Aphorisms for Thinking about Separation: Not Separating What God Has Joined Together

Aphorism 4: None of the commands of Scripture contradict the other commands when rightly understood, and to be correctly applied and interpreted all of the commands of Scripture must work together.

Eight hundred feet below the surface of the water, in a cramped nuclear submarine armed with ballistic missiles, my friend and newly minted lieutenant felt like he was faced with an impossible decision. On Sunday morning would he meet and worship with the dozen or so sailors on the boat that professed Christ but belonged to compromised groups (American Baptist, United Methodist, etc.) or quietly pray by himself in his bunk? Would he “be separate” (ESV, 2 Cor. 6:17) or neglect “to meet together” (Heb. 10:25)? Would he “[b]ear one another’s burdens” (Gal. 6:2) or would he “[p]urge the evil person” (1 Cor. 5:13)?

My friend had grown up under the teaching of Axioms of Separation which required separation from disobedient brethren. And disobedient brethren were by definition anyone who did not separate from other disobedient brethren. Thus the conundrum. How does one obey the commands to separate and the commands to be unified?

One option when faced with two seemingly contradictory commands is to attempt to sin the least. So if unity with Christians is “better” than separation from Christians, one might unify or vice versa dependent on which command one believes will create the better outcome.

Yet this strategy has devastating scriptural problems. Sinning less as a necessity cannot be a godly option, because Jesus in “every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15). If sinning less is a temptation of man, Jesus experienced this temptation “yet without sin.” Therefore when faced with two commands that seem contradictory, there must always be a way to obey both commands without sin, “for sin is the transgression of the law” (KJV, 1 John 3:4). There must be a way of escape (1 Cor. 10:13); God promises it and Jesus’ holiness requires it.

By God’s grace, Jesus interacted with the Pharisees on this very issue. They had prioritized separating from disobedient brethren over the other commands of God. So we read in Matthew 9:11-13 (ESV),

And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard it, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” Go and learn what this means, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.” For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.

Our Lord’s frustration with the Pharisees was that they did not provide opportunities for reformation and revival in the sinner’s lives. By completely and rigorously separating from the disobedient brethren (the tax collectors and sinners were Jews), they denied them the possibility of mercy through repentance and faith. And they also provided themselves the opportunity for prideful self-righteousness (Luke 18:11).

Jesus obeyed the injunction “be separate” (2 Cor. 6:17; Isa. 52:11) by refusing to join the tax collectors and sinners in their sin. And Jesus separated by preaching against sin, but Jesus also obeyed, Leviticus 19:18, “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.” Jesus loved them by spreading “the knowledge of God” (Hosea 6:6; cf. Matt. 9:13 citation).

The Pharisees did not separate for the purpose of reformation among their brothers and sisters, but rather for the purpose of taking vengeance. They separated so that they could say in the Temple, “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector (Luke 18:11). The Pharisees absolutized the commands to separate at the expense of God’s command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” But God’s intent for the commands is found by obeying both commands in the same action.

Jesus makes this clear in Matthew 23:23-24,

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!

The problem Jesus has noted is not that they were obeying God’s command to tithe, but rather that they prioritized tithing over other “weightier matters of the law.” The Pharisees were particularly rigorous in obedience to some of God’s commands, but in so doing they began to contradict other commands of God. When their actions became a pattern Jesus states that they were “making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down” (Mark 7:13).

Absolutizing the commands beyond God’s intention leads to “straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel.” So when Christian unity is prioritized over separation the gospel is compromised and holiness is subsumed in licentiousness. This is the way of modern liberalism that prioritizes love over holiness. But when separation is absolutized, the offer of mercy within the gospel is compromised and holiness petrifies into legalism. This is the way of modern rigorist. But both prioritizing unity and prioritizing separation are sins.

The “weightier matters of the law—justice and mercy and faithfulness” teach us how to obey all of God’s commands at the same time. Jesus gives us three examples of his use of “weightier matters of the law.” In Matthew 12:2-7, Jesus

said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless.”

Neither David nor Ahimelech (1 Sam. 21:8) sinned in the exchange of the bread of the Presence. It is clear that they were guiltless. The priests were not sinning by profaning the Sabbath in obeying God. The law of the bread of the Presence was never meant to weaken the future king of Israel as he fled from the demon oppressed king of Israel. The 4th Commandment was designed to assist people worshiping God and to allow Jesus’ disciples to eat on the Sabbath. Or as Jesus asked rhetorically, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?” (Luke 6:9). And so Jesus violates a first-sight reading of the 4th Commandment’s “you shall not do any work” with the words “My Father is working until now, and I am working” (John 5:17).

We see the balancing of the “weightier matters of the law” throughout Jesus’ ministry. Jesus violates a first-sight reading of the ceremonial law by touching lepers and not declaring himself unclean (Matt. 8:3; Lev. 15:7). Nor does Jesus declare himself unclean when touched by a menstruating woman (Luke 8:45; Lev. 15:19). Obviously, the intent of the ceremonial law allowed Jesus to make the unclean clean without himself being tainted.

Since the Bible does not allow us to prioritize separation over mercy or unity over holiness and the model of Jesus and Paul (cf. Aphorism 3) requires that we separate by proclamation as we extend the opportunity for reformation and revival, we thus have again returned to the issue of wisdom. How do we know if we have correctly balanced the “weightier maters of the law?” Wisdom. The way that we apply God’s commands comes down to wisdom.

I opened this article with my friend on the submarine trying to think through if he should worship with the professed Christians on his boat. The intent of both the commands “separate” and “meet together” is love God with all your being and love your neighbor as yourself. So, taught Moses (Deut. 11:13; Levi. 19:34), Hosea (Hosea 6:6), Jesus (Matt. 22:37-40), Paul (Rom. 13:9; 1 Cor. 16:22), John (1 John 4:20-21), and James (2:8) in various ways throughout their writings.

My friend decided to love God and his neighbor as himself by joining the sailors in worship. The specific context of the situation, the character and faith of the sailors, and the singularity of their united faith made this appear the wisest choice. And in so doing he “went out of their midst and [was] separate from” the unbelievers (2 Cor. 6:17) and he met together with fellow Christians.

In a different context, say on an aircraft carrier with a godly Anglican chaplain and a profane Baptist chaplain, holding separate services, he would have to separate and meet together in a different way. The rules of application are not axioms of tradition, but rather the rule of wisdom as guided by specific commands and God’s intention that He be loved with all our being and that we love our neighbor as ourselves in the specific context.

Having established that all of God’s commands can be obeyed without contradiction, we now need to move on to a consideration of the issue of Christ’s return and the commands to separate.

Aphorism 5: No one knows when Jesus is coming back or how long it will be before Jesus comes back, and so application of separation passages cannot be dependent on how close or far the return of Christ is.

Following the discussion on the end times, we will consider how patterns of application expose whether or not we are truly obeying God.

Aphorism 6: Our patterns of application of separation need to include people to the left and the right on the group boundary markers—our “friends” and those who make us uncomfortable. Grace on believers who are like us or provide advantages to us but no or little grace on believers who are different is a sin (James 2:1; Luke 6:3-32).

Aphorism 7: Our patterns of application of separation must include the grace we allow the godly of the past.

Aphorisms for Thinking about Separation: Were Jesus and Paul Separatists?

Aphorism 3: Applications of the commands of separation must take into account Jesus’ and Paul’s application of these same commands as recorded in the Gospels, Acts, and the epistles.

Was Jesus a separatist? Given that Jesus acted according to some of the same commands He requires His church to obey, the answer must be yes.

Let consider some of the examples: “Purge the evil person from among you” (ESV). This phrase is from the LXX and is used six times in Deuteronomy (17:7, 19:19, 21:21, 22:21, 22:24, 24:27).The Apostle Paul uses this phrase and demands obedience to it of the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 5:12. The Greek verb behind “purge” is only used here in the New Testament, “suggesting Paul’s intentional and explicit use of the formula from Deuteronomy” (Beale and Carson, Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, 709).

