Clough Divine institutions Lesson 4

Divine Institution #1 – Positive and Negative volition – Romans 1:18-22

We are continuing our study of the first divine institution and you’ll recall that there are four divine institutions: volition, marriage, family and national government. These four are not just accidents, they’re not just evolved features on the historic scene, they are an integral design of history by God. We defined a divine institution as a designed feature in creation that is unique to man and that has essential spiritual functions; a designed feature that is unique to man and has essential spiritual functions. That makes these divine institutions very important. Every theological question that involves history, that involves any section of the text of God’s Word, involves in some way or respect or manner these divine institutions.

Our first one, which we will conclude tonight, divine institution number one, volition, we define as the responsibility before God to choose different ends and means in life. We found that various features of this you will remember and recall that first of all, it does not necessarily mean that we are able to actually accomplish the goal that we choose. That’s not implied in the divine institution of volition. What it means is that we want to. We gave numerous Scriptural examples where men were credited with obedience to God, even though they did not have the capacity to work out their choice, they nevertheless, in spite of their lack of capacity to accomplish the goal, nevertheless chose for that goal and that is credited. We find this in passages like the giving passage of 2 Corinthians 8 which we examined, in which we found that it is credited to a man according to that which he has, not according to that which he has not, showing the fact that if a man does not have the funds available to give, for example, if a man is depriving his family because of some silly idea about a tithe and he is depriving his family of food and other necessities of life to provide a tithe, he blasphemes the Lord. That’s taught in 1 and 2 Timothy. And it says in 2 Corinthians 8 that Paul says God accounts your willingness to give, not the actual act of giving because in that case it would have been impossible, since the man did not have the money. So that was one feature we noted about volition.

Another feature we noted about volition that we noted was that it was always before God and not before man, primarily. The volitional choice must be viewed as a vertical one that stands as we stand, under God and not in front of men, and we gave examples of this, hence why there is a judgment before God, never a judgment before men.

Then we dealt with two human viewpoint attacks on this first divine institution. One we said was that strict determinism in which all of nature becomes a machine and there is no more freedom left in it. This is a product of sheer western thought in the last 400 years; it does not have anything to do with the Bible and it is not a valid form of thinking about the world, as a determined machine. Also we noted that modern physics, in several cases that I mentioned, had some very dubious questions to raise about the whole picture of the universe being looked at as a machine.

The second attack against the divine institution of volition we found was evolution, in which a continuity of nature was hypothesized which included man with the animal, and hence therefore the experience that we have of choosing is nothing more than an instinct rising to the surface and it appear to be a free choice simply because of a more sophisticated brain that the man has and the animal doesn’t. We dealt with that problem, and dealt with the difference, and the problem of physical damage to the human body, what happens to infants who cannot choose, for example; what happens to blind men who cannot see, what happens to people who have physical infirmities that makes it impossible for them to choose that which God would like them to choose. And then we dealt with the most crucial type of damage to volition, spiritual destruction in which a person, because of his negative volition toward God reaps the inevitable cause/effect result and that is that his volition becomes damaged, and we find in cases in various points of history, the Amorites of Genesis 15, the Canaanites, Pharaoh, we find the future saints during the Tribulation as examples of great cultures and peoples who because of their intense hostility toward the things of God have reaped the inevitable consequence of the loss of volition in which they reach a point where they no longer can even choose for God. They have reaped the final destruction of their volition; volition is destroyed through persistent negative volition.

Then last time we dealt with the problem of volition and the sovereignty of God and showed that the origin of the problem or the paradox is solely rooted in modern thought and has nothing to do with the Bible. This is not a logical contradiction of the Biblical system, sovereignty or free will; it is only a logical contradiction when you define freedom the way modern man defines freedom, when you want autonomous freedom for yourself, and absolute freedom. There is no absolute freedom for any portion of the Creator.

Now we come, finally, to the last section of volition dealing with what can volition do, positive and negative volition, the only two states of human choice, positive or negative. Now some people are deceived in their thinking because they think you can be neutral on issues; they think you can be neutral to certain things. And then those of us who point out the fact that neutrality is impossible are always accused of starting trouble, are always accused of starting an argument, are always accused of being splinters, are always accused of disrupting the scene. And yet the matter of the fact is that volition can never be negative by virtue of its structure and we shall examine three scriptural passages tonight that clearly teach that volition can never neutral, at any given point in time you are positive or you are negative toward God; you can’t be neutral, it’s impossible and it’s a figment of modern imagination. One is either for or one is against, one cannot be neutral in this issue.

Let’s give an illustration: people say, for example, you take a man who’s thinking about a woman seriously or a guy who has a girlfriend, and the question comes up whether he wants to marry the person or not. Now if he says I’m neutral and haven’t made up my mind it sounds as though this is an illustration in common life of neutral volition, he hasn’t yet decided to do it or not. That sounds like it’s neutral but as a matter of fact it’s not, it’s negative for as long as he debates the question he never marries and never will, and he could wind up being a bachelor for the rest of his life. Do you see the point; it is not neutral, it is negative. For him to say I haven’t made up my mind is to say that he already has, I’ve decided right now not to until I make up my mind to. So there’s no such thing as neutrality, it’s always for or against, everything in every area of life.

In Genesis 3:1-9 we have the fall, and you’ll see here how this failure to be neutral comes out in Eve’s disposition when she faces Satan. “Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, has God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” And of course this question that he asked the woman in verse 1 is the key to identify a satanic attack. Every satanic attack on the Christian can be identified by the fact that no matter what the specifics are it always has one overriding feature, and that overriding feature is a denial of the authority of the Word of God, whether that comes from a professor in the college classroom or whether it comes through a teacher in the public school system it is a satanic attack and that person speaks and stands in the position that the serpent does to Eve. When any man challenges the authority of the Word of God he is essentially an incarnation of Satan, just as this serpent is here. There is no positive and negative. And so the doubt is sown in Eve’s mind, “Yea, has God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?”

Genesis 3:2, “And the woman said unto the serpent,” and she quotes back the commandment of God with some additions, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; [3] But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.” Now if you’ll just look in Genesis 2:17 you’ll see God never said any such thing; this woman is all fouled up, either because her husband didn’t get it clear and teach her or she didn’t pay attention when he was teaching her, but of course, by the way, Eve got her information from Adam so it’s not necessarily that Eve was fouled up, her husband, Adam, might not have been a clear teacher but this commandment in verse 17 was not given to Eve, it was given to Adam and Adam was responsible for instructing his wife in spiritual things, just like men are today. Verse 17, “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Nothing about touch, absolutely nothing there. And the fact that Eve adds the “touch” in verse 3 suggests that perhaps she misunderstands something. It may mean that she thinks of the fact that there’s a poison on the thing or something, and therefore she doesn’t want to touch it because if she does then she’s somehow going to get a shock or something, a poison, and that’s not the point. She’s located the problem in the material and the problem basically is volition.

