Calvin on God's power and resolve

I could fill this blog with incisive Calvin quotes (I use his commentaries in every sermon I prepare, unless something drastic happens). Perhaps I should! But anyway, here's a relevant one for believers today. Often those who stick to the Bible are told that they are "limiting God". Calvin:

"But it is idle, and unprofitable, and even dangerous, to argue what God can do unless we also take into account what he resolves to do" (comment on Luke 1:37 in Calvin's Gospel Harmony, volume 1).

Christ alone, Christ always

John Calvin on John 14v5:

... whoever obtains Christ is in want of nothing; and, therefore, whoever is not satisfied with Christ alone, strives after something beyond absolute perfection.

14v6:

All believe and acknowledge that the happiness of man lies in God alone: but they
 afterwards go wrong in this respect, that, seeking God elsewhere than in Christ, they tear him — so to speak — from his true and solid Dignity.
...
 Wherefore all theology, when separated from Christ, is not only vain and confused, but is also mad, deceitful, and spurious.

Matthew Henry on 14v6:

"No man cometh to the Father but by me." Fallen man must come to God as a Judge, but cannot come to him as a Father, otherwise than by Christ as Mediator. We cannot perform the duty of coming to God, by repentance and the acts of worship, without the Spirit and grace of Christ, nor obtain the happiness of coming to God as our Father without his merit and righteousness; he is the high priest of our profession, our advocate.”

"I am the way, the truth and the life" is, God-willing, the glorious text for the evangelistic outreach meeting tomorrow - messages from past weeks are uploaded on my website.

Matthew Henry on prayer

This delightful comment on prayer comes during Matthew Henry's commentary on the healing of blind Bartimaeus:

The waterman in the boat, who with his hook takes hold of the shore, does not thereby pull the shore to the boat, but the boat to the shore. So in prayer we do not draw the mercy to ourselves, but ourselves to the mercy.

Then in another place:

Though Christ knows all our needs, he desires to know them from us.

Great Lloyd-Jones quote

A friend has this as the signature of her e-mails... what a great, apposite quote:

"Religion is man searching for God; Christianity is God seeking man, manifesting Himself to him, drawing Himself unto him." - Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

The career of Moses

Very memorable quote from Gareth Crossley's "The Old Testament Explained And Applied" (EP), on the 120-year life of Moses:

(a) Forty years thinking he was somebody, (b) Forty years learning he was a nobody, and (c) Forty years discovering what God can do with a nobody.

He slew it

"But our very life came down to earth and bore our death and slew it with the very abundance of his own life" - Augustine

(Augustine's Confessions - somewhere about 1/5th of the way through (audio version!))

Some great quotes...

Gleaned from Justin Taylor's blog:

"And, of course, teaching kids can help to keep us humble: they do not understand academic qualifications, but they do understand boring, irrelevant, and pretentious–and they punish such unmercifully." More...

"As usual, as soon as religion's cultured despisers find something else to despise in religion, the mainlines, with their various seminaries and colleges, abandon it and join in the general anti-orthodox chorus, as radical, original, and revolutionary as a trust fund kid with a Che Guevara teeshirt and a Lexus. To apply a quotation from Michael Heseltine, like a pathetic one-legged army they march along, `Left, left, left, left left.'. They are merely part of the problem, not the solution. But there is a problem here for the orthodox too. The pro-gay issue is carried along by a veritable cultural tidal wave, with everybody from high-powered political pundits to soap opera screenwriters helping to create an environment where to be opposed to homosexuality is regarded as irrational, implausible bigotry. This can only be resisted in two ways: mindless anti-gay bigotry built on hatred, which is sinful and unbiblical; or a vigorous commitment to high biblical standards of morality. Such a commitment can only exist where there is a vigorous commitment to a high doctrine of scripture."

...

