Ligon Duncan on Religous Zeal without Knowledge

“Now there are a lot of folks who are very practically oriented and they are very impatient about doing the hard work of thinking through and getting things right.  I mean, they just want to get on with the Christian living.  And there is something admirable about that at a certain level, but it can lead to real problems.  Especially if you have left some very essential work undone in the area of the understanding of God’s Word.  Zeal without knowledge is not more spiritual.  It is less spiritual.  Zeal without knowledge is in fact prideful, because it is saying, ‘I don’t need that knowledge that God took a lot of time to [set] down in his His Word.  I am just going to live the Christian life.’  And God didn’t design us to work that way.  He designed us to understand His Word and to operate from the base of His Word in Christian living.  So we must turn our hearts to worship the Lord even in our pursuit of knowledge.  To glorify Him as we pursue knowledge that we might learn and obey.”

(J. Ligon Duncan, “Introduction to Covenant Theology,” Lecture Series on Covenant Theology, First Presbyterian Church – Jackson, MS 1998)

A Wrong View of Life After Death

“[Soul sleep] teaches that when believers die they go into a state of unconscious existence, and the next thing that they are conscious of will be when Christ returns and raises them to eternal life…But when scripture represents death as “sleep” it is simply a metaphorical expression used to indicate that is only temporary for Christians, just as sleep is temporary.  This is clearly seen, for example, when Jesus tells his disciples about the death of Lazarus.  He says, ‘Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awake him out of sleep’ (John 11:11).  We should notice that Jesus does not here say, ‘The soul of Lazarus is sleeping,” nor, in fact, does any passage in Scripture say that the soul of a person is sleeping or unconscious (a statement that would be necessary to prove the doctrine of soul sleep).  Rather Jesus simply says that Lazarus has fallen asleep.  Then John explains, ‘Now Jesus had spoken of his death, but they thought that he meant taking rest in sleep.  Then Jesus told them plainly, ‘Lazarus is dead’ (John 11:12-13).   

“…The fact that Hebrews 12:1 says, ‘We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,’ just after an entire chapter spent on the discussion of the faith of Old Testament saints who had died (Heb. 11), and the fact that the author encourages us to run the race of life with perseverance because we are surrounded by this great cloud of witnesses, both suggest that those who have died and gone before have some awareness of what is going on in the earth.  Scripture says very little about this, probably because it does not want us to speak to those who have died or to pray to them or to contact them in any way (note Saul’s great sin in this in 1 Samuel 28:7-25).  Nonetheless, Hebrews 12:1-2 does give us this slight hint, probably as an encouragement to us to continue also to be faithful to God as were those who have died and gone to heaven before us.  Similarly, at the end of Hebrews 12, the author tells us that when we worship we come into the presence of God in heaven, and we come not to ‘the spirits of just men who are sleeping in an unconscious state’ but ‘to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant’ (Heb. 12:22-24).  

“Revelation 6:9-11 and 7:9-10 also clearly show the souls or spirits of those who have died and who have gone to heaven praying and worshiping, for they cry out with a loud voice, ‘O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell upon the earth?’ (Rev. 6:10) and they are seen ‘standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb’ (Rev. 7:9-10)!  All of these passages deny the doctrine of soul sleep, for they make it clear that the souls of believers experience conscious fellowship with God in heaven immediately upon death.”

(Wayne Grudem, “Death and the Intermediate State,” Systematic Theology, pp819-821, 2000)

How Could Temporal Suffering Satisfy For Infinite Guilt?

“The answers are: First, infinite guilt demands an infinite punishment, but not therefore an everlasting one; provided the sufferer could suffer an infinite one in a limited time.  We do not view the atoning value of Christ’s sacrifice, as a quantity, to be divided out by pound’s weight, like some material commodity.  We do not hold that there must be an arithmetical relation between the quantity of sacrifice, and the number and size of the sins to be satisfied for, nor do we admit that, had the sins of the whole body of elect believers been greater, the sufferings of the substitute must also have been increased; as when the merchant buys more pounds of the commodity, he must pay more money for his purchase.  The compensation made to justice is not commercial, but moral.  A piece of money in the hand of a king is worth no more than in the hands of a servant, but the penal sufferings of a king are.  One king captive would exchange for many captive soldiers.  Hence, Christ paid, not the very total of sufferings we owed, but like sufferings, not of infinite amount, but of infinite dignity.