Genesis 3:4, “And the serpent said unto the woman, You shall not surely die,” and so we have the second feature of a satanic attack. The first one undermines the authority of the Word, and the second one comes in with a strong denial of the Word of God. [5] “For God does know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing both good and evil.” Now of course, this is interesting, this is quoted in many areas. I’m always amused by this quote because you’ll see certain universities, where I went to school at MIT we had a large dining room there and I can remember eating there all five years that I was there seeing this big mosaic pattern and on top of this big long mural across this thing they had a scientist, and the picture was of this scientist with a white coat, with his hands outstretched, and down below were all the pieces of civilization, and they were all looking up to science to provide them with this thing, and in one hand there was one pot, good, and the other pot, evil, and down below was the caption, “ye shall be as gods, knowing both good and evil.” And it’s a complete misunderstanding of the whole point. In other words, the only Scripture that was quoted there was what Satan said in the Bible.

So what he’s saying here, “Ye shall be as gods,” meaning that there’s a clear cut choice and this is the third level of a satanic attack. First he denies the authority of the Word; second he denies the content of the Word, and now thirdly he maligns the character of the God who spoke it. This always is a result; this is why I say the most elementary doctrine for you as a believer to get under your belt and know it cold is the divine essence: God is sovereign, righteous, just, love, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, immutable and eternality. You must know God’s essence; every satanic attack is directed against annihilating, maligning or misrepresenting one or more of these attributes. Here he is maligning the attribute of love as Satan always does throughout Scripture. He is destroying or trying to misrepresent God’s love. He’s saying God does not want the best for you and He’s deliberately restricting you to give you a bad time, because after all, if He didn’t restrict you, you might have a good time. In other words, what the argument here is is that restrictions are not a product of love; restrictions are given only because someone has a grudge against you and is trying to give you a hard time. And this, incidentally, is very parallel to every disturbance you’ll find in your family, every disturbance you will find in society is rooted to the rebel who says that restrictions always mean lack of love. Love can never legislate restrictions and this is a satanic argument that comes all the way from Genesis 3.

Genesis 3:6, “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise,” then she ate. Now the point that’s happened here is that the woman has taken it upon herself to act as the final court of appeal. She has become a person who operates with herself as the judge, no longer the Word of God as judge. She has transferred her volition from submission, positive volition toward the Word of God to negative. The very act that she thinks she can be her own authority is blasphemy and is negative volition and rebellion against God, for if God is there and God really speaks then by definition His words are automatically authoritative. And yet here is this woman; here’s the woman who says I will make up my mind, I will consider two opinions and choose between them. And here she uses herself and sets herself up as the ultimate frame of reference.

Now why this is so important to see is that the tendency is to look back in your Christian life and think back to the time when you became a Christian. Those of us who have accepted Christ tend to think of our life as neutral; then we were confronted with the gospel versus non-gospel information and we choose between the two. Psychologically that is what we think happened and yet as a matter of fact the Bible doesn’t say it; the Bible says that we were on negative volition all the way up to the point of choice and then we went on positive. We were on negative in the sense that we decided we would run our own lives and this of course is the essence of sin. And this is really frightening and really I would say not very acceptable to the modern man as he thinks of this, that he is deeply and profoundly in rebellion against God, and at the point we become Christians God the Holy Spirit replaces that sinful nature with a regenerate nature, the regeneration of the Holy Spirit.

But in Genesis 3 you find the nature of man not to be neutral. This woman already, at the point of doubting the authority of God, has gone on negative volition because she has chosen to be her own judge. You might say that she is one who would go into a school and consider ten different theories and say I will be the ultimate frame of reference of choice between all these theories and the point is that no one is a position of neutrality. In other words, it is a false picture you have of life if you think you’re neutral and you’re simply choosing between different views of life. That’s not the Biblical picture; the Biblical picture is that you at any given time are either in a profound state of rejection of the Creator or you are submitting to Him. There is no neutrality.

And this is why in our evangelism today, as I will show later with an illustration, why evangelism today is not having the affect it had, say in the days of the Puritans and Jonathan Edwards. Those men clearly perceived that when they preached the evangelistic message they were not entertaining a cafeteria of ideas; they were not laying the Christian along down aside of something else and saying you neutral people you decide between the two. Rather, what they were saying that you entrenched damned miserable sinners ought to listen to what the Bible has to say to you and describing their state. In other words, they approached their audience as though they had already rejected the Christian message. They did not appeal to neutrality, they attacked rejection and it’s this either/or, negative or positive, that you find again and again in the preaching of these Puritan men who I consider to be Americas greatest evangelists. These are the men, everywhere they went things happened, there was something that was let loose.

For example, even in the 20^th century we have the early fundamentalists in this century going around between 1910 and 1920 in some of the rural areas and they would wholly change the town, without any publicity, without any long campaign, without any TV and radio coverage; these men would come to a town and taverns and bars and everything else would close up, and it wasn’t because they were preaching against liquor; it was because they had something so fantastic that it upset the entire town and anybody that knows a little history knows this happened again and again and again throughout the south particularly and parts of the Midwest where these itinerant evangelists went. And they had a sharp effect and their preaching had the same characteristic of the fact of blasting loose people who are on negative volition. They did not consider the person to whom they spoke as a neutral person. They considered him as a hostile rebel toward God. In other words, they applied a militant confrontation, a head-on collision of the gospel with this rebel, rather than appealing to him as a neutral man of reason.

Now in Romans 1 we find a very similar thing that Paul does to the culture of Rome and remember that this is significant because it is written to a highly cultured area, the church as Rome; not as cultured, perhaps, as classical Greece but nevertheless, considering some of the other locations in the New Testament, such as Crete and so on, and Corinth, the city of Rome at least had some culture. And here is Paul’s classical commentary on human culture; Roman 1:18ff. He is talking about his preaching of the gospel, verse 16, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ; for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believes; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. [17] For therein,” now watch, here’s the gospel he’s talking about, but look what he says is contained in the gospel, now there’s some things contained in here I guarantee you won’t hear in a normal evangelistic message today, and yet Paul says this is part and parcel of the gospel. Verse 17, “Therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith; as it is written; The just shall live by faith.” Now we all agree that most evangelistic messages have some exposition of the righteousness of God. So that’s not what I’m talking about.

