The Vision (7.1.16): Mr. Fearing

Note:  Devotion taken from conclusion to last Sunday morning’s sermon on Hebrews 11:11-22.

Hebrews was originally written to encourage Jewish Christians not to abandon Christ. the author intones:  If they have truly known saving faith they will be granted enduring faith.  Their perseverance in the faith, in the end, does not depend upon their faithfulness but upon the Lord’s faithfulness to them.

In the second part of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress there is a scene in which the pilgrims are passing through the Valley of Humiliation, described as “a valley that nobody walks in, but those that love a pilgrim’s life.”  Honest and the guide Great-Heart begin discussing a previous pilgrim named Mr. Fearing.  Honest says he knew him well, affirming he had “the root of the matter” but “he was one of the most troublesome pilgrims that ever I met with in all my days.”  Great-Heart says he knew of Mr. Fearing’s weaknesses, but, he adds,  “I could very well bear it, for men of my calling are oftentimes entrusted with the conduct of such as he was.”

Great-Heart then describes his guidance of Mr. Fearing on his pilgrimage to the Celestial City.  He notes, “Why he was always afraid that he should come up short of whither he had desire to go,” adding, he had “a slough of despond in his mind, a slough that he carried everywhere with him.”

Great-Heart then tells how Mr. Fearing eventually reached the final river which each pilgrim must pass over to reach the Celestial City. Upon arrival, Great-Heart says he noticed what was “very remarkable:  the water of that river was lower at this time than ever I saw it in all my life.”  So even Mr. Fearing was able to pass over “not much above wet-shod” and enter the city.

J. Gresham Machen ends his book What is Faith?  with reference to Bunyan’s Mr. Fearing, adding these final words:

Such is the blessed end of the man of little faith.  Weak faith will not remove mountains, but there is one thing that it will do: it will bring a sinner to peace with God.  Our salvation does not depend upon the strength of our faith; saving faith is a channel not a force.  If you are really committed to Christ, then despite your subsequent doubts and fears you are His for ever (p. 251).

Grace and peace, Pastor Jeff Riddle

Ex Nihilo Creation

Image:  Roses, North Garden, Virginia, June 2016

Note:  Some expanded notes from my 6/5/16 sermon on Hebrews 11:1-6.

Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear (Hebrews 11:3).

To be a Christian necessarily means to believe in the special creation of the world as described in the Bible.  As the catechism teaches, God made the world in the space of six days and all very good.  Only a Christian understands how the world came into being.  He does so because he trusts the Biblical account of creation.

When it says the world was framed by the word of God, we might think of two things:

First, we think of how God made the world by his divine command:  “Let there be light.”

But, second, we also consider how the world was made by the Son of God:

John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

 2 The same was in the beginning with God.

 3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

Hebrews 1:1 God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets,

2 Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds;

The inspired author adds, “so that the things which are seen were not made of the things which do appear.”  This is a proof for what we call the ex nihilo view of creation (creation out of nothing).  The pre-Christian pagans believed in the eternity of the world.  Everything that exists has always been.  This view was re-articulated in modern science in the view known as the “steady state theory.”

Christians rejected that.  Why?  Because there is only one being who is from everlasting to everlasting.  That is God himself.  If the stuff that makes up the world had always been then it would be eternal.  This is an attribute that belongs to God alone.  To reject ex nihilo creation is to run the risk of pantheism, of worshiping the creation as divine.  It is to run to idolatry, to have a god above God.

In J. Gresham Machen’s What is Faith? He offers this assessment of Hebrews 11:3b:  “Here we have, expressed with a clearness that leaves nothing to be desired, the doctrine of creation out of nothing, and that doctrine is said to be received by faith.  It is the same doctrine that appears in the first verse of the Bible.” (p. 50).

Machen also warns against those who promote pantheism as a substitution for theism “on the ground that it brings God nearer to men” (p. 53).  He argues:

In reality, however, it has exactly the opposite effect. Far from bringing God nearer to man, the pantheism of day really pushes Him very far off; it brings Him physically near; but at the same time makes Him spiritually remote; it conceives of Him as a sort of blind vital force, but ceases to regard Him as a Person whom a man can love and whom a man can trust.  Destroy the free personality of God, and the possibility of fellowship with Him is gone; we cannot love or trust a God of whom we are parts (p. 53).