Our Lord Jesus was also required to obey, “Depart, depart, go out from there; touch no unclean thing” (Isa. 52:11). The Apostle Paul requires this of Christians in 2 Corinthians 6:16.

Further, in His relationship with other believers Jesus was also required to obey the command, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18). This command is picked up and proved as normative for the church by both Paul and James (cf. Gal. 5:14, James 2:8).

Obviously, Jesus’ context is different, but inasmuch as there are similarities in context, Jesus provides us an authoritative model for the application of the commands to separate and God’s intent in giving the commands. At the bare minimum, Jesus provides us with a rich example to think about separation.

Jesus’ context

The two generally well-known theological groupings in Jesus’ day were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. It is almost completely anachronistic to call these two parties liberal and conservative. From the point of preserving the status quo religiously and politically, the Sadducees were conservative, but they also had a low view of the existing Bible and in that sense we might call them liberal. The Pharisees were conservative in the sense of having a high view of the Bible, but were liberal in the sense of going against the established norms of worship and practice. The sinful propensity of the Sadducees was to take away from the Bible (Luke 20:27, Acts 23:8) and the sinful propensity of the Pharisees was to add to God’s word (Mark 6:5-9). In our day the general propensity for “liberal” Christians is to follow the Sadducees by taking away from God’s Word by rejecting parts of God’s Word as authoritative. Modern “conservatives” tend to follow the Pharisees by adding to God’s Word.

The Sadducees, who rejected the existence of angels, the resurrection, and spirits, controlled the Temple in Jerusalem. For Jesus to come to the Temple required Him to come under the human authority and to fellowship with people who openly rejected parts of God’s word. The law required Jesus to go to the Temple and He did so. Further, we see Jesus both asking questions and listening to the teachers in the Temple as a 12 year old (Luke 2:46-47). Thus Jesus’ model allows a degree of fellowship and training with theologians and believers who reject portions of the Bible as true.

We should also note the Temple itself was tainted. The architecture did not exactly follow the model shown to Moses (Exod. 25:9; cf. Heb. 8:5) or to David (1 Chron. 28:19), but was instead an approximation of the written description contained in the Old Testament with some additions. Finally, the building had been funded by the syncretistic Herod and was policed and overseen by the pagan Romans.

Our Lord’s most basic means of separating Himself from the error found within the Temple was through His proclaimed doctrine and His actions. “Day after day I sat in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me” (Matt. 26:55). Jesus obeyed the commands to separate through His teaching ministry as He united with the Sadducees and Pharisee in worship at the Temple. We also know it was Jesus’ custom to worship at the local synagogue (Luke 4:16) each Sabbath; an educated guess is that this was about as much of a mixed blessing as it is today for those of us who attend an unknown church while traveling.

We should also note the requirements that Jesus places on the godly members of the church of Thyatira in Revelation 2:18-29. There is a false prophetess functioning in the church “teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols” (v. 20). Yet, there is no command to separate from her or her followers as church members. In fact Jesus says to the faithful, “I do not lay on you any other burden” (v. 24).

Paul’s context

And then we come to Paul. Paul worships at the Temple controlled by and administered by people who explicitly reject the deity of Christ and who reject portions of the Old Testament (Acts 21). He held a Bible study in a philosopher’s hall (Acts 19:9). Paul continued in fellowship with a church where people were getting drunk during the Lord’s Table celebration (1 Cor. 11:20), people were denying the resurrection (1 Cor. 15:12), a party spirit divided the church (1 Cor. 1:12), church members were going to the local pagan temple and having sex with prostitutes (1 Cor. 6:16), and the spiritual gifts were operating without control. Paul, while forbidding these gross sins only demands church discipline for the man cohabitating with his stepmother. There is no mention of discipline for the whoremongering, drunkenness, or party spirit, but there is a request for funds for the church in Jerusalem (1 Cor. 16:1-4).

Yet at the same time, we read,

But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.” (1 Cor. 5:11-13)

There is a tension between Paul’s practice and his commands. Paul commands “not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one,” and yet he fellowships with and accepts and collects funds from the church of Corinth. And we see the same in Jesus’ ministry; He also was required to “Purge the evil person from among you,” and yet He worships at the Temple, attended dinners with Pharisees, and so forth. How do we reconcile the commands with Paul’s and Jesus’ practice?

I will attempt draw the practice and the commands together in a two-step process. My first step will be to highlight how Jesus and Paul separate by proclamation and establish a timeline and benchmarks for repentance. This require us to continue the discussion of aphorism three below.

The second step will be to argue for aphorism four (that none of the commands of Scripture contradict the other commands when rightly understood, and to be correctly applied and interpreted, all of the commands of Scripture must work together) in the next installment.

Jesus and Paul as Separatist

The argument I am pursuing is that Jesus and Paul were separatist. (I’ve attempted to cover this in greater detail in the previous article.) Jesus and Paul must be separatists because they are obeying many of the same commands that we are. Further, Jesus and Paul give us a model to both follow and to understand God’s intent in giving these commands. Paul and Jesus’ model is the rule for Christians, because Paul commands us, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1).

We’ve already noted that Jesus entered into theological dialogue with the doctrinally compromised teachers at the Temple (Luke 2:46), that he was known for dining with Jews who were morally compromised either politically with the Romans (i.e. tax collectors) or were sinners (Luke 7:34). It must be noted that both tax collectors and the more general category of sinners were members of the nation of Israel and therefore necessarily under the law. Jesus dined with the Pharisees and interacted with the Sadducees. Further, Jesus supported attendance at the synagogues and submission to the scribes and Pharisees who taught there (Matt. 23:2).

The New Testament parallel to all these groups—tax collectors, sinners, scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees—is backsliding church members, churches, and even denominations. And Jesus describes the Sadducees as those who knew “neither the Scriptures nor the power of God” (Mark 12:24) and the Pharisees and scribes as children of hell (Matt. 23:15).

So how did Jesus obey Isaiah 52:11a, “Depart, depart, go out from there; touch no unclean thing; go out from the midst of her”—a command Paul repeats to the church in Corinth? Or, “Purge the evil person from among you” found six times in Deuteronomy (17:7: 19:19; 21:21; 22:21, 24; 24:27), and repeated by Paul in 2 Corinthians 6:16?

Jesus’ primary means of separation was through proclamation. He worked both to proclaim himself as the fulfillment of the Old Testament (Matt. 5:17), but also to correct the false teaching of his day on various issues.

Much of Jesus’ preaching ministry correcting the sinful doctrine of his day. The reason for this is that rejecting or misapprehending the Old Testament made it impossible to accept him as the Messiah. Or as Abraham describes it in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, “If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead” (Luke 16:31).

Thus we find Jesus defending salvation by faith alone by correcting the Pharisees’ faith plus works formula (Luke 18:14). He preached against the easy divorce practice of the day (Matt. 19), and overturned the traditional interpretations and applications of the false teachers (Mark 7:11-13).

Most importantly Jesus argues against rigorously separating from disorderly and sinful Jews without the opportunity to extend mercy through repentance. So we read in Matthew 9:11-12, “And when the Pharisees saw [Jesus fellowshipping with sinners], they said to his disciples, ‘Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ But when he heard it, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”

At the same time, Jesus also establishes two timelines for repentance: the first is death or the second coming (Matt. 25:30). If those who are professed Jews do not repent of their sins and have faith, they will die and go to hell. So the Pharisee who trusted in his self-righteousness went away from the Temple without justification (Luke 18:14), while the tax collector was saved. The Pharisee remaining in his sin on death would join the rich man in Hades (Luke 16:23-24).

