THE PUNDIT'S FOLLY

This afternoon I read Dr. Sinclair Ferguson's 1995 book The Pundit's Folly: Chronicles of an Empty Life. The book is an exposition of Ecclesiastes. It is very good, stimulating and edifying.

Ferguson calls the author of Ecclesiastes the Pundit (i.e. a learned man who considers himself an authority). The Pundit's quest is twofold: (1) What is the nature of life under the sun? and (2) What is the meaning of life under the sun? He looks to education, pleasure, work, and success for answers but time after time he comes up short, declaring that everything is meaninglessness and foolishness. Why does he reach these conclusions? Ferguson writes:

The Pundit's error was to begin from the wrong starting point. All his thinking presupposed that his spiritual condition was normal. But the truth is that we are all spiritually abnormal; we are diseased, broken and twisted (42).

In other words, the Pundit initially failed to take into account the problem of sin. To look for the nature and meaning of life without accounting for sin is the height of folly. Any answers we may derive must be, by definition, meaningless, since they fail to recognize the triune God who is the primary referent upon which nature (i.e. ontology) and meaning (i.e. epistemology, axiology) are derived.

So what is the final message of the Pundit? Well, eventually he recognizes his error. Ferguson writes:

Life is sick; we are sick. This is the Pundit's message. You need an emetic. Painful and embarrassing though it may be, you need to vomit out of your soul everything that is destroying your life and will eventually lead you to an endless emptiness. The fear of God is the medicine you need (72).

And what is the fear of God?

The fear of God in some ways defies our attempts at definition, because it is really another way of saying 'knowing God'. It is a heart-felt love for him because of who he is and what he has done; a sense of being in his majestic presence. It is a thrilling awareness that we have this greatest of all privileges, mingled with the realisation that now the only thing that really matters is his opinion. To have the assurance of his smile is everything; to feel that he frowns on what we do is desolation. To fear God is to be sensitive to both his greatness and his graciousness. It is to know him and to love him wholeheartedly and unreservedly.

To fear God, to trust God, to love God, and to know God--these are all really one and the same thing. In fact, the fear of God about which the Pundit speaks arises from the discovery of God's love for us in our sin and weakness. It is the sense of awe that results from the discovery that he knows me through and through, means to destroy all that is sinful in me, and yet does so because he loves me with an intensely faithful love. That stretches my mind and emotions to their limit (74).

This fear, the fear of God, is what transforms life from an endless puzzle of foolishness and tragedy into a meaningful and purposeful act of worship.

Without him, life is at best a puzzle, at worst a tragedy; this is not a self-contained 'user friendly' universe. With him we learn that even when his immediate purposes are hidden from us his ways are perfect (for we do not always, nor do we ever fully, understand his plans). We also learn this: even though we will never know everything about this world, we do know something about everything: God is its Creator, and he is our heavenly Father (77).

The Pundit says it this way: "Fear God and keep his commandments [IN THAT ORDER], for this is the whole duty of man."

MISCELLANIES 2 and ATTEMPTED AXIOM: On Ethics

This morning I taught from Revelation 1. John has a vision of "one like the son of man" alluding to Daniel 7. This one like the son of man is the resurrected and ascended Jesus Christ. The text says he was

clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white like wool, as white as snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength.

The Lord Jesus is presented here as the final judge of the world, with all power and authority. And how does John respond?

When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his hand on me, saying, "Fear not I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades."

John responds to Jesus with reverent, repentant worship. Although he knows that the only thing that makes him acceptable before God is the righteousness of Christ imputed to him by faith, a righteousness that is complete, which he can neither add to nor subtract from, he still responds to Christ with full submission.

Here's a question: Why would he do that? Why not just "be himself" (whatever that means). Why not just shake Jesus' hand, pat him on the back, and call him a righteous dude? Or why not take a moment to decide how he might use his creative abilities in the unique way God has gifted him in order to worship him in a fresh new way? All of these questions really boil down to one question: Why should Christians who are no longer condemned by the law (speaking from the sense of the ordo salutis) be concerned with obedience to it? Or, in other words, if my works of obedience or disobedience do not ultimately add to or subtract from my acceptability before God, why should I obey?

Answer:

There are three possible motivations for any moral decision:

1. To gain what I don't have.
2. To keep what I might lose.
3. Love of true excellence.

The reason Christians should obey God's law is because they love its excellence, which is another way of saying they love his excellence, since the law reflects his character. And we come to behold God as excellent, and thus the law as an expression of God's love, by grace through faith in the person and work of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4:6).

When Christians obey to either gain what they don't have or keep what they might lose, they are operating from the basis of legalism. When Christians disobey because their obedience doesn't add to their acceptability before God, they are operating from the basis of licentiousness, which is really just evidence that they love something other than God and his law as more excellent. When Christians obey because they have seen God as truly excellent in the person and work of Jesus Christ (i.e. the gospel), then they operate from the basis of love.

Therefore we may derive this ethical axiom:

Obedience that is not based on the love of God is disobedience.

Or . . .