JTR

Machen: Religion’s Absolute Dependence on Doctrine

Here is another brief excerpt from J. Gresham Machen’s What is Faith? (1925; Eerdmans, 1962) in which Machen interprets the significance of the central statement in Hebrews 11:6.

“…for he that cometh to God must believe that he is…” (Hebrews 11:6).

….Here we find a rejection of all the pragmatic, non-doctrinal Christianity of modern times.

In the first place, religion is here made to depend absolutely upon doctrine; the one who comes to God must not only believe in a person, but he must also believe that something is true:  faith is here declared to involve acceptance of a proposition.  There could be no plainer insistence upon the doctrinal or intellectual basis of faith.  It is impossible, according to the Epistle to the Hebrews, to have faith in a person without accepting with the mind the facts of the person.

Entirely different is the prevailing attitude in the modern Church; far from recognizing, as the author of Hebrews does, the intellectual basis of faith, many modern preachers set faith in sharp opposition to knowledge.  Christians faith, they say, is not assent to a creed, but it is confidence in a person.  The Epistle to the Hebrews on the other hand declares that it is impossible to have confidence in a person without assenting to a creed.  “He that cometh to God must believe that he is.”  The words “God is” or “God exists,” constitute a creed; they constitute a proposition; and yet they have here placed as necessary to that supposedly non-intellectual thing that is called faith.  It would be impossible to find a more complete opposition than that which here appears between the New Testament and the anti-intellectual tendency of modern preaching (pp. 47-48).

JTR

Machen on Pedagogy and Faith

Image:  J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937)

Yesterday morning I started preaching my way through Hebrews 11, the great faith chapter.  As part of my preaching preparation for this topic, I also started reading J. Gresham Machen’s What is Faith? (1925; Eerdmans reprint 1962).

In the opening chapter, the Reformed defender of orthodoxy in the face of modernism, who had taught at Princeton and later withdrew at the formation of Westminster, attacks the modern shift in educational philosophy, from facts to experience.  Though written in the 1920s it has an uncanny contemporary ring to it, particularly for the ears of any who have done any college level teaching.

Here are some of Machen’s thoughts:

…The old fashioned notion of reading a book or hearing a lecture and simply storing up in the mind what the book or lecture contains—this is regarded as entirely out of date.  A year or so ago I heard a noted educator give some advice to a company of college professors.—advice which was typical of the present tendency in education.  It is a great mistake he said in effect, to suppose that a college professor ought to teach; on the contrary he ought simply to give the students an opportunity to learn.

This pedagogic theory of following the line of least resistance in education and avoiding all drudgery and all hard work has been having its natural result; it has joined forces with the natural indolence of youth to produce in present-day education a very lamentable decline….

The undergraduate student of the present day is being told that he need not take notes on what he hears in class, that the exercises of memory is a rather childish and mechanical thing, and that what he is really in college to do is to think for himself and to unify his world.  He usually makes a poor business of unifying his world.  And the reason is clear.  He does not succeed in unifying his world for the simple reason that he has no world to unify.  He has not acquired a knowledge of a sufficient number of facts in order even to learn the method of putting facts together.  He is being told to practice the business of mental digestion:  but the trouble is that he has no food to digest.  The modern student, contrary to what is often said, is really being starved for want of facts (pp. 15-17).

Interestingly, just after I read this I attended an orientation meeting at a large university which my daughter will be attending this fall in which the president told the parents that the administration did not want our children simply sitting in the classroom listening to lectures and taking notes.  I’m thinking, however, that there might not be anything wrong with that.  Some knowledge simply needs to be transferred from those who know it to those who don’t.  And there’s not much for the student to work with till he has mastered some basic facts.

Machen’s discussion of pedagogy, of course, had a spiritual end.  His point was that the modern shift in education also reflected a modern shift in Christian doctrine and practice.  Modern liberals did not want to bogged down with doctrinal precision in defining who Jesus is, particularly given that they were dismantling the traditional and confessional view of Jesus.  They preferred the mystical approach.  Just trust Jesus, but don’t bother with controversial attempts to define who he is.  So Machen observes:

The preacher says:  “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” But how can a man possibly act on that suggestion, unless he knows what it is to believe (p. 43).

He later adds:

It is perfectly true that faith in a person is more than acceptance of a creed, but the Bible is quite right in holding that it always involved acceptance of a creed.  Confidence in a person is more than intellectual assent to a series of propositions about the person, but it always involves those propositions, and becomes impossible the moment they are denied (p. 48).

JTR