But there is second timeline. Jesus, in agreement with John the Baptist, preaches about a coming cutting off of the corporate nation of Israel if they do not repent. John is the most explicit, “Bear fruits in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (Luke 3:8-9).

Our Lord Jesus adds to John’s doctrine: “They will fall by the edge of the sword and be led captive among all nations, and Jerusalem will be trampled underfoot by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled” (Luke 21:24).

If the nation of Israel does not repent and believe “what the prophets and Moses said would come to pass” (Acts 26:22), then a terrible judgment would come upon the nation of Israel. And as history teaches us, Jesus’ prophecy of the destruction of the nation occurred in 70 A.D. and ushered in the “times of the Gentiles.” We also need to note that the cutting off included the expectation and hope of future repentance.

The way that Jesus separated himself from sinners was by proclamation of the truth, warning of the individual consequences, and proclaiming the coming corporate cutting off. And Jesus extended this patient warning from his preaching ministry in the early 30s to 70 A.D. Jesus gave the nation of Israel nearly 40 years to reform and repent and then the axe came.

Though we do not have as explicit a timeline in the letters to the seven churches in Revelation, we have an almost identical pattern. Jesus extends the opportunity to repent (Rev. 2:5) and informs them of a coming corporate judgment (2:22).

In Paul’s context at Corinth, we find him following a similar model to Jesus but with different emphasis.

Paul clearly lays out some of the sins from which Christians are to separate from among those who profess Christ—sexual immorality, greed, idolatry, reviling, drunkenness (1 Cor. 5:11). Yet he only calls for church discipline on the grossest form of sexual immorality, incest, within the church (1 Cor. 5:5). And, he demands that the other forms of sexual immorality—prostitution (6:15), refusal of conjugal rights (7:5)—immediately cease. He does the same for greed expressed through lawsuits (6:1), idolatry (10:14), reviling (1:10; 4:6), drunkenness at the Lord’s Supper (11:21-22; 15:34). But Paul does not demand the separation of church discipline for these sins, but rather calls for repentance. Further, Paul strongly critiques the teaching within the church on prophecy, speaking in tongues, gender roles, and the denial of the resurrection (15:12). But the only sins that Paul requires immediate separation from is incest and those who do not love Jesus (16:22), and Paul continues in financial and ministry cooperation with the church of Corinth.

When we move to 2 Corinthians, it becomes clear that some degree of repentance from these sins has begun (7:15-16). Yet at the same time we read in 12:21 that some or possibly many of the church members “have not repented of the impurity, sexual immorality, and sensuality.” And so Paul will come a third time and he “will not spare them” (13:2) and use his apostolic authority in a severe way (v. 10). It is difficult for us to establish a firm timeline, but Paul’s patience with the Corinthians lasts perhaps a year or two.

Both Jesus and Paul separate from professed believers who have fallen into doctrinal error and sin by proclamation, but continued in worship, fellowship, and financial cooperation (Matt. 17:26) with disorderly believers and professed believers; they both extend the opportunity for repentance, and they establish a timeline and even bench marks for repentance. They warn of the personal consequences of not repenting (2 Cor. 13:5-6), but they act with great patience always looking for and hoping for repentance and reformation. In both the first and second letter, Paul continues in financial partnership with the church.

Jesus’ patience with the nation of Israel was based on divine revelation, yet Paul does not appear to be responding to revelation on the timing of separating from both the individuals at Corinth or declaring the church apostate. Paul language is too tentative for revelation in 2 Corinthians 12:20, “For I fear that perhaps when I come I may find you not as I wish, and that you may find me not as you wish—that perhaps…” and then in 13:5, “unless indeed you fail to meet the test.”

It is then apparent that Paul’s decisions for prioritizing the incestuous relationship over the other sins and the amount of time allowed for reformation and repentance was based on wisdom. Paul’s best wisdom was to demand church discipline for the sin that was “not tolerated even among pagans” (1 Cor. 5:1) and to strive for reformation until he was forced to “use of the authority that the Lord had given.”

The record of Acts shows that the Apostle Paul was also willing to worship with Jewish believers that explicitly rejected the deity of Christ and his gospel (Acts 21:26; cf. Acts 22:22). And that he did so after writing the letters to the Corinthians explicitly citing Old Testament passages as normative for the church. It is also apparent that this was the practice of the majority of Christians in Jerusalem (cf. Acts 21:18-25).

I need to be rather clear here: Paul’s behavior serves as a model for us, yet the Jewish Christians use of the Temple prior to 70 A.D. was a unique issue in salvation history. After the destruction of the Temple, John refers to the synagogues’ of Satan (Rev. 2:9; 3:9)—language not found in the earlier epistles. Paul openly anathematizes anyone who does not love Jesus (1 Cor. 16:22), and modern Christian are not to worship with those who openly disavow Christ or his gospel as the official practice of their congregations.

My purpose here is for us to recognize Jesus and the Apostle Paul’s patterns of application of the commands to separate and to attempt to imitate them in as much as our context is similar to theirs. God’s intent in the commands to separate is not found in the letter or in our traditions of application, but rather in the whole council of God. Separation is fundamentally about wise application.

The next series of aphorisms will attempt to lay out how we can discern God’s intent in the commands and provide a test to analyze our patterns of application as being wise.

So Lord willing next week will discuss Aphorism 4: None of the commands of Scripture contradict the other commands when rightly understood, and to be correctly applied and interpreted all of the commands of Scripture must work together.

Aphorisms for Thinking about Separation: Command, Intent and Application

Aphorism 2: All applications of the commands of Scripture are based on a particular context outside the Bible. Therefore unless the context is identical to what was intended by the Bible, an application cannot be as normative as Scripture itself.

Allow me to share an explicit command of Scripture, repeated five times in the New Testament which is patently ignored at least in literal obedience by almost all churches in the United States: “Greet one another with the kiss of love” (ESV, 1 Peter 5:14; cf. 1 Thess. 5:26, 2 Cor. 13:12, 1 Cor. 16:20, Rom. 16:16).

I hope you obey this command of Scripture by greeting all Christians in a culturally appropriate way. But my guess is that your church does not practice a literal kiss of love but replaces it with a handshake, shoulder squeeze, or hug. We look through the culturally decided symbolism of a kiss and replace it with our culture’s symbolic synonym of a warm greeting.

Obedience to the command is then based on our cultural context. The trans-contextual aspect is that we must greet all Christians in a friendly way. We must obey the command or we are sinning.

Command and intent

Most of the time we overlook the complexity of the Western church’s interpretation and application of “Greet one another with the kiss of love.” It’s not a hot issue, but any meditation on our non-literal conformity to this clear biblical command should tell us that we often unconsciously recognize the differences in the command, the intention of the command, and the application of the command.

The intention of “greet one another with the kiss of love” is that Christians will warmly greet each other. But if obeying the command itself leads to licentiousness or confusion, then the intention of the command must be obeyed above the literal wording of the command.

Our Lord Jesus teaches us this explicitly on the issue of the 4th Commandment—“the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work” (Exod. 20:10). The Pharisees had built up a pattern of application that forbade Jesus from healing on the Sabbath. And so Jesus confronts them by asking, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” (Mark 3:4).

Jesus’ diagnostic question considers God’s intention within the Sabbath law. Was the 4th Commandment intended to harm or cause unnecessary suffering for God’s people? Was obedience to cause good or evil? Jesus argues that the purpose of the command was to do good. Jesus then explicitly contravenes the literal meaning of the command “you shall not do any work” with the words, “My Father is working until now, and I am working” (John 5:17). Jesus is of course obeying the intent of the command by resting from a particular category of work to honor God, but He is working in the sense of doing good on the Sabbath.