“Christ’s sufferings were vast, and the capacity for feeling and enduring conferred on His humanity by the united divinity enabled Him to bear, in one life time, great wrath.  Second, it is the great doctrine of hypostatical union, according to Heb. 9:14, which grounds the infinite value of Christ’s sufferings (See that doctrine, Lect. 38).  As the infinite nature of the God, against whom sin is committed, makes it an infinite evil, although the act of finite creature, so the acts of Christ’s human nature in suffering have infinite value, because of the dignity of His person.  As to the latter part of the Socinian objection, the answer is, that one pang, or one drop of blood, would not suffice, because the law demanded a penalty of similar kind to that incurred by man; a bodily death and a spiritual death.”

(R. L. Dabney, “Chpt. 35: The Nature of Christ’s Sacrifice,” Systematic Theology, 1878)

Louis Berkhof on the Death of Christ

“The sufferings of the Saviour finally culminated in his death…It is but natural that, when we speak of the death of Christ in this connection, we have in mind first of all physical death, that is, separation of body and soul.  At the same time we should remember that this does not exhaust the idea of death as it is represented in Scripture.  The Bible takes a synthetic view of death, and regards physical death merely as one of its manifestations.  Death is separation from God, but this separation can be viewed in two different ways.  Man separates himself from God by sin, and death is the natural result, so that it can even be said that sin is death.  But it was not in that way that Jesus became subject to death, since He had no personal sin.  In this connection it should be borne in mind that death is not merely the natural consequence of sin, but above all the judicially imposed and inflicted punishment of sin.  It is God withdrawing Himself with the blessings of life and happiness from man and visiting man in wrath.  It is from this judicial point of view that the death of Christ must be considered.  God imposed the punishment of death upon the Mediator judicially, since the latter undertook voluntarily to pay the penalty for the sin of the human race.”

(Louis Berkhof, “Doctrine of the Person and the Work of Christ,” “The States of Christ,”  Systematic Theology, pp 338-339, Banner of Truth ed., reprinted 2005)

 

The Clarity of Scripture

“In a day when it is common for people to tell us how hard it is to interpret Scripture rightly, we would do well to remember that not once in the Gospels do we ever hear Jesus saying anything like this: ‘I see how your problem arose–the Scriptures are not very clear on that subject.’  Instead, whether he is speaking to scholars or untrained common people, his responses always assume that the blame for misunderstanding any teaching of Scripture is not to be placed on the Scripture themselves, but on those who misunderstand or fail to accept what is written.  Again and again he answers questions with statements like, ‘Have you not read…’ (Matt. 21:42), or even, ‘You are wrong because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God’ (Matt. 22:29; cf Matt. 9:13, 12:7; 15:3; 21:13; John 3:10, et al.).

“Similarly, most of the New Testament epistles are written not to church leaders but to entire congregations.  Paul writes, ‘To the church of God which is at Corinth’ (1 Cor. 1:2), ‘To the churches of Galatia’ (Gal. 1:2), ‘To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi, with the bishops and deacons’ (Phil. 1:1), and so forth.  Paul assumes that his hearers will understand what he writes, and he encourages the sharing of his letters with other churches: ‘And when this letter has been read among you, have it read also in the church of the Laodiceans; and see that you read also the letter from Laodicea’ (Col. 4:16; cf John 20:30-31; 2 Cor. 1:13; Eph. 3:4; 1 Tim. 4:13; James 1:1, 22-25; 1 Peter 1:1; 2:2; 2 Peter 1:19; 1 John 5:13).”

(Wayne Grudem, Chapter 6: The Clarity of Scripture; Systematic Theology, pp 106-107, 2000)