Look at the next verse, Romans 1:18, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness.” There’s a positive and a negative to note in verse 18. First the positive: what it is saying is that the gospel message includes in the initial exposition a condemnation of the hearer, a condemnation of his position, a rooting out of his position of rebellion, yet we must also carefully balance that. Too often this becomes a hellfire and brimstone presentation in which hell is used as an emotional device to coerce people into having an emotional response and then trot them down the aisle to 40 stanzas of Just as I Am. This is an illegitimate usage of this and it misunderstands the point. Paul doesn’t even mention hell here; that’s not his point. The point Paul is talking about is volition. He is exposing negative volition, not the penalty, he is exposing the negative volition, the rebellious attitude; he hasn’t even got to where it leads but he’s saying the gospel presentation must include an exposition of the negative rebellious attitude in the man’s heart who hears the gospel.

There’s a little phrase in verse 18 that I want you to see that you ought to underline, “who hold the truth in unrighteousness.” Now who’s holding the truth in unrighteousness? The unbeliever is holding the truth. Well, that should get you thinking. What truth does the unbeliever hold in unrighteousness? He holds, the word here means to lay hold of and grasp and seize, the unbeliever does have parts of the truth in him; there is no neutrality. Paul says the very fact the unbeliever has truth proves he’s not neutral because he’s suppressing it. In other words, there’s no such person who is one who has never heard. There’s no such person who is truly neutral; there are only people who have the truth and have submitted to it and those others who have the truth that are suppressing it, but there is no such thing as a neutral person.

Now this kind of strikes some people as rough and hard but just look at verse 18, what it’s saying, these people that Paul is condemning and in context he’s talking about the unbelieving culture of the city of Rome and he says these people are the ones who “hold the truth in unrighteousness,” in other words, in rebellion. They hold onto this truth; what is the truth that they hold onto. Obviously it’s not the fine details of the cross of Christ and all the rest of it, but what is it that they hold onto. Now he’s going to tell you what it is they hold onto.

Romans 1:19, “Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God has shown it unto them,” notice that verse, “that which may be known of God,” what may be known of God? Let’s look further, but first look at verse 19, “God has showed it unto them,” this means that there is no such thing as neutrality; God through common grace, as we have said last time, the three circles of common grace, the universal circle, the restricted circle, and the gospel circle of common grace, those three circles show that God is at work in the human race.

The first circle is His common grace in such things as promoting culture in society, promoting technological advancement, the blessings of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5 when Jesus says he sends the rain on the just and the unjust, and so on. So this is the wide circle, all men are in that circle. But then there’s another restricted circle that we’ve identified from 2 Thessalonians in which God at certain points of history restrains sin in a society, even though that society deserves to go down into the garbage can. I would say that we are experiencing that in America today, this second circle of grace, in other words that God is restraining the results. We have made so many wrong decisions as a nation that we by all odds of history should not exist today and yet we are existing and I think it’s because of this restraining grace. Then the third inner circle is John 16, the gospel circle of common grace in which the gospel is presented and illuminates the minds of people who do not choose to believe. So we have these three circles of grace outlined in God’s Word and this is what Paul means here in verse 19, “that which may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it unto them.”

Now Romans 1:20 is a more clear exposition of which circle of the three Paul has most in mind; it’s the first one, that outer larger circle. “For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.” That’s another place to underline, “so they are without excuse.” No one will ever be able to say well God, I didn’t know, someone didn’t come up and present Christianity to me God so I just didn’t know and all the rest of it. They are, Paul says, “without excuse” because they have actively chosen to reject the information they had. What is the information they had to reject? Verse 20, again this exposes this information, “For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen,” and in the Greek this is very strong. It is strong because the word “are seen” is in the present tense and the present tense means action which goes on and on and on and on, continuous action. So it is not just seen once, it is seen again and again and again and again and again and again, all down through history it is seen, seen, seen, seen, seen, seen, and then, if that isn’t enough to emphasize the point, Paul adds the word “clearly.” So he says not only is it seen, seen, seen, seen but it’s clearly seen, clearly seen, clearly seen, clearly seen, clearly seen, over and over and over and over and over and over again. These, again, are people who never heard the gospel, keep that in mind. This epistle was written about the people in Rome and the people in Rome didn’t hear the gospel but they have clearly and constantly seen the invisible things of God.

Romans 1:20, “Being understood,” these invisible things are understood, the word “understand” is the verb for mental processes, it means it is comprehended in the mentality of the soul, “being understood through,” the word “by” means “by means of the things that have been made,” in other words, this is the familiar argument of design, though not in its philosophical niceties that philosophers are used to discussing it. Paul is not using in that tight philosophical sense. Paul is using the argument of design in the sense that as you look out and experience life do you have an explanation? Just from the pattern of life of life, everything that comes into your life, that hits you from 360 degrees, he says these are revelations of God’s character; all, every experience of life, whether you think of the design of physical things, whether you think of the personal things that happen to you, whether you think of your personal relationships with others, whether you think of the realm of morality or whatever area of life you want to think about, Paul says that testifies to God’s power and His deity. In the last part of verse 20, “His eternal,” but I caution you about reading things into this word “eternal.” If you check out carefully it means His constantly working power; “His constantly working power and His godhead,” or His deity or the fact that He’s absolute over all.

For example, we might say as I look out in the world I have to, if I’m a thinking person, must have some explanation for the order I see and either ultimately I attribute it to Chance or I attribute it to a designer, one of the two, and every man must deal with the problem of design. We think of morality and we say that we have a concept of right and wrong, where does it come from? Somebody must give this, and this is the moral argument, and we have to come with…again, we’re not saying these prove, in the sense of theoretical mathematical proof, we’re not saying that at all. We’re saying that these are evidences that you come crashing into in your life, over and over and over and over again, and you have already evolved some explanations for them if you think about them for a minute.

For example, most people believe in morality, at least in this part of the country most people believe in morality, although they are not all Christians. This is an illustration, “they hold the truth in unrighteousness.” The people in this part of the country hold a morality and they have a good solid citizen concept and I wouldn’t do anything immoral and all the rest of the self-righteousness prissy attitudes that are around here and so on. Now why? Because they believe in a morality but they don’t have any base for it. They have this morality, they’ve got to come to some explanation for right and wrong, and so they try to invent all these ways of explaining it. For example, if a person does not believe in morality they have a hard time with a man by the Adolph Hitler because in 1933 when Adolph Hitler seized power he had a constitutional empowerment act passed by the Germans which empowered the Fuhrer to change any phrase or paragraph of the constitution. So from 1933 to 1945 by definition Adolph Hitler never violated German law, therefore the Nazis were legal and therefore you can’t say they are wrong. Now do you agree to that or not? You shake your head, you say no; why? Because you recognize there must be some other law which stands above and beyond the German law and if you do not have the Biblical Christianity I challenge the basis of that sentiment you have. You have no right to hold that sentiment unless God is there and God has His attribute of righteousness and justice, otherwise you don’t have any basis for condemning the Nazis or Adolph Hitler or anyone else for that matter.