Thus when we come to a command, it is not enough to merely ask if we are obeying the words of the command. The modern Western church, in general, does not obey the words of “Greet one another with the kiss of love,” but it does obey the intent of the command.

Intent and application

The issue of both the intent of the command and the application of the command can be observed in more basic commands like, “You shall not murder.” What determines whether an act is a murder? Numbers 35:16-24 gives some of the scriptural conditions for murder and includes motive, pre-meditation, and the situation. The Bible itself clearly teaches that the command “you shall not murder” is to be applied with consideration of the intent of the command, the motive, and the specific situation. The application of a command is then dependent on the intent of the command, the motives of those obeying and disobeying, and the specific situation.

But there is a further element that must be noted. Part of the universal context of all human beings is finitude, fallibility, freedom, and fallenness. Humanity is forced by our existence to trust in God’s grace and give grace to others, because of our limited perspective in the application of God’s command and our own sinful natures. Sometimes the issue is incredibly clear, but sometimes it’s less clear, and sometimes we must simply trust in the grace of God.

Elusive clarity

There will always be unclear areas based on individual conscience even with the issue of murder: What treatments should be used for pregnant mothers with advanced cancer? How much responsibility does an individual Christian soldier take for the possibility of “collateral damage” to civilians in warfare as a pilot, sniper, or drone operator? What formula decides if a police officer who shoots and kills a bystander because he missed a criminal is a murderer? How high a standard of evidence is needed by the state to use the death penalty? Where exactly is the line between negligence and a mistake in medical treatment that leads to death?

Thinking through how to obey a command or recognizing when others have disobeyed thus requires biblical wisdom. We see an example of such wisdom in the relationship of Apollos and Paul. They had a disagreement over how Apollos should obey the great commission in Corinth. In particular, how he should “make disciples” and teach “them all that [Jesus] had commanded.” (If you’re not comfortable with the great commission being in play in 1 Corinthians 16, supply the second great command, Matt. 22:39.) And so Paul strongly urged the application that Apollos would immediately visit Corinth, and Apollos said, “No.” He disagreed with the Apostle Paul’s application, and so we read in 1 Corinthians 16:12, “I strongly urged him to visit you with the other brothers, but it was not at all his will to come now.”

If Paul had elevated his wisdom to the authority of Scripture by commanding Apollos to go to Corinth, he would have been sinning just like the Pharisees. The Pharisees, according to our Lord Jesus, taught “ ‘as doctrines the commandments of men.’ [They] leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men” (Mark 7:7-8). The Pharisees elevated their applications to the level of law. But when Paul doesn’t have a specific word from God on the application of a command of Scripture, he leaves it up to the individual conscience (c.f., Rom. 14:23).

Yet this doesn’t make Paul a moral relativist who allows anything. Paul is abundantly clear about how and when to obey the command, “repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15). God, “now commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30). Everyone is expected to immediately obey this command and to obey in the exact same way. There are no cultural accommodations (1 Cor. 9:18-23). There is only one gospel and only one way to obey the gospel command—repent and believe.

The obvious reason for this is that the intent of the command “repent and believe the gospel” is universal and it is to be obeyed by “all people everywhere” in the exact same way. The motives for not repenting and believing are always the same. And “all people everywhere” desperately need to obey the gospel.

If you disagree will Paul about the gospel, it’s not an issue of conscience or application. We find no extending of a gracious opportunity for greater spiritual growth (Phil. 3:15) to those who reject the gospel. Rather Paul damns all who would preach a different gospel, including himself, “If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed” (Gal 1:9, cf. v. 8). And if someone preaches that salvation requires one to repent, believe and be circumcised—Paul wishes for severe consequences (Gal. 5:12).

Different kinds of commands

The Bible, then, has different sorts of commands. “Repent and believe the gospel” is applied to all men everywhere exactly the same way. Paul and Apollos cannot disagree on the application of this command or the context. But there are other sorts of commands—for instance the great commission—where Paul and Apollos can disagree about application and the context.

This leaves several things to be considered on the issue of separation, and even on God’s commands in general. The most important of these is, What is God’s intention in giving us the commands to separate? Next week, (DV) I will attempt to discover this by analyzing Paul and Jesus’ obedience and application to the commands to separate.

In anticipation of possible questions, the next two aphorisms to be considered are these:

Aphorism 3: Applications of the commands of separation must take into account Jesus and Paul’s application of these same commands as recorded in the Gospels, Acts, and the epistles.

Aphorism 4: None of the commands of Scripture contradict the other commands when rightly understood, and to be correctly applied and interpreted all of the commands of Scripture must work together.

Celebrating Christ’s Nativity and Resurrection at Andover

On 27 April, 2014

When I became a pastor about 7 years ago, I held to a rejection of all holidays in the Sunday morning service. And I came to this conclusion from three, I hope, godly influences: the first was to not wield a coercive authority over a tender and biblically informed conscience in obedience to Scripture (Rom. 14:21) at a required meeting of the church. The second was responding to open idolatry in evangelical church services that I had attended, and the inability of the pastors of these churches to comprehend that what they were doing was idolatrous. The third was a desire to conform my practice to the Spirit inspired practice of the godly throughout history.

The difficulty or the tension that I see in this now is: first, that as an elder my authority to select the text is coercive. I force the members and attenders at my church to celebrate the nativity of Christ when the text requires it or the resurrection, or accession. This authority was given to me by God to be used in wisdom. I think it would be a sin for me to spend 20 years preaching on say Esther though it is in my authority as an elder to do so. My authority in this regard includes preaching topical sermons on Sunday morning or selecting particular texts for the health of the congregation based on events outside of the church.

The point that I am reaching towards is that Andover Baptist, our church, has a church calendar. Outside events, my vacation—scheduled by the way around historical church or secular holidays and providentially my birthday—illnesses, theological events, and the like, all influence what is preached on. Often times while the text is selected sequentially the application is driven by current events as well.

So the worship at Andover's calendar is influenced by things outside of our local congregation and I as a pastor require the congregants to submit to my wisdom on these issues. Because we are a congregational church if I were to become extremely foolish or sinful in this regard, I would be removed.

Since, I require the congregation to celebrate the nativity of Christ when I believe it’s wise (my memory is that we’ve done this now in July and April), I am at loss as to how to explain why it’s not wise to celebrate the nativity in late December once a year or for that matter to celebrate the resurrection of Christ in the spring. This is especially case given the evangelistic opportunity offered by both holidays.

The second issue is the idolatry occurring in both Protestant and Catholic churches during the celebration of Christ’s nativity and resurrection, accession, entering into Jerusalem, and so forth. None of the idolatry is necessitated by considering the texts describing and celebrating these events. The idolatry is caused either by rank stupidity or by incorporating things into the Sunday morning service that are not required by Scripture, not required to obey Scripture, or are not indifferent.

On the issue of indifference. What is indifferent in one context, say 1550 Paris, is not indifferent in Harvey, Iowa in 1935. Indifference is created not merely by the Scripture but how local contexts arrange symbols and practice in response to wisdom. Culturally, among most Baptist it’s not currently indifferent to use wine at the Lord’s Supper; historically the current Baptist practice is an anomaly. (I don’t think we are necessarily sinning by using “fruit of the vine.”)

Finally, I had assumed that Protestant practice was monolithic on the issue of rejecting the historical holidays of the church. And the answer, just as with articulating the degree of application of the 4th Commandment in the New Covenant, is more mixed. There is a Continental tendency and a British Isle tendency.

The Synod of Bern (1532) advocated celebrating communion on Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost.  The Church Order of Dort (1619) did so also.

The Palatinate Liturgy (Heidelberg, 1563), according to the notes of my assistant pastor, advocated the celebration of five festivals: Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, and Whitsuntide (Pentecost).