The second temptation is to become what the pro-gay left are saying we are already: hatemongers. It is vital we remember that nobody can be reduced simply to their sexuality. No heterosexual person is simply heterosexual; no gay person is simply gay. We are all complex human beings, defined by the basic category of image bearers of God, not sexual preference. As soon as we start thinking of people as a sexual preference, not as image bearers, we lose sight of them as individuals. They become mere labels or slogans, not persons. It is hard to love a slogan; indeed, it is very easy rather to hate such. Even as we are being labeled and turned into mere sound bites, we must not respond in kind. Let us stand firm on biblical ethics, but let us also reach out to gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals with the love of Christ. As Luther would remind us, our task is not done when we simply preach the law to the lost; we must then also preach the gospel to them and point them to Christ. For such, as Paul once said, were some of you; and, thankfully, somebody treated you as a lost person not an abstract moral category or a sexual preference. More...

James Grant writes:
It is hard to believe that while my wife and I are desperately doing everything we can to make sure our baby, at 23 weeks, survives and continues to grow in the womb for the next few months, there are others who in this country actually have abortions at this stage.
(For those of you praying for the Grants and their baby son, see this encouraging update!)

Think for a minute about what James writes above. What is the difference between the baby growing inside Brandy Grant's womb, and a baby growing inside the womb of a mother undergoing abortion. (In the time it takes you to read this post another baby will have been killed.)

The difference comes down to one word: want. Few words carry more power in the world today than these: I do not want this child at this time. More...

Creation or evolution - do we have to choose (chapter 4 - natural selection and reproductive success)

This chapter explains the "big idea" of Darwin's theory (in its modern form) - that natural selection, operating upon the the variations generated by mutations, is the engine driving the evolutionary machine.

By his own confession, DA postpones the difficult questions until later chapters, such as: where does the amazing complexity in even the "simplest" life forms come from in the first place? (i.e. the idea of Darwinism requires a pool of competing candidates to begin with), and are the changes generated by gene mutations (which DA concedes are normally harmful, not beneficial) able to cause not just one offspring to differ from another, but to bridge larger gaps - even such that ultimately the whole of all life is just a single family tree? That is, are there limits to the changes which can be generated by DNA copying errors? Likewise, questions of what evidence exists that such a process has actually happened (the fossil record, etc.) is not in this chapter.

So, like the previous chapter that makes this more of a plodding exercise in describing what the theory actually is, rather than one in which there's much argument to show that it's true or not. At least, though, in those particular cases which DA flags up, he attempts to answer them in later chapters. Other issues are not even raised.

To take an example, somebody attempting to evaluate the theory of evolution as a Christian theologian is going to have to grapple at some point with the fact that man is an awesome creature who is capable of vastly more than he needs to be capable of in order to survive. He's made in the image of God, not just as a machine to survive by the skin of his teeth. I like Handel; but even the most cunning and inventive minds haven't yet suggested how the ability to compose such intricate melodies, harmonies and so on stopped George Frederich or his fans from getting eaten by the local predators. All the wonders of human art and culture might ultimately be attributed to our immaterial souls, but they do at least pass through our physical brains. If Darwinism is a purported explanation for the origin of the complexity of those brains, it needs to explain this. Natural selection, as DA defines it, is to do with relative likelihoods of survival. Yet, the breadth of human capabilities exceeds what is needed for mere survival by a galactic mile and then some more after that. We might learn to play a piano concerto, debate the niceties of internal Labour Party politics, blend spices for the finest lamb madras, or contemplate the consequences of this or that chess move a few gambits down the line. It ought to be obvious that anyone who thinks that such excessive capabilities can be accounted for in terms of reproductive pressures is probably a few quality genes short up top themselves. DA, though, as has been his habit thus far in the book, simply ignores this question, if he's even aware of it.