So these are illustrations of the fact that every thinking living person must have some truth that he holds and he suppresses it; in other words, he defies it and every person is in contact with God. There’s no such thing as an isolated individual; people are rebelling or they’re submitting but they are not neutral at any given time, even though psychologically they may argue that they weren’t aware of it, nevertheless, the Bible says that they hold this deep down in their unconscious mind and unconsciously they are rebels before God. They may have suppressed this rebelliousness out of their consciousness but it’s still there and they are still judged for it.

Romans 1:19 again, “That which may be known,” notice “God has showed it unto them,” in other words, the law of life can be viewed as a stream of revelation that God pours, like a stream of water on the unbeliever. See this! History does not go on as kind of a machine, it just sort of goes on and God sits around and goes like this, you know, isn’t it interesting to look down there and so on. That’s not the picture you get from the Bible. The picture you get from the Bible is that God is actively bringing experiences into the lives of all men; not just Christians, all men. Now this to me gives me great comfort because it tells me when I go to share Christ with an individual and discuss the things of the gospel that I’m not coming against a person who doesn’t know God; I’m coming against a person who’s already been in touch with God, a person that God has already worked in his life, and even though he may suppress it from his consciousness, deep down, if I probe deep enough I can find out where that person has rebelled, the point of rebellion against God. And so this gives me great hope for an evangelistic thrust because it means all men are always in contact with God in some way.

And then the results in Romans 1:21, again notice, Paul’s not talking about hellfire and brimstone, even though this is a message of condemnation, this isn’t the point for talking about hell. It’s only a point for exposing rebellious attitudes and this must be included in an evangelistic thrust. Now we go to one or two extremes; either the evangelist comes around and preaches hellfire and brimstone, gets everyone hacked and so they turn him out, which they should really if he’s that dumb and uses it that way he doesn’t deserve a hearing, or they go the other way and they say well let’s just present the positive side and let’s just kind of saddle up alongside the person…now of all the thousand and one religions let’s consider Christianity versus these things in a purely neutral way. There’s no neutral way to look at it; that’s the [can’t understand word], Paul says, you come up and you slam the rebellion that exists there.

Verse 21, “Because that when they knew God,” and here’s his explanation for Roman culture, “when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain,” there’s your word “vanity,” remember Ecclesiastes is a 12 chapter exposition of the word vanity; you should know the concept of vanity now from the book of Ecclesiastes, “neither were thankful but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. [22] Professing themselves to be wise, they became idiots,” they became fools, stupid, and the Bible means by stupid not uneducated; we’re not talking about education. When the Bible says wise or foolish it means that the person knows the structure of reality or he denies the structure of reality. The Bible is realistic. A fool is one who shuts his eyes to what’s really there, to the men in the Bible. A wise man is not a mathematician or a philosopher in Biblical thought; in Biblical thought a wise man is one who has his eyes wide open to everything that there is in life, including social relationships and everything else. A fool is one who has blinders on his eyes.

So therefore this word in verse 22 suggests that as this unbeliever persists in his negative volition against God, since he faces the problem… let’s draw him. Here’s the unbeliever; in his heart he has negative volition. That negative volition is in rebellion. Let’s make this reality, everything in this box is all of his experiences in life and so let’s catalogue all of his experiences in life, everything that happens to him, things that happen in school, things that happen in the home, things that happen in history, things that happen to him all over life, this is reality. All right, there are certain things in reality; say this area, that God is particularly using to speak to his heart, and so Paul says he knows God’s there, don’t kid yourself, that unbeliever knows God’s there and he knows that he is in rebellion against these features of his experience that speak to him of God. So therefore the unbeliever faces a problem; he doesn’t want the relationship with God but he has to live in the world anyway and so this sucks him in tension, and now the unbeliever must come to a decision. Every unbeliever does this; you did it before you became a Christian, I did it before I became a Christian, even though now when we look back even now it’s hard to see where we did it, but nevertheless we know from God’s Word that this psychological process went on; it was more than just a psychological process, it’s a very intensely spiritual process.

So what happened? Here you have the unbeliever; he faces these experiences in life, he has to face them because he lives in this world, but on the other hand, if he opens his eyes, they testify to him of God. Since he doesn’t want God, he therefore has to shut his eyes to those particular areas of life that speak to him of God. So therefore he is in active rebellion against God at many points in his life. He rebels against God’s trying to probe him constantly, as Paul says, and the price he pays is verses 23 and following.

Romans 1:23, “And changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. [24] Wherefore God also gave them to uncleanness through the lusts of their own heart,” and what he is saying here in verse 23 is that a choice has to be made. Every man, because he is a man made in God’s image, we have as Pascal said, a God-shaped vacuum that only God can fill as He has made known through Jesus Christ. Every man in his structure has a need for God. Therefore, he has this box that’s inside; let’s make this little box inside and label it “V” for vacuum. He has this vacuum and that vacuum cries out to be filled, you’ve got to fill me, you’ve got to fill me, you’ve got to fill me, you’ve got to fill me, you’ve got to fill me with some standard, some goal, over which you can measure yourself. So therefore the person has only one choice: Creator or he takes a piece of the creation to fill it and when it’s a piece of creation it’s an idol and when it’s the Creator it’s God. And every man makes it; every man makes the choice, either in negative volition he has set up in his life a supreme absolute that he considers in rebellion against God and that’s negative volition or he has chosen to make the Creator the center of his life, that’s positive volition.

You’ve got to see this, it’s idols or it’s God, one or the other; there can’t be any in between, there’s no neutrality here. Let’s look down further in the text; Romans 1:25 we read, “Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.” In other words he is saying that every man must do this; he’s not saying some men consciously say well, I’ve got to make up an idol; I’ve got to do it. No, he’s not saying that’s the way it works; he’s saying this is automatic, he says you can’t help but do it. Because you exist as a member of the human race you have to have a God, something has to be your God, it is either a piece of creation or it’s the Creator over and above the creation, but one of those things has to be there and if it’s a piece of creation it’s an idol. So therefore Paul says this is the choice that you face, that I face, that every member of the human race faces, either an idol or it’s God but there is no in between.

Let’s turn over in the Old Testament to find out what the classical Biblical way of dealing with idolatry is. 1 Kings 18, when we begin to study the magnitude of volition and the fact that it must be positive of negative you begin to see that the gospel confrontation is a head on collision and why you as a Christian cannot be neutral in your society, why you can’t be neutral in the United States of America in 1970, why you are either in total head-on collision with your culture or you go along right with it, it’s one or the other, there’s no in between.