Bullinger advocates six festivals (the five above plus Circumcision) in both the Decades and the Second Helvetic Confession.  The Second Helvetic says that if those six be religiously celebrated "according to Christian liberty, we do very well approve of it."  In the Decades, in his sermon on the Sabbath, he says, "[I]t would be against all godliness and christian charity, if we should deny to sanctify the Sunday: especially, since the outward worship of God cannot consist without an appointed time and space of holy rest.  I suppose also, that we ought to think the same of those few feasts and holy days, which we keep holy to Christ our Lord, in memory of his nativity or incarnation, of his circumcision, of his passion, of the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ our Lord into heaven, and of his sending the Holy Ghost upon his disciples.  For christian liberty is not a licentious power and dissolving of godly ecclesiastical ordinances, which advance and set forward the glory of God and love of our neighbour."  Though he uses such language there, he says in the Second Helvetic (in a later period in life) in the context of the Lord's Day, "we do not account one day to be holier than another...”

I draw this altogether to say that as long as the elders of a local church or local group of churches believe that it is wise for the congregation to meditate on the passages of Scripture describing the events celebrated in a historical church holiday, and they do not exceed their biblical authority in the worship service, the celebration of some church holidays in the Sunday service now seems to have dropped to the level indifference or wisdom.

The issue of indifference is only related to those holidays that celebrate events in the life of Jesus Christ. The continued habit of idolatry over Mary and the other saints among non-Protestants means that remembering the past saints and martyrs must be done with care and almost always outside of the Sunday morning service. The proliferation of secular and card holidays must be addressed on a case by case basis, but I personally see no need and much detriment in celebrating them on Sunday.

I do not regard my refusal to celebrate church holidays in the past as either unwise or a sin. When I first arrived at Andover, there was still a pressure to incorporate unwise and possibly ungodly elements into such celebrations. My hope is that God has used my conviction, wisdom, and practice for the good of your souls and the church.

If I have sinned in this regard, it has been on the prideful application of my best wisdom and not on the conviction itself. And for this pride I ask to be forgiven. I am particularly ashamed of having harangued church visitors during my first Easter and perhaps Christmas sermon.

What this means for the church is that the next Sunday before Christmas, we will have a scriptural passage selected to highlight the incarnation and birth of Christ. And the next resurrection Sunday, we will have a passage selected to honor the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. I would also like to continue celebrating these and other holidays outside of the Sunday morning service.

At the same time, while I believe the use of symbols to celebrate Christmas and Easter are an issue of conscience for individual Christians in their homes, I cannot support nativity scenes, Christmas trees, bunnies, and eggs, crucifixes or the like as decorations in the church.

I have spoken often of the regulative principle of worship. It is a doctrine that I hold dear and rejoice over as unburdening the conscience of the congregation. I do not now believe that a careful incorporation of the evangelical church holidays, those that celebrate events of the life of Jesus, necessarily violate the regulative principle, and I have purposely framed my explanation of this in terms of the regulative principle.

Parenting Part 3: Modern Parenting and the Bible Club

One of the sticks that Christians tend to whack each other with is the biblical club. One group of Christians defines their understanding of parenting as biblical parenting. By necessity then, everyone who disagrees with them is practicing “un-biblical” parenting. Rhetorically this tends to work out in language that denigrates anything anyone tries that does not agree with the biblical “principles” discovered or promoted by so and so. Perhaps, you thought rewarding your children for good behavior was similar to God rewarding his people? Depends on who you ask. One author might call that bribery or manipulation. Another might call it godly wisdom.

Mind the Gap in Charity

Part of the problem arises from two sorts of being “unbiblical”: The first way is that the Bible must be bridged from its original language and situation to our context.  We don’t speak Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek. We don’t live in Corinth or Bethlehem. Our language, cultural patterns, habits of mind and so forth are not identical to the original writers or recipients of the Bible. Modesty in Corinth in about 60 A.D. has overlap with Baltimore in 2012, but they are not identical. I am unbiblical in that I am wearing kakis rather than a toga, but biblical in that I am attempting to please God.

Let me illustrate this from yesterday and today: Richard Baxter (1615-1691) saw the susceptibility to sin in terms of body temperature. We tend to see susceptibility in terms of genetic predispositions. In as much as neither Baxter nor we use the current thought patterns to excuse sin or violate the Bible, we aren’t sinning. Yet we are both thinking and applying God’s words using thought patterns that are somewhat foreign to the Bible and to situations to a degree different then found in the biblical record.

The “unbiblical” nature of application means that we all must have the proper humility when speaking to other Christians about applications of Scripture. Applications can’t be as normative as God’s Word unless the biblical situation and current application are identical.  Biblical principles on child rearing can never become the Bible.

Out Right Sin

All ages are also unbiblical in the sense of having ungodly blind spots. Every age allows some sin to be respectable and minimizes portions of God’s Word. Augustine should have married his concubine. Luther’s trust in God’s grace was sometimes an excuse for vulgarity. Wesley needed help with his wife.  Modern Christians look back in horrified amazement at the American record of racial slavery. And in all likelihood, our children or grandchildren will look back at us with a similar and completely accurate disgust.

We sin. And part of the way that we can stop sinning is by reading the applications of Scripture by other Christians. We’ve got to be open to being convicted of our sins and the possibility of blind spots. We are really good at spotting Baxter’s sin, but miserable at seeing our own, and so we’ve got to think with care. We need to think with Christians of the past and modern Christians, because we are all trying to serve God together.

Modernity and the past aren’t safer or better—just different.  There’s no need to fear anything but God. While we need to be wary of modernity and we need a proper sobriety towards our responsibility of raising children, we also need to “Rejoice always!” And we need to believe, Psalm 127:3-5, “Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward.”

God’s Gifts Are Good

God gives us children because he loves us. “For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (Ps. 103:14). And the thing God wants us to do is to raise up our kids in the fear and admonition of the Lord, and enjoy it. Really, I am not kidding. It’s supposed to be fun to have kids, not constantly hilarious or entertaining but a godly delight. So much so that when God talks about prosperity, he writes this way, “And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets” (Zech. 8:5).

In God’s eyes there is something delightful, wholesome, and good about streets filled with playing children. Every “good” parenting book I have begins by soberly reminding us that our children are all potential axe murders or totally depraved, and then that they must be converted. Great, God agrees and so do I, but the whole council of God includes streets “full of boys and girls playing”; and “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt.18:3-4). There is something delightful about children, so much that God gives them as a good gift to sinners and believers (Pss. 17:14, cf. 127). They’re something to rejoice over and in, but we can only do it if we trust in God’s grace and not in books or this blog about childrearing.

We can’t cure our fear and trembling over modernity or the responsibility of being parents by reading the right books; we can only do it if we trust in God’s grace and trust in God’s Word. You don’t want to purposely sin, but you also don’t want to be anxious. You will sin, but God has fixed all of this on the cross. We can cry out with David, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son” (2 Sam. 18:33). But we don’t ever want to cry out in sorrow, “But we did everything according to The Duties of Parents.”

Back to the Blog

Having said all this, and perhaps rambled a bit more than I intended, let me come down to the nitty-gritty of this series. I understand my calling as a pastor to help people worship God by understanding the Book and the lesser book of creation—which includes lots of even lesser books and blogs, some about childrearing.  In the coming weeks, I hope to think through the books I’ve listed in the first blog, so that we might worship God better by delighting in him and the job he’s given us to do.

Yet, I did want to put this out again: “Read your Bible. Love your kids; play with them. Be consistent with rules. Disciple them when they need it. Every kid’s different.”   And I want to add one thought, “Don’t be scared. He’s a good God. ‘For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself’” (Acts 2:39).

Parenting Part 4: The Baby and the Bathwater

The folk wisdom proverb, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” requires us first to identify the difference between the baby and the bathwater. So let’s begin by considering how to separate the baby and bathwater in childrearing books.