The one thing that separates Christian obedience from legalism is the love of God demonstrated, received, and reciprocated according to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

THE WESTMINSTER CONFESSION INTO THE 21ST CENTURY

I just finished the first volume of The Westminster Confession of Faith into the 21st Century, ed. Ligon Duncan. It is excellent. I plan to finish the other two volumes by year's end. Students of the Confession should be exceedingly thankful for such quality work! Dr. Richard Gaffin's essay "Westminster and the Sabbath," Dr. Morton Smith's essay "Theology of the Larger Catechism," and Dr. Michael Horton's essay "Finney's Attacks on the Westminster Confession" should be required reading for every elder in the Presbyterian and Reformed tradition.

Here's an excerpt from the Rev. Dr. David W. Hall's essay "The History of Westminster Assembly Commemorations" which was particularly motivating to me, emphasizing the light and heat of the Puritan-Reformed tradition:

Of the Confession of Faith as an accurate and vital compilation of Christian truth, Warfield contended, that as such, the Westminster Confession of Faith could not in its influence:

lack in spiritual quality. It is the product of intellect working only under the impulse of the heart, and must be a monument of the religious life. This is true of all the great creedal statements, and preeminently true of the Westminster Standards. Their authors were men of learning and philosophic grasp; but above all piety. Their interest was not in speculative construction, but in the protection of their flocks from error . . . . In proportion as our own religious life flows in a deep and broad stream, in that proportion will we find spiritual delight in the Westminster Standards.

Benjamin Warfield challenged his contemporaries with this: ". . . the nicety of its [Westminster Confession] balance in conceiving and the precision of its language in stating truth, will seem to us scholastic only in proportion as our religious life is less developed than theirs." When Warfield saw others attempting to lessen the influence of the Confession of Faith and lower its standard, he felt "an inexpressible grief [to see the Church] spending its energies in a vain attempt to lower its testimony to suit the ever changing sentiment of the world about it" (13).

CALVIN AND EDWARDS ON "WORKS OF THE LAW"

Here

ATTEMPTED AXIOM: On the Kingdom of Heaven and Anarchy

If rules impede relationships, then the kingdom of heaven must be anarchy.

CALLING THE SABBATH A DELIGHT

Here is a thought-provoking post by Jared Nelson and a line that was particularly well said:

It's not whether you have a long list of fun stuff you are sure not to do that day, but what takes priority?

This gets to the heart of the issue of resting from worldly recreations on the Sabbath, which is a doctrine to which many ministers take exception within my denomination, the PCA. Our standard confession, the Westminster Confession of Faith, reads:

This Sabbath is to be kept holy unto the Lord when men, after a due preparing of their hearts, and ordering of their common affairs beforehand, do not only observe an holy rest all the day from their own works, words, and thoughts about their wordly employments and recreations, but also are taken up the whole time in the public and private exercises of His worship, and in the duties of necessity and mercy (21.8).

Last year I was taught that the framers of the Confession misinterpreted Isa. 58:13-14 (i.e. ceasing "from doing thy pleasure"), leading to the doctrine of resting from worldly recreations on the Sabbath. In other words, the divines interpreted the word "pleasure" as "recreation;" and therefore taught resting from recreation on the Sabbath. The assumption was that this was the sole basis for their doctrine.

As I've thought through this issue lately, I don't think that's true. I think the confessional doctrine is the result of a robust biblical theology of the moral law. It is a deduction based on the understanding that the fourth commandment requires something of us. In other words, the commandment is not first "Thou shalt not" but "Thou shalt." So the question should not primarily be, "What shouldn't we be doing on the Sabbath?" but "What should we be doing on the Sabbath?" The framers answered that question with one word: worship. The Sabbath is a time set apart (i.e. holy) and blessed by God so that his creatures may have a whole day to be focused in worship to him, both public and private. Therefore, since one cannot engage in worship while engaging in worldly recreations, then one should rest from worldly recreations in order to be engaging in worship. This is why Question 99 of the Larger Catechism references Isa. 58:13-14 when it explains this aspect of how we are to rightly understand the Ten Commandments: "That as, where a duty is commanded, the contrary sin is forbidden . . ." It seems that the divines' interpretation of Isa. 58:13 was that we should cease from doing anything other than worship (i.e. whatever we please) on the Sabbath, works of necessity and mercy excepted.

Therefore, it is the requirement of the fourth commandment that leads to the doctrine of resting from worldly recreations (and employments), not a misinterpretation of the word "pleasure" in Isa. 58:13.

A possible objection is this: But shouldn't we use all our time in a way that glorifies God (e.g. 1 Cor. 10:31)? Shouldn't all our time be worship to God? Answer: Yes, of course! But we confess that Scripture teaches a distinction between glorifying God in the totality of the way we live our lives, a kind of worship to be sure, and religious worship, properly speaking. This is why WCF 21.7 teaches "that, in general, a due proportion of time be set apart for the worship of God." If there is no distinction between glorifying God in the totality of the way we live our lives (i.e. all our time) and religious worship, then the idea of setting apart a time for worship is meaningless. Therefore the objection fails.