Here in 1 Kings 18 there was a crisis in the nation. I’ve taken you to this passage several times but you should be familiar with this because this is one of the classic confrontations between idolatry and Yahwehism. It’s Elijah and Elijah, of course, didn’t have homiletics course so he didn’t know how to win friends and influence people, he just knew how to present the truth. So in 1 Kings 18:17 he comes out. Now Ahab is… the famous R. G. Lee, the famous preacher in Tennessee, he has the most beautiful picture of Ahab in one of his most famous sermons, I can’t think of the name of the sermon but he compares Ahab to a toad and it is one of the most fantastic sermons. If you ever want to listen to it it’s Rev. Lee from Tennessee, and he is probably one of the great old time orators and he is a man who has the oratorical capability, for example, of going over to a place like the coliseum and holding people spellbound for an hour and a half or two hours. He can just get up and talk and you can hear a pin drop; he is fantastic. And he has one of his great sermons he has given, I think something like 300-400 times in various places in the country this sermon on Ahab and he compares Ahab to a toad, and it is amazing the parallel he draws and very accurate. But Ahab, even since I heard that I think of Ahab as a toad.

So here’s Ahab on his toadstool, and in verse 17 out comes Elijah. The trouble with Ahab was he had an unbelieving wife who he allowed to dominate his life. “It came to pass, when Ahab saw Elijah, that Ahab said unto him, Are you he that troubles Israel?” Here comes the troublemaker. Now immediately this is the testimony of a believer in his society, he’s a troublemaker. Now this doesn’t mean troublemaker being an idiot about it, making trouble over false issues. That’s not the concept, but there is a concept. Some Christians are so afraid of making ripples that they’re afraid of this. Yet Elijah wasn’t, and Elijah here had the reputation in high political circles for being a troublemaker, and this is a king that comes out, well, here comes the country’s troublemaker, here comes Elijah.

1 Kings 18:18, “And he answered, I have not troubled Israel,” here’s Elijah’s answer, “but you have, and your father’s house.” Now see, he starts out being very polite and courteous, how to win the appreciation of Ahab, he takes him out to dinner and so on…NO, he doesn’t do that, he says you’re the troublemaker around here, you’re the one that’s done this, “in that you have forsaken the commandments of the LORD, and you have followed the Baalim.” The “Baalim” refers to Baal plus all the cosmogony, his cosmology around him set up with…he had these various gods around plus their beliefs form one unit, form one system of thinking. And so he said “you have followed the Baalim.” You see, it’s not commandments versus a God, it’s commandments of the Lord versus Baal’s whole set of commandments; it’s two systems that are in collision here, not just two gods; there’s Jehovah and His commandments and Baal and his commandments, two entirely distinct systems. And he says you have gone with one and I have gone with the other.

1 Kings 18:19, “Now, therefore, send, and gather to me all Israel unto Mount Carmel, and the prophets of Baal, four hundred and fifty, and the prophets of the groves, four hundred, who eat at Jezebel’s table.” See, that’s his problem, he’s got a problem in the family. [20] “So Ahab said unto all the children of Israel, and gathered the prophets together unto Mount Carmel. [21] And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? If the LORD be God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word. [22] Then said Elijah unto the people, I, even I only, remain a prophet of the LORD; but Baal’s prophets are four hundred and fifty men.” And if he were to ascertain truth like we do now he’d call a vote and say watch, it wins, Baalism wins, 450 to 1 so that makes it right, see, they had an election and since the majority rules, the majority is always right, and so it wins; truth by majority vote. Now that’s a lot of nonsense.

Do you know where that story came from? It came from a French philosopher by the name of Rousseau, and Rousseau was the man who started modern democracy, totalitarian democracy. Totalitarian democracy must be distinguished from the republican type of government such as the Constitution. But in a totalitarian democracy it’s strictly up to the people at any given point; what the people vote is automatically by definition right, because they don’t have any absolute standard then the voice of the people becomes that standard. If you have no Word of God, then you must have the word of the masses or you must have the word of a despotic king, either one is a despot, if he’s an individual king or if he’s the masses, both are equally despotic. And Rousseau said this, the height of blasphemy, now this is the man who engineered the French Revolution, “the most general will is always the most just also.” Now listen to this because this is a line our children are being taught in the public schools. “The most general will is always the most just also. The voice of the people is in fact the voice of God.” That’s the man who designed democracy; those of you who think absolute democracy is so great just listen to that again. “The voice of the people is in fact the voice of God,” that’s blasphemy! The voice of the people can never be the voice of God. Who was the voice of the people when they said Crucify Him, Crucify Him? If they had taken a vote in the courtroom who would have won, Christ or the mob? The mob; does that make the crucifixion right? Absolutely not. The voice of the people usually is the voice of Satan, not the voice of God.

So here at 450 versus one Elijah would have lost. But Elijah isn’t going to appeal to democratic process; Elijah is going to do something else. In 1 Kings 18:24 he’s going to ask him to “call ye on the name of your gods, and I will call on the name of the LORD; and let the God that answers by fire, let him be God.” He puts it to the test. And then in verse 27 while they’re yelling and screaming, O Baal, O Baal, O Baal, O Baal, and going through this ritual and so on, Elijah starts to mock them. And this is one of the standard techniques in the Bible to ridicule idolatry. I do not frankly know of one passage of Scripture that deals with idols, to my knowledge now, there may be, but to my knowledge I know of no passage of Scripture that involves an assault on idols that is not using sarcasm and ridicule; not one. Every one of them! And in verse 27 Elijah mocked them, and he said, “Scream loud; for he is a god. Either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or perhaps, he’s sleeping, and must be awakened.” Elijah’s saying ha-ha, yell a little louder, maybe he might wake up.

Now why does Elijah do this? Because these people are not neutral; these people have already decided, they’re on negative volition toward God and Elijah must come smashing in against it and so he does so by the process of ridicule and sarcasm. And while these people are yelling O Baal, O Baal, O Baal, and going through all this he’s saying ha-ha, why don’t you yell a little louder, maybe he’s out for a walk. That’s what it means, incidentally when it says he’s “out on a journey.” The way to translated it idiomatically, maybe your god took a walk, you’d better yell a little louder so he’ll come back home and listen. This is downright sarcastic ridicule that Elijah is heaping on these idols.

You see, this again in the prophet Isaiah, when the prophet Isaiah says you stupid idiots, you worship your idols, do you know those idols you have to have chains to hold to the wall. In the temples there they have these idols set up on these shelves, and they had some of them made out of wood and some of them stone, and these weirdoes set up there and they were tall and they were top heavy, and they had to chain them to the wall. And Isaiah says how stupid, look at that, your idol has to be nailed to the wall because he can’t even stand up under his own weight, and you sit down and you bow yourself and you worship him. He was not neutral, he was a man who attacked, viciously and ridiculed…now he didn’t ridicule the people, please notice, ideas not people. His ridicule here is not against the people; his ridicule in verse 20, although he mocked them he is actually directing his ridicule towards the idol. Now you have to be careful in this; you can get out of fellowship and out of the Lord’s will. God doesn’t call us to mock people in this sense, he has taught us to mock and make fun of the idols they worshipped, say ha-ha, look at the idol, isn’t he an idiot, isn’t he stupid, worshiping this thing. So here he is attacking the idols.