Every book I mentioned has some really helpful things: Tedd Tripp’s aiming for the heart in discipline is manna from heaven; Baby Wise teaches that infants need a structure besides their wants, MacArthur and Beeke’s commonsense applications are often helpful. The problem is placing their wisdom into your situation and recognizing the limits of their suggestions and interpretation.

The Bathwater in Shepherding a Child’s Heart

Let’s start with an example from Tedd Tripp under his terrible-sounding category of emotional privation. As far as I can ascertain, “emotional privation” is the isolation and temporary withdraw of communication, fellowship, and comfort by an authority figure until repentance occurs. Tripp describes it in a family this way:

[The parents] place their misbehaving daughter in a chair alone in the middle of the living room for a specified period of time. As long as the child is being punished in the chair, no one in the family may speak to her or have any contact with her. She is isolated from the family. . . This approach is not only cruel, but ineffective in addressing the heart biblically. This young girl is not learning to understand her behavior biblically. . . . What she is learning is to avoid the emotional privation of being on the chair. Her heart is being trained, but not to know and love God. She is being trained to respond to the crippling fear of emotional privation (65).

What’s clear from the above quote is that “emotional privation” is cruel, ineffective, unbiblical, and does not teach children to “know and love God.” Awful. Who wants to be cruel, ineffective, and unbiblical and be detrimental to knowing and loving God?

Does the Bible say anything about “emotional privation?”  Emotional privation is commanded by God to be used by the church in Mathew 18:17 and 1 Corinthians 5:11. Jonah’s experience was a bit extreme, but his time out was for three days.  David assumes it as a discipline from God in Psalm 51, “Restore to me the joy of your salvation.” Taking away someone’s source of joy is by definition emotional privation.  We find this discipline mentioned throughout the psalms: Psalm 13:1, “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” Psalm 88: “You have caused my companions to shun me” (v. 8). And in verse 14, “Why do you hide your face from me?”

When we add to this God’s threat to exile his people when he tells his children that if they do not repent and obey him, they will lose certain blessings and access to the sacrifices and their prayers will not be answered besides being sent away (Deut. 30:1-6), it becomes clear that “emotional privation” is a consistent strategy of God in disciplining his children. God uses it throughout the Old and New Testament. Apparently, God thinks “emotional privation” is an acceptable strategy for discipline. God himself uses this method and commands it for the church.

But perhaps Tripp would respond that God’s relationship to his people is too dissimilar to a relationship of parent and child. This possibility is explicitly rejected by the Christ, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Mat. 7:11). Further, God’s discipline and godly parents’ methods of discipline are explicitly linked in Deuteronomy 8:5, “Know then in your heart that, as a man disciplines his son, the LORD your God disciplines you” (cf. Heb. 12:6-10).

So, it’s clear that God uses “emotional privation” as a strategy for disciplining his children and parents can use a similar strategy for their children. But how in the world is the newbie Christian or young parent isolated from their more experienced family supposed to figure this out after having read Shepherding a Child’s Heart?  Wisdom and prayer. Tons of it.

Finding the Baby in Any Parenting Book

Wisdom. Wisdom is what allows us to recognize the difference between “Thus says the Lord” and any childrearing advice that should always be read as “This is what I think the Lord is saying about this circumstance.” Wisdom teaches us that we need God’s grace, and she teaches us to pray for more wisdom. Wisdom truly is more precious than gold. Wisdom is something that begins with the fear of the Lord, but is a lifelong process. We know this because the wise are always willing to accept correction (Prov. 9:8; 25:12). Wisdom is the ability to sort through applications of Scripture and then to use the correct application for your situation.

I want to close by also showing that wisdom is the ability to interpret Scripture and apply it to a particular situation: Proverbs 26:4-5 provides us with one of the most obvious text cases: “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.”

We have a selection of two opposed proverbial commands; to be used well the proverbs must be correctly interpreted in their textual context and the reader’s situation must be correctly interpreted and then the correct proverb must be applied. A component of wisdom is knowing the information of Scripture, but wisdom is completed by correct interpretation and application to particular situations. Wisdom is recognizing that one child will be crushed by one form of discipline, encouraged to sin by another form, and may respond best to a third.

In our next blog, I hope to build up our appreciation for God as our perfect parent and consider the mysterious art of hermeneutics through the writings of William Whitaker (1547-1595).

Parenting Part 2: Why So Downcast?

Most of the modern parenting books that I’ve come across have at least a tone of anxiousness if not hysteria. Many of the Christian parents I’ve meet are anxious as well—and that includes me in my worst moments. The general consensus of modern writers is that things are getting worse in the church and in the wider culture.

The fear and trembling may have some legitimacy: a bunch of historical events including technology, secularism, and capitalism, means that godly folk wisdom and beneficial cultural structures have faded away while at the same time our exposures to possible “wisdoms” has increased. So instead of just attempting to correct the mistakes and sins of our parents and potentially our childhood pastor and follow them in what was godly, we must analyze and respond to Rousseau, Dr. Spock, Oprah, Gothard, Trip, MacArthur, and Plowman. Modernity has dislocated us. Capitalism has created the childrearing juggernaut of books and videos, and we are suddenly having serious conversations about “nipple confusion” among infants and facing the fact that spanking is now illegal in places.  It is scary and it seems unmanageable.

The second grounds for fear is that we are responsible to teach our children the gospel, to do our best to make sure they survive childhood, and to train them to become productive citizens. It’s a big and scary job.

And this brings us to the sin issue: part of our fear and trembling is over the fact that we don’t trust God and we aren’t listening to him. God’s word says in Ecclesiastes 7:10, “Say not, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.” Modern life has its problems, but fundamentally it’s no worse or no better than the past. There were and are advantages and disadvantages to both.

Modernity’s a Mess

We do need to be wary of modern things. Part of the reason for this is that modern things haven’t been tested. And even when the theory is right, untested things can be potentially dangerous because of unintended consequences. New technology, practice, and ideas all carry a threat within them.

For instance, moderns eschew corporal punishment for children but are indifferent to the progressive militarization of our police force which is required to deal with little Bobby when he finds the appetite for say heroin. Somehow it’s become acceptable for the police to wear body armor and carry automatic weapons, but Daddy better not paddle his son. Goodness no, we’d rather let him be tazered by the police officer patrolling his middle-school.

The Past’s No Better

But we also can’t assume that old things are good as did one of the above authors in recommending Richard Baxter’s Christian Directory: “We have long waited for a purely biblical treatment of the spiritual ills and cures of men which is untainted by the views of modern psychology. Since Baxter lived about 200 years before modern psychology arrived, his deep work is completely void of this encroachment.” The author is saying this about a book that recommends bloodletting and either enemas or self-induced vomiting or both to reduce “inward, filthy lusts” (335). While Baxter didn’t know Dr. Spock or Skinner, he was overly influenced by ancient Greek medicine and the theory of bodily humors—neither of which are found in the Bible. And I doubt that our modern author recognizes how influenced he is by “modern psychology” any more than Baxter thought through the implications of writing “the temperature of the body hath a great hand in this sin” (Ibid.).

Modernity is nasty, but the past is a mess as well. One of the greatest spiritual shocks of my childhood was reading Davey Crockett’s autobiography at about the age of ten. “The king of the wild frontier,” and my erstwhile Disneyfied hero, took so many “squaws” that I lost count, ate potatoes cooked in human fat, and campaigned for congress by passing out whiskey. He makes Bill Clinton look like an innocent. And by the way Wilberforce was addicted to opium, Jonathan Edwards owned slaves, John Wesley was abused by his wife, Augustine put away a concubine with whom he had a child instead of marrying her, and so forth.

There’s enough sinful examples and teaching in the past to destroy any child and their parents just as there are in the present. The only safe source of information about parenting comes from the Bible, but we have to interpret and apply it and in so doing we expose our own weakness, bigotry, and sinfulness. And so what shall we do?

