FORGET NONE OF HIS BENEFITS, volume 8, number 41, October 8, 2009
. . . he became the father of a son in his own likeness, according to his own image, and named him Seth, Genesis 5:3.
How We Got Here
By 1700 Puritan America was in retreat. The great preachers and leaders of early New England—men like John Winthrop, John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, Increase Mather, and Cotton Mather—were either dead or very old and their Calvinism was quickly fading. The Scottish Enlightenment—led by men such as Adam Smith, David Hume, Hugh Blair, and William Robertson—cast doubt on the authority of Scripture, causing people in America and the British Isles to look elsewhere for answers. But God brought forth two sons of Connecticut, Jonathan Edwards and David Brainerd, along with England ’s George Whitefield, to blaze a trail of revival that profoundly impacted Colonial America. However by the time of the Revolutionary War in 1775 America was submerged in Deism, a religion that believed in God but denied His immanence, His activity in the world. This stripped Christianity of power and vitality. But then God gave us more men from Connecticut —Lyman Beecher, Asahel Nettleton, James Brainerd Taylor (a maternal cousin, four times removed from the great missionary David Brainerd), and Charles Finney—whom He used powerfully in preaching during the second Great Awakening. By the 1850’s the French Enlightenment had wrought severe damage to American Christianity, especially in the north, and unbelief was rampant. However a layman named Jeremiah Lanphier began a noon day prayer meeting on Wall Street in New York which quickly attracted thousands of businessmen. It spread to Boston, New York, Philadelphia , and Charleston to name only a few places. The fires of revival roared through the armies of the Confederacy. Thousands were born again during this third Great Awakening. But then Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1858) caught on and people again jettisoned Scripture in favor of human reason. Gross injustice—first in slavery and then in southern Reconstruction, not to mention the robber barons of the “Gilded Age”—ruled the day, causing a great divide between the rich and poor. But in 1906, in response to the Welsh Revival of 1904, Christians began to seek God again for the outpouring of His Spirit; and He gave us a black preacher named William Seymour, blind in one eye, his face terribly disfigured from small pox. The Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles was the result, the beginning of the modern Pentecostal movement. This was the fourth Great Awakening in our country. With the exception of a brief revival at Asbury College and Wheaton College in the early 1970’s and thousands entering the kingdom from the drug culture of the late 1960’s, early 1970’s, no true revival has happened since in our country.
I don’t need to mention details of our problems today. You know them well—the threat of Israel’s annihilation by Iran ’s nuclear capability, the peril of economic destruction through hyper inflation in the U.S. , and the deterioration of race relations, to name only a few. The question is—how did we get here? The answer is found in the text mentioned above. Genesis 5:1-5 gives details about the line of Adam, saying that his seed was made in his likeness. We know from Romans 5:12ff, as well as from Psalm 51:5, that Adam’s sin was imputed to the entire human race. He was our representative, our federal head. His sin was handed down to every one who is born into this world. In other words, all people are born with a sinful nature and they develop their own style of sinning. This doctrine is foundational and drives everything in our world. A failure to realize it and deal with it Biblically brings disastrous results to any culture. Winthrop, Cotton, Hooker, Edwards, Brainerd, Nettleton, and Taylor believed it and preached it. Many within American Christianity hated the doctrine and sought to mitigate its influence. First it was through Old Light men like Charles Chauncey [1] of the mid eighteenth century. Then it came through Nathanael Taylor of the New Divinity of New Haven which gave us New School Presbyterianism and the new measures of Charles Finney.[2] In every case theologians and pastors moved away from the “doom and gloom” of Calvinistic emphasis on the sinfulness of sin, original sin, the total depravity of man. This led eventually to a higher view of man that consequently robbed the person and work of Christ of its glory. The atonement of Christ began to be viewed, not as a propitiating sacrifice that removed the wrath of God, but as a demonstration of God’s love, something we were encouraged to emulate. The natural propensity of unregenerate man is to exalt himself and debase Christ. Preaching the new birth has characterized each revival and the loss of it has proven revival’s demise, bringing spiritual declension.
What is the remedy for our country? I will continue my thoughts on this in greater detail in my next devotional, but I can at least end this one with a few thoughts concerning the remedy. We must preach Christ crucified. Paul (1 Corinthians 2:1-5) tells the Corinthians that he determined to know nothing among them except Christ and Him crucified. What does this mean? To preach means to proclaim or herald, as the old town crier, the exact words of the king. The herald was to say only what the king wanted his subjects to know. He had no license to put his own spin on the king’s words. Another Greek word, from which we get our word evangelism, means to speak a good message. This is what the Christian diaspora in Acts 8:4 was doing, going about spreading the good news of Jesus. To preach Christ means we tell of His person and work, of His two natures, His three-fold office, His humiliation and exaltation, His propitiating, expiating, reconciling death.[3] To preach Christ crucified means we stress to Christian and non-Christian alike that their only hope of forgiveness is through repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus. To the non-Christian we must say that he has a corrupt heart, a bad life, and a bad record, that he is under the wrath of God and must flee to Christ to be saved. There is no other remedy. And to the believer who still battles indwelling sin and the influences of the old man (Romans 6:1-7) we must tell him to repent daily, to acknowledge his sin, to never assume he is incapable of great evil, to urge him to guard his own heart, to remain accountable to other brothers and sisters who will ask him the “hard questions”, to run daily to Jesus.
I visited a dying man recently in a Hartford hospital. He had liver failure due to alcoholism. When I got to him he was near death. He was still conscious but too weak to speak. I said to him, “You don’t need to say anything. Just listen and nod your head if you understand me.” I proceeded to tell him that though I know nothing about him, I am sure he is a sinner in great rebellion against God, just like everyone. I said that he may think his life an utter waste, that he has no hope. I told him that he need not die in his sins, that he could be forgiven, that he had a corrupt, rebellious heart, bad life, and was under God’s judgment. But then I told him about Jesus. I put my hand on his head and softly preached Jesus to him, offering him the gift of eternal life and forgiveness of his sins, urging him to call upon Jesus. I then prayed for him. I asked if he understood what I was saying. He nodded, “Yes.” Was he saved? I don’t know. I pray he was. This is the only message that matters, the only one that makes sense in our sinful, rebellious, godless world. May God move in our hearts, convincing us of it, bringing us to repentance for failing to proclaim it!
[1] A schism developed between Old Side Presbyterians and Congregationalists like Charles Chauncey of Boston and New Side men like William Tennent and Jonathan Edwards. The former rejected revival, holding to a formal Calvinism while the latter sought an experiential Calvinism that stressed the new birth.
[2] Taylor, a Yale professor of Theology denied original sin, election, regeneration, and propitiation. See An Uncommon Christian, written by Francis Kyle III, page 40-41.
[3] Propitiation- to remove the wrath of God by Christ’s blood shed at Calvary (Romans 3:24ff). Expiation- to wash away the guilt and shame of our sin by His death (Ephesians 1:7).Reconciliation- the enmity God has toward us is removed by Christ’s death. (Colossians 1:15ff).
FORGET NONE OF HIS BENEFITS is a weekly devotional by Reverend Al Baker, pastor of Christ Community Presbyterian Church in West Hartford, Connecticut.
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