Now let’s go back to Romans 1:24, again we see that the appeal is not made to neutral, calm, unimpassioned reason. The appeal is made and is attacking people because they are already in a negative stance; they are attacking what they believe in. “Wherefore, God,” this is one of the results, “Wherefore, God also has given them up to uncleanness through the lust of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves,” and so on. Every system of apostasy will result in destruction of society. This is why…I point this out to you although it’s not directly pertinent to what I’m going to say tonight, I point this out because oftentimes the counter argument is presented that by adhering as we do to a solid confrontation with the idols of our society, when we do this we tear society apart. And this is the rejoinder that, for example, I would get if I would be asked to pray at the Tech football stadium, don’t pray some evangelistic prayer because you might upset the crowd, in other words. In other words, be neutral. And I would probably tell them, of course, I will not pray that kind of a prayer, I would either pray as unto Jesus Christ or not, period, over and out no ifs, ands, or buts. It’s either one or the other, not some O God, thank you for the traffic today and thank you that this football game is being played in cool weather and all the rest of it, and praying around with the birds and the bees and everything else and then they come down, and of course by the first two minutes of this thing everybody is tee-heeing and haw-hawing and I would too, and it ridicules the whole concept of prayer. If you want to see an idiotic prayer just go over to the Tech coliseum and all the town idiots will go out there and make their little pitch. You’ll see this happen in certain graduation ceremonies, they’ll get some minister and we’ll have the graduating class trot over to the coliseum and this dear minister of the gospel will address them, and he’ll address them on something, oh you children need ideals and you have to go through all the rest of it and you get this song and dance about we need ideals today and all the rest. Now that’s nonsense.

A man of the gospel has one message, whether it’s to a graduating class in Tech coliseum or it’s some place else, with the hotten tots in Africa, and that is that you are either a group of damned, miserable sinners or you are submitting to the will of God on earth through Jesus Christ. That’s the only message there is period, and this business of trotting a graduating class over there to get a ministerial blessing and everyone pats them on the head, you’re just sweet little things and so on, that is in effect one of the most blasphemous compromising ceremonies we have in this town. That is compromising the gospel. No minister has the right to go talk like that, he has a commission from Jesus Christ and he is to fulfill that commission whether it’s over there or anywhere else. This is what this neutrality is; people would say you can’t do this without corrupting, without destroying things, you’d tear up the whole place if you did something like that, there’d be letters to the editor from now until hell freezes over; it’d cause an upset and Christianity would get a bad name because it offended somebody and all the rest of it.

The answer is in verse 24 and following, Paul says if this doesn’t happen your society is going to fall flat on its face. In other words, denial of the Word of God will always lead to these patterns that we see today. Look at verse 30; now I don’t want to be a name caller but just look what Paul does in Romans 1:29-31, [Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, malicious; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity; whisperers, [30] Backbiters, haters of God, insolent, proud, boasters, inventers of evil things, disobedient to parents; [31] Without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful.”] he gets very nasty, and he even talks about people that are “boasters” and “inventers of evil,” now that’s just the King James term, doesn’t that sound sweet, “inventers of evil things,” it means plotters, these are plotters always going around trying to twist somebody, that’s what he’s talking about; “disobedient to parents, covenant breakers,” business men that sign contracts and break them, that’s what he’s talking about, “without natural affection, implacable and unmerciful” and so on.

He’s saying this is what results and he’s saying far from the troublemakers, Elijah and Paul and Jesus aren’t the troublemakers; it’s not troublemaking to confront people with the gospel message in a public place. We saw that this morning, when Jesus got up in the middle of the Feast of Tabernacles and said hey, come to Me, when they’re pouring water down there and chanting this water is eternal life, hold the waters of salvation, and this man has the gall to get up and say you come unto Me in thirst. Now that is arrogant, and you could say He caused a problem there. But the Bible says that wasn’t the problem; the problem is that if you let this thing go, this sleet of neutrality, if you let that thing have its logical course, this is what’s going to happen and in the end who is it that divides society? It’s the person who compromises; it’s the person who allows the deteriorative processes to continue, who never challenges them. These are the people that are responsible for breaking up society, not the person who challenges the system.

We have another passage to show that volition is either positive or negative and that’s Galatians 5:16; here is the believer; we have seen the man in the Garden of Eden, Genesis 3, we have gone to Romans 1 for the general culture, and now we will go to the Christian. This may come as a shock but in the Christian life you and as far as the gospel is concerned, anyone including myself, any believer at any given time is positive or negative but never neutral…NEVER neutral! You don’t have a moment from the time you receive Jesus Christ until the time you die or the rapture, whichever occurs first, there will never be any moment in that interval where you are neutral. You are either at one point out of fellowship or you are in fellowship, it’s either positive volition of negative volition.

Galatians 5:16, “This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. [17] For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these,” notice this, “these are contrary the one to the other, so that you cannot do the things that you would.” In other words, there are only two classes, positive and negative volition. The flesh is the old sin nature and the Holy Spirit operates through the regenerate nature, the new nature, and we have this dichotomy in the Christian life. This is why you have a struggle in the Christian life. It’s illegitimate to tell someone the moment you accept Christ everything is going to be erased, you’re going to have a sweet time together and all the rest of it. No, you will have a struggle like you never had before and this is one of the features of the Christian life. There are two dimensions of the Christian life, the absolute dimension and the relative dimension and you must distinguish these two. At any given time you are either positive volition or you’re negative volition, that’s absolute; you are either in fellowship or you’re out of fellowship; you are either worshiping some idol that you have a tendency to worship or you’re worshiping God, made known through Christ. Or, you have the relative. Here’s the absolute: at any given time you’re one or the other, but there’s a relative thing and that’s growth.