Parenting Part 1: Thinking about Parenting

Several weeks ago, I went into a good Christian book store—in fact one of the most trustworthy that I am aware of in the nation—and I asked for their best books on parenting. Here’s what I got.

• Ginger Plowman, “Don’t Make Me Count to Three!” A Mom’s Look at Heart-Oriented Discipline

• John MacArthur, What the Bible Says about Parenting: God’s Plan for Rearing Your Child

• Bruce A. Ray, Withhold Not Correction

• Joel R. Beeke, Parenting by God’s Promises: How to Raise Children in the Covenant of Grace

• C. H. Spurgeon, Spiritual Parenting—Updated Edition

And they recommended, but I already had:

• Tedd Trip, Shepherding a Child’s Heart

• Elyse M. Fitzpatrick and Jessica Thompson, Give Them Grace

• J. C. Ryle, The Duties of Parents

All of these books are by Christians. I expect to see every one of the authors in glory and perhaps all of them are or were more productive servants of Christ than I will ever be. Several of them say things that I find wrongheaded and a few mishandle God’s Word badly. For the rest of this series when material is quoted, I will often not give a citation; the point of this blog is not beat anyone up. But I do want us to think carefully about what is being taught in these books.

An Adventure in Parenting by Christians Books

Let me begin with a testimony. Prior to becoming a parent, I had read two parenting books: On Becoming Baby Wise and Shepherding a Child’s Heart. They were both popular 11 years ago when Kimberly, my wife, was pregnant with our first child.

By God’s grace, our firstborn did not die when we attempted to place our child on a feeding schedule prior to Kimberly’s milk coming in. To this day, I am at a loss as to what the “lactation specialist” told us in the two-minute conversation before we went home from the hospital. We also managed to ignore the doctor’s overly quick diagnosis that Kimberly was physically incapable of feeding our child. (The doctor had never heard of Becoming Baby Wise and likely couldn’t imagine anyone attempting anything but “demand feedings” for the first several weeks.) We called a lady up in our church with ten kids, and she drove over and taught Kimberly how to help our daughter latch on and told us to toss Baby Wise.

We had a similar experience, though not as life threatening, with Shepherding a Child’s Heart. We followed all the rules and spent all day attempting in serious tones to explain to a one-and-half-year-old, God’s law, our role as parents, how the child had violated God’s law, God’s redemption in Christ, and then careful apply discipline, making sure not to be angry, and so forth. My father-in-law kindly took me a side, and said, “Shane, you are attempting to reason with her and as a child she is unreasonable. Also, by trying to get her to analyze why she was disobeying God you are teaching her how to lie to you and to rationalize her sin. Finally, you need to put some more vim in that discipline.” He was right. And I felt like an idiot.

And so two years ago, when a godly new parent asked me what books I suggested on parenting, I said: “Read your Bible. Love your kids; play with them. Be consistent with rules. Discipline them when they need it. Every kid’s different.”

There’s a part of me that wants to stick to this advice. Enjoy your kids. Don’t panic. Play with them. Be their parents. Really, God gave them to you as a blessing. Cuddle up with them on the couch and talk to them about the time you, Buddy the Wonder Mutt, and Uncle Jim, swam at “Ajax Pond.” Or how about the time Grandpa let you throw a paper airplane off the balcony at church and got in trouble with the deacons. Or the time at two in the morning when the computer crashed destroying your stats project. Or the time this girl showed up at church, and she was so pretty you couldn’t talk to her, and God let you marry her, and then gave you that little princess sitting next to you.

Yet, so many of us parent in fear and trembling concerned that if we use “mechanical sleep aids” or fail to recognize the dark and sinister “dangers of scolding,” our child is going to burn in hell after a torrid life of sin and misery. Not only that, if we don’t turn every available moment into a sober searching of our child’s heart, if we don’t drive the home the gospel every time they misbehave, we likely deserve hell—we do by the way, but not for being unable to change our children’s hearts, for enjoying our kids as a delightful gift from God, or for being saved children of Adam.

Next week we’ll consider why we are so worried.

What Is Love?

Love in English is flexible. As a noun it can refer to a tennis score, several positive sexual meanings, a beloved, and a positive emotion towards some object. The verb form is much the same. There is also a host of synonyms and near synonyms for love that share the general meaning or have a degree of overlap: charity, delight, affection, loyalty, fondness, devotion, attraction, and so forth. It’s much the same in the Greek text of the Bible; both the Septuagint and the New Testament use a variety of words with a range of meaning limited by the context to express the idea of love. The basic issue is that love is a positive emotion towards something.

Sometimes among Christians, we conceptualize love with the Greek terms of agape (self-giving love), philia (friend love), and eros (sexual love). These may be somewhat helpful distinctions in conversations with other Christians, but it breaks down very quickly in doctrine, practice, and meaning. From a merely lexical perspective, John uses the Greek agape love and philia love to describe God the Father’s love for Jesus (John 3:35; John 5:20): the intended meaning of both agape and philia is identical. Paul requires that self-giving among married couples include erotic love (1 Cor. 7:2-3), but eros does not appear in the Septuagint or the New Testament. Further, we find agape love for both Christian and non-Christian love for instance in Luke 6:32, “If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.” Love is then varied and diverse. Stand alone Greek words representing Christian or non-Christian love are no help to us, because love must be enframed.

Having cleared away the issue of Christian talk about love, we must now deal with the issue of the human experience of love.  We can love something for use—a good steak which is destroyed by love; we can love something for enjoyment without diminishing it, but with benefits to us—Bach’s Oboe Concerto in D minor, a sunset, God.  And then there is a love of enjoyment and use combined together—drawing out the beauty of wood grain on a board for a table top and the physical changes and threats attendant to carrying, delivering, and nurturing a child. The wood and our spouse, and ourselves are transformed—increased and decreased—by love.

The issue of using and diminishing our beloveds sounds terrible doesn’t it? But the problem is implicitly commented on in Scripture (Prov. 5:18; Isa. 54:6). At the same time Scripture teaches the increase within married love that is a benefit of for both spouses. We will consider this more closely in a latter article. But the point to be grasped is that human love functions within an order that includes physical and spiritual decay and death and physical and spiritual improvement within interdependent relationships.

One of the great tensions of love between men and God’s love is this issue of enjoyment and use. God as the all-sufficient being and the source of all that is good can love a creature without benefit to himself. God loves creatures out of magnanimity and charity. As a human being we cannot love without expecting and hoping for a benefit because we are absolutely dependent on God for our existence and in a secondary sense dependent on the larger creation and web of relationships within the world. To love God is to recognize God as God. Human absolute dependence means that all human love includes dependence—godward always and toward neighbor to a greater or lesser degree. We cannot love that which we believe is not good for us in some sense. God’s freedom to love his creation is not a dependent love. God’s love is free indeed.

This theory of love, or perhaps I should say fact of love, requires that the human default be what is called eudaemonism. We love and we act on what makes us happy. Before you draw up in arms against me on this, as creatures dependant on God the thing that ought to make us happy is pleasing God. In other words, Christian love, agape love if you wish, is the desire to please God and to order our lesser loves around pleasing God. Christian eudaemonism is the recognition that what ought to make us happy is to please God. True felicity comes from pleasing God. Non-Christian eudaemonism is to make your belly your god, but Christianity is to recognize God as the source of all that is truly good.  The perverse disorder of our current life is that it is possible to love in a way which displeases God. We may love in a way that rebels against, rejects, despises, tramples on our actual dependence on God. To love as if we are not contingent on God or to love as if we ought not love God is sin. Most importantly sin is the hatred of God.