One helpful "thought experiment" DA partakes in is to liken the (supposed) history of the earth to a 24-hour clock. On this scale, man appears at 3 seconds to midnight, and all of his record history takes place in the final fifth of a second. If we lengthen that to take in the whole history of the universe (not just the earth), then it's 1 second to midnight, and somewhere about 0.07 seconds for the bits we know about. DA, though, simply ignores the theological question that then arises, as to in what sense man's creation can with any responsibility or accuracy be portrayed in Scripture as being an event at the beginning of time, grouped with the creation of light and land when in fact they come at opposite poles in evolutionary reality. Nonetheless, DA is consistent in gliding over all such questions, because as we've seen his method is not to look for Scripture for history in any way - for him, it gives no parameters or boundaries, this is the role of modern science. Hence, he simply never raises the question; it doesn't come up within his methodology.

That's one of the things that concerns me about this book most. The undiscerning reader is not at the most fundamental level just being shown how evangelical thought and Darwinism can live together. He's actually getting a whole course of instruction in a new way of reading the Bible. A new way in which there are boundaries and limits set before we even open the book. A new way in which the key questions aren't to find out how the New Testament interprets the Old, or how the Saviour and his apostles guided us concerning the reliability of Genesis not just for matters of spiritual truth but also for flesh-and-blood matters of people, places and times. The reader is unwittingly being shown how to relativise the importance of the Scriptures, and form a whole new world-view which does not come from the mind of God as revealed in the Bible but from the secular "Enlightenment". A new world-view in which he learns not to ask "What does Scripture say?", but simply, in many important cases never to raise that question at all, because he's been taught to think of it as a category mistake.

Last Words Of Saints And Sinners

When we are thinking about death, we are thinking about the ultimate reality of our existence in this life: it ends. A couple of quotes from "Last Words Of Saints And Sinners: 700 Final Quotes from the Famous, the Infamous, and the Inspiring Figures of History", Herbert Lockyer, Kregel, 1969:

1. Augustus Montague Toplady (1710-1778), will ever be famous as the author of one of the most evangelical hymns of the eighteenth century, "Rock of Ages," which was first published in 1776. During the final illness, Toplady was greatly supported by the consolations of the gospel:

"The consolations of God, to so unworthy a wretch are so abundant; that he leaves me nothing to pray for but their continuance."

Near his last, awaking from a sleep, he said:

"Oh, what delights! Who can fathom the joy of the third heaven? The sky is clear, there is no cloud; come Lord Jesus, come quickly!"

He died saying:

"No mortal man can live after the glories which God has manifested to my soul."

2. Volatire, the noted French [atheist] and one of the most fertile and talented writers of his time, used his pen to retard and demolish Christianity. Of Christ, Voltaire said: "Curse the wretch!" He once boasted, "In twenty years Christianity will be no more. My single hand shall destroy the edifice it took twelve apostles to rear." Shortly after his death the very house in which he printed his foul literature became the depot of the Geneva Bible Society. The nurse who attended Voltaire said: "For all the wealth in Europe I would not see another infidel die." The physician, Trochim, waiting up with Voltaire at his death said that he cried out most desparately:

"I am abandoned by God and man! I will give you half of what I am worth if you will give me six months' life. Then I shall go to hell, and you will go with me. O Christ! O Jesus Christ!"

President Theodore Rosevelt on militant materialists

“There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all superstition. No grotesque repulsiveness of medieval superstition, even as it survived into nineteenth-century Spain and Naples, could be much more intolerant, much more destructive of all that is fine in morality, in the spiritual sense, and indeed in civilization itself, than that hard dogmatic materialism of to-day which often not merely calls itself scientific but arrogates to itself the sole right to use the term. If these pretensions affected only scientific men themselves, it would be a matter of small moment, but unfortunately they tend gradually to affect the whole people, and to establish a very dangerous standard of private and public conduct in the public mind.”

Theodore Roosevelt, “The Search for Truth in a Reverent Spirit,” Outlook, Dec. 2, 1911.

Pretty relevant for a quote of 96 years ago. Not everything changes as quickly as you think!

HT: Uncommon Descent