Distinguish between the two; be careful. Some concepts in the Bible have to do with growth, for example, your knowledge of the Word of God. Every time you get out of fellowship do you lose your memory? No, you can be out of fellowship and still have a knowledge of the Word of God. But the point is that knowledge is built up through time. The curve looks like this; and then you have this either or thing. Those are two separate entirely different dimensions of the Christian life. You can be out of fellowship, the way to get back in fellowship is 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” That’s the way out; the way to grow is as 1 Peter 2 says, desire ye the sincere milk of the Word as newborn babes. You know, I never appreciated that until I had children of my own. “As newborn babes desire the sincere milk of the Word,” and I memorized that as a Christian and went on, until one day I discovered, you know when these babies are hungry they let you know about it. And it’s a very strange thing, when it comes 2:00 a.m. or 3:00 a.m. or 4:00 a.m. in the morning, everybody in the house knows that baby wants something to eat. You know it, and that’s what Peter says the Christian desire should be insatiable. In other words, if you are a believer you should demand knowledge of the Word of God and keep screaming and yelling until you get it. Now what would happen to half the liberal clergy if that happened? Believers in these liberal churches that allow this apostasy to go on, what they should be doing is yelling like…how long could you stay in a house with three kids yelling the top of their heads off? You’d go batty after about an hour, you know that. What would the liberal clergyman do if he had about 100 people in his congregation yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yelling and screaming and fussing and carrying on because they didn’t get fed? He’d shoot himself or get out. Do you see the point?

In other words, there’s no neutrality even there. Peter says there’s a strong desire that you should demand feeding and yell and scream until you get it; that’s what he’s saying, “desire ye the sincere milk of the Word,” it doesn’t mean [can’t understand word], it means you yell and scream and raise hell until you get it. That’s what it’s saying; those are the instructions to believers.

So now we have considered three passages of God’s Word that have to do with the fact that volition is never neutral. Now we are going to conclude with applications. Turn to Deuteronomy 7; I want you to see how idols were treated in the ancient world. We have idols today but the difference with our idols is they are abstract. The idols of the Bible were concrete but I want you to notice something. For example, if you study Baalism you’ll see that there was just Baal but it was more than just worship of an idol. I discovered from my studies that Baal had a whole cosmology built up around himself, so when these men worshipped Baal it wasn’t that they were just falling down before the statue, it was that they were accepting components of a religious system that said that Baal was, for example, the lord of the rain, so these farmers that were having trouble with the soil, you can feel the tensions, here’s this farmer, it’s not raining, who is he going to worship, God or Baal to get the rain for his farm? And these prophets of Baal would go around and say Baal; that’s why practically every picture we have of Baal in archeology shows him holding a lightening bold riding a thunderhead, because he was evidently very closely identified with the rain process in the ancient world. So these ancient gods had cosmology surrounding them, what they did, how they brought the world into existence, and you want to think just not of the idol Baal, but of everything that surrounded that idol, a whole system.

Now in Deuteronomy 7:2ff these were the instructions to believers in that day to handle idols. “And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them,” this is people who hold to this idolatry, “when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee, thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them,” and the word “utterly destroy” is charem, and charem does not really mean to destroy in the sense of viciousness, by the way, that’s the word we get harem from, and it means to wall off, it means to take people and put them in an enclosure, that’s why a harem is called a harem, this man would get about a hundred women and he’d lock them up because he didn’t want someone playing around with his girlfriends. So that was called a harem, well, a charem from which this word comes from was actually a process of dedication, all this city and its idols to Jehovah. In other words, the army would walk into the town and there could be no looting, none whatsoever. This is vicious holy war but I want you to notice the character of holy war; it was true they killed everybody in the city, men, women and children, but they did not do it because there was personal animosity; they did it because God said take that whole city, with all the riches and the material possessions and wall it off.

And then He said, [3] “Neither shall thou make marriages with them … [4] For they will turn away thy son from following me.” Verse 5, “But thus shall ye deal with them: ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their pillars, and cut down their groves [idols], and burn their carved images with fire. [6] For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God,” in other words, there’s a sharp antithesis here, that they walk into this town, they wall it off, and they dedicate it to Jehovah and then they destroy it. They do not destroy it out of a personal vengeful motive; this is where people misread the Bible, misread it completely. They are doing this whether they like to or not; often we get into Joshua and Judges you’re going to see cases where the people did not want to destroy their enemies, they didn’t want to destroy them; in the first place they had a lot of money in there, they wanted some of the money, and they started looking at some of the girls and so on, the soldiers would walk in and say this town has some pretty sharp babes here, why do we have to kill these girls for and so on. Well, Jehovah said that whole town goes, it goes to Me, so you’re conquering My name and when you finish conquering you give it to Me; in other words, you destroy it before Me. So this was how they handle idols in that time.

But since today we don’t have these concrete idols, we can’t go out burning and smashing things, what do we do? Turn to 2 Corinthians 10:5 for the New Testament counterpart. Verse 4 to pick up the context, “(For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal,” that means they do not consist of burning and physically destroying, “but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds), [5] Casting down vain imaginations,” these are the workings of the human mind, “and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. [6] And having in readiness to revenge all disobedience,” do you see the same mental attitude persists in the Christian life as it does over in the Old Testament. The only thing is that our idols are abstract idols; our idols are principles and systems, such as organic development that has become an absolute to some people and they start interpreting history in terms of organic development, they interpret biological history in terms of organic development, they interpret economic systems in terms of economic development, they interpret all sorts of things in terms of organic development and when that happens, here’s their idol—organic development, and that idol must be ridiculed and it must be destroyed and laughed it.

Now this is why I say that the Christian must develop a divine viewpoint framework, why you have to have God at the center, Bible doctrine around, but don’t stop with Bible doctrine. Now here’s where most Christians get off the track and in fundamental circles, I don’t know why we haven’t caught on to this; you take Bible doctrine and then you move out, just like the Israelites did, and conquer. It just doesn’t mean winning individuals souls to Christ because if you don’t conquer the ideas what good does it do to conquer the individuals, because if you win someone to Christ and you haven’t challenged the ideas you’ve opened the door of his heart and sooner or later, two weeks later, after he’s become a Christian, he’s swallowed the whole… hook, line and sinker of human viewpoint again. You’ve got to challenge science, history, philosophy, art, music, literature, all these things in the culture have to be attacked, systematically and academically and carefully and honestly, probing for areas where idolatry has crept in to these studies. Now that takes courage and that takes something that fundamentalism has failed to do in our time with the result that we are progressively deteriorating in our ability to communicate the gospel to our culture, because we haven’t done our homework and we haven’t moved out.

Those of you who are training in these fields, music and so on, don’t you ever sacrifice your training for some sob story that you’re not in fulltime Christian service. You are in fulltime Christian service; if you’re in art, if you’re in music, that is your fulltime Christian service and you’d better be a soldier out in that area. If you’re in the area of art you ought to understand your field to the best of your knowledge and be able to express Bible doctrine in and through your art and to be able to refute the idolatry that the other artists are promoting in that area. If you are on the job in some area, if you are a historian you ought to be able to take the facts of history and relate them to the biblical framework and to point out and begin to ridicule idols of your colleagues and your fellow historians in your field. That is your Christian ministry to do this, and that’s what it means, “bringing every thought unto the captivity of Christ.” You will find in the process men will be won to Christ, don’t worry about the evangelism, that will be there; you will win because all of a sudden you’re going to be hitting and rubbing shoulders with people who have never heard the gospel in our day; the artists, the intellectuals and so on probably never in this country have had a clear hearing of the Word of God. And you will find when you begin to move out in these fields all of a sudden you’re going to come into conflict with people and you are going to have opportunities to witness that you never dreamed possible. You’ll have opportunities to touch people that haven’t been touched in fifty years in this country because you are an aggressive soldier for Christ who recognizes that volition is either positive or negative, no neutrality. And that means that no matter what area of life you’re in there never is neutrality…never is there neutrality.