We’ve worked out a definition of love: Godly love is the desire to please God as God and to order all our other loves around pleasing God. The logic of this definition is our absolute dependence on God and our secondary dependence on others.  So let us turn to God’s word and attempt to prove it.

I’ve already shown above that love as love is a positive affection towards something and that the Bible allows for good love and wicked love. At the same time how love is to be ordered is explicitly commanded in the law (Deut. 6:5; Lev. 19:18), confirmed by our Lord Jesus Christ and then repeated by the Apostles in the epistles in the two great commandments—love God with all your being and to love your neighbor as yourself. There is no limit on our godward love—heart, soul, and mind; but there is a limit to our love of neighbor—love of self. We are only required to love our neighbor as ourself, and we are certainly forbidden to love our neighbor as God. The Bible then places two limits on love: all love must flow through our love of God.  Our love of God then orders our love of self, and our ordered love of self creates the contours of our love of neighbor. The two great commandments, the summary of God’s moral, not only agrees with our definition, it requires this definition.

In our next articles we will explore, the love of God, love of self, and the love neighbor more carefully with an especial focus on Son of God Jesus Christ and his love.

The Framework of Love

John Lennon’s lyrics “All you need is love. Love is all you need,” are either the truest words ever penned or the most perverse. They are either criminally trivial or deeply profound. The significance of the lyrics is not found in the letters of the word love but by what is intended by love. And Lennon understood this to the degree that he rejected patriotism as love of a nation, tyranny as the love of detrimental power and embraced the love of non-violence and art. Even entertainers at least suspect that we are saved and we are damned by love.

Our salvation or reprobation and love are clearly linked in Scripture; “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8).  He is not merely love and yet he is love. Further, man is created in the image of God and so in some sense man is love, though again not merely love. The great summary of the duty of man is to love God with all our being, and to love our neighbor as ourself. We cannot move away from God without a love, and we cannot turn to God without love. Thus both theology proper (the study of God) and anthropology (the study of man) are dependent on what love is or is not. A definitional misstep on the issue of love damages both our worship and our ethics; the greater the error the less true our worship and the more confused and detrimental our relationships. False love when “fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:15).

God is love, and because God is the greatest possible being (Heb. 6:13, 16-18), God must love perfectly: further God is “blessed forever” (Rom. 9:5, 2 Cor. 2:11), and so God has always loved and been fulfilled or blessed in that love “before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24). To love requires an object of love. The infinitely perfect object of God’s love is himself in the mutual admiration of the Trinity.  The Father loves and so begets the Son, the Son in turn loves the Father and both the Father and Son are conscious of this mutual love, leading to the spiration of the Holy Spirit.

Shedd summarizes the issue for us: “God cannot be self-contemplating, self-cognitive, and self-communing unless he is trinal in his constitution. The subject must know itself as an object and also perceive that it does. This implies, not three distinct substances, but three distinct modes of one substance. Consequently divine unity must be a kind of unity that is compatible with a kind of plurality. The unity of the infinite being or Trinity. God is a plural unit” (Dogmatic Theology,  220).1

The “blessed forever” God cannot have a love based on need. We may say, “I would love a glass of water, or I would love to be healthy,” but God’s love is self-sufficient. God’s love does not know need, because God is holy and perfect. There is an infinite perfection to God’s love that humans can only admire and taste because we are wholly dependent and He is exhaustively independent.

Yet, God’s love is an ordered love. There is a logic to God’s affection. Christ tells us, “I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me” (John 5:30) and “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing. And greater works than these will he show him, so that you may marvel” (John 5:19-20). And the Father and Son together send the Holy Spirit (cf. John 14:26 and 15:26).

God’s love for himself is then not egalitarian; instead God’s love has an economy or order based on the Father begetting the Son and the spiration and procession of the Spirit. The Father instigates, the Son submits to the Father, and the Spirit is sent. All three persons within the Trinity are equal in subsistence or ontologically, but each member has different roles and responsibilities within the Godhead.

Thus far we have been considering God’s internal love or God’s infinite love of himself as the most meritorious, beautiful, holy, and true. For God to be, he must be Trinitarian. But when God created the universe, there became something less than himself.  The universe is less than God because it is dependent on God for its continued existence. Or as the author of Hebrews states it, “he upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3). We are because he is and chose to create and keep us.

God created the universe so that it both exists and moves forward in time. The movement of the universe around God’s unfolding design means that an individual component of the universe could be good (Gen. 1:4), a complex whole could be good (v. 10), yet that which was only good as it developed could become “very good” (v. 31). The universe which exists in time unfolded from a partial good to a complex good to a complete very good.

God’s love as directed outside of himself is then also not egalitarian. God’s love of self is not egalitarian because of the order of the Trinity, but God’s love for creation is non-egalitarian for a host of reasons. The first is that the creation is not God. If the creation were God, it would be perfect, but the Bible and natural observation presents a world of becoming. The creation as first formed was good, but the creation completed and prepared for the first family became “very good.” God’s love directed outside of himself is an evaluating, probing, judging, rational love, dependent on the internal standard of God’s plans or decrees. God distinguishes between the “good” in conformity to God’s unfolding of his declared will and “very good” at the revealed completion of God’s creation.

And so enters man. Adam and Eve stood enframed by God’s creation and his commands. They are lovely and very good. The procession of creation from maturing good to very good, from loveable to lovely, taught them that something greater awaited them and their offspring (Gen. 1:27-31); and the single negative command with the threat of death (Gen. 2:17) taught them that there were two kinds of becoming—pleasing to God and not pleasing to God, to love God or to hate him, to obey or disobey.

When Adam named the animals, he proved that he too was an evaluating and judging being. He then shared in God’s ability to judge the good and the very good. Adam’s recognition of the incompleteness of nature (2:20) and the incompatibility of the animals requires that his loves be ordered around God’s commands and God’s nature. The framework of Adam’s love was not merely the commands of God, but also reasoning from the structure of the universe and the character of God.

When Eve was confronted by the Serpent over the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, she “saw it was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise.”  There is a horrifying subtlety within the temptation. The fruit was not evil, for God had declared it not only good but very good. The fruit was beautiful. God agreed with Eve that the fruit was beautiful and good, but when she used the fruit for a purpose other than God had commanded, she hated God. She hated God, because she judged God as less than perfect. What but an imperfect and cruel God would forbid man from becoming wise (cf. 1 Cor. 3:19-20)?

In eating the fruit Eve accepted Satan’s enframing of the universe—a worldview with horizons sketched out on the premise that God was not good as he ought to be. She ate and Adam joined her within this faith that God was unlovely and that man and Satan were wiser than God. They attempted to murder God within their hearts, but were only able to destroy the principle of love within their hearts. Adam and Eve loved that which was less then God as if it were God and died. Their bodies continued to function, but the Spirit of love left them (cf. Smeaton, The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit).

The death of God within the heart of man was an imagined death and not the reality, because he is the living God. He exists independently of man and man’s conceptions of him. At this point in history God had the right to destroy Adam and Eve and with them their posterity, but God held back. And here we have a new expression of love; it is not merely the creational condescension of the infinite to the finite or of the Being to the becoming, but God loving through grace. Grace is not merely unmerited favor, in the sense of favor that is unearned, but it is unmerited favor poured out on his enemies. Grace is loving the unlovable.

God’s love is so much love that God the Father gave his son (John 3:16) for the world, and the Son gave his life for the world (1 John 2:2), and the Spirit now testifies to all the great love of God and returns to the heart of man. The staggering, infinite weight of grace is measured by the cross. The goodness of the Lord is vindicated and displayed at the cross. God is love.

Lord willing, next month we will consider the definition of love, and then in the following months: loving God, the love of self, love of neighbor, common objects of love, and uncommon objects of love.

1. It is important to note the modes here mentioned are persons or modes of subsisting and this should not be confused with the heresy of modalism which allows only for a single mode of subsisting.