That is what He means by laboring and being heavy-laden---by the law of God, the commandments, moral ideals. You have tried and sweated and fasted. You are laboring, like Martin Luther before he saw the truth, like John Wesley before he saw it. Like all these people before they saw it, you are laboring, trying to live the good life, but failing; we are miserable failures, weary and forlorn.

The hymns of the church have always expressed this.

I heard the voice of Jesus say,
"Behold, I freely give
The living water, thirsty one;
Stoop down, and drink, and live."
I came to Jesus as I was,
Weary, and worn, and sad...
H. BONAR

That is how they have come. The invitation is to such---the weary and worn.

- Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Walking with God Day by Day, April 21