An illustration of this might be the Christian teacher who says I will teach my children and I will go to school and I will learn all the Bible but when it comes to the classroom, the then in effect what I’m going to do is just teach what the school tells me to teach and just hand it right out, in other words, it’d be like a doctor who sterilizes himself, goes through all the careful procedures of operating, washes his hands, gets the sterilized gloves on, and then hand poison to his patients. Now that makes about as much sense. Well this is what we have Christians doing today, fundamentalists who are studying to be Christian teachers in various public school systems and they do not want to have the developed a divine viewpoint framework so they’re just going to teach the kids socialism and communism and teach whatever happens to come along, the history book gives the Marxist interpretation or something like that and they’ll just teach it right on, never challenge it and go right on with the class, teaching poisoning, well, I’ve done my job, fed the people for the day as they choke to death on their poison. That’s what’s happening because we have failed to grasp the divine viewpoint framework. Every area of life is either positive or negative; you are for Christ or you are against Him, in every area, in every activity.

To give a concluding example of what happens on the national scene, and this is not made clear, I’d like to refer to a Newsweek article, July 20, 1970 on Billy Graham. Billy Graham has been greatly used of God in this country. But one feature of Billy Graham’s ministry that has bothered many of us in the fundamentalist areas is the fact that time and time again Billy will allow liberals to sit on the platform, liberals to design his policy and oftentimes tailor his evangelistic thrust so as not to offend liberal hierarchy in various cities where he is preaching. Sometimes he does not do this so do not interpret my remarks as a blanket condemnation of Billy Graham. I respect Billy Graham very deeply as an individual person and I think that God has used his ministry in many ways. But I’m pointing at this, not to say anything against Billy Graham as a person but to show you what happens when you do not take an aggressive thrust against the idols of our society.

This Newsweek article was one of the fairest articles I’ve ever read; I expected in picking it up to read five or six pages of the usual bilge that you get in Time Magazine and Life when it comes to Christianity, putting it down the drain, distorting it and so on. Yet as I read this article carefully I was convinced that the writer either was a Christian or he knew a lot about Christianity. He knew what the words “born again” meant, he knew various terminologies and he knew what the issues were, and as I quote some of what he said you will see that this man had understanding.

The article begins with a quote from none other than John Rousseau, the man who I have previously quoted as saying “the voice of the people is the voice of God.” It starts out with this; this is a quotation from Rousseau, “There is therefore a purely civil profession of faith of which the sovereign should fix the articles, not exactly as religious dogmas but as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful servant.” In other words, Rousseau is saying there should be a national faith to draw the nation together; that’s true, there has to be. Rousseau is very perceptive in this and Deuteronomy was saying this, you can’t have real national unity unless it’s on a religious base. And Rousseau suggested, therefore, “a purely civil profession of faith which the sovereign should fix the articles,” now who’s the sovereign in democracy? The people. So you have the majority vote and develop a civil faith, “as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful servant.”

And then the first line of the article reads this, after this quotation from Rousseau: “On the 4^th of July, 1970, evangelist Billy Graham came as close as anyone has to adopting Rousseau’s idea of the civil religion to the American experience.” That’s a very perceptive remark because at this point he, although I’m sure Billy Graham, if you had listened to him carefully, was not making the confusion to himself; I’m sure Billy himself is not doing this, but his remarks come filtering through. In other words, because of the way he preaches the message gets reinterpreted by the time it gets here. Now I don’t blame him for that, I have the same thing happen all the time. If you deal with the public at large you can say two and two is four and there’ll be a headline tomorrow that says two plus two is five, and so you wonder, good night, are we hearing the same person of what? This is why it’s always good to have your messages taped; you can tell what you said. Anyway, the point was that Billy’s message by his participation on the national day or whatever it was that they had there on the 4^th of July was that this was going to be a national faith a least common denominator faith, faith in America and so on.

Now the article concluded and I quote this because I want you to see the man is not ridiculing Billy Graham but he’s pointing to something, and he’s not doing it in hatred of Billy Graham, he’s just pointing out, Billy watch out, watch out, watch out what you’re doing. The article concludes with this statement: “Graham’s foremost concern remains, of course, to gain personal decisions for Jesus Christ,” he clearly perceived that, “Graham’s foremost concern remains, of course, to gain personal decisions for Jesus Christ, but in his larger effort to justify the ways of God and government he has fashioned a common denominator faith which hues almost doctrine for doctrine to the positive dogmas of Rousseau outlined for his civil religion 208 years ago, (quote) ‘the existence of a mighty intelligent and beneficent deity possessed of foresight and providence, the likes to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social contract and the social laws.”

And of course the point here again, he is not saying that Graham is wrong in preaching the gospel. What he’s saying is that Graham doesn’t go far enough; what he should have done was laid bare the fact that you cannot be neutral on a non-Christian base and in the contents of this article he quoted a Mormon millionaire who had personally financed most of this thing and the millionaire said why, Billy Graham is a man for all religion, he’s a non-controversialist. Now how could he make a statement like that? If a man had been consistently saying the positives and the negatives like Paul in Romans 1, that you are either for Christ or you’re against Him, and making it clear…it may be that you can’t make it clear, that could also be a possibility today, that no matter how clear you are the media will misinterpret; that may be, but whatever it is, the fact of the matter is that in this situation we have a clear instance of a man who is trying to communicate the gospel but it turns out that it’s being received wrong in the public at large.

And this, I would suggest, is the explanation for why it is that out of the Graham revivals we have not seen a back-to-the-Bible correlative movement as we have in past times of history where great evangelistic thrusts have been correlated with the resurgence of Bible teaching among the major denominations and yet in his ministry this has not happened. Again, not because of him and his personal sincerity; this is not saying anything against his personal sincerity. I respect him very deeply as a person; I’m just pointing to the fact that in practice what happens because of the failure to include what Paul does in Romans 1 that the gospel must appeal to the people, not as people who are neutral and you can choose one way or the other, but these people are deep rebels against God and the gospel has a negative and a positive side and both have to be in balance. If you just give the positive side you never blast out that latent sinful rebellion and the people in the culture.

That’s what Paul meant in Romans 1. He said you people know the truth and you’re rebelling against it. With our heads bowed….