Month: May 2015 (Page 2 of 2)

73

May 7, 2015 / Allan Babcock

Yesterday (Wednesday) I had the highest number of users on my blog—73! That seems kind of scrawny to “the professionals”, but to me—well, praise the Lord.

My “highs” to that point had been 66 last Monday and 59 on March 22 and 30.

I’m telling you this, not to brag about myself, but to boast in the Lord. When disability drove me to retire from pastoring March 31, 2014, I didn’t know what I would do with myself. How about blogging? Sounded reasonable (brain surgeon and auto mechanic were equally out of the question!), especially since I’ve wanted to write for decades and the only thing I knew after 44 years of pastoring was the Bible.

So a couple weeks before retirement, I began. I quickly learned that producing a blog-post that said something significant in typical blog-space was as big a challenge as finishing a sermon by noon. It took much longer than I’d expected. I still can’t write a blog a day.

But what’s significant about blogging for me is the opportunity it gives me to still “preach” God’s Word. That was my life for 44 years. And now our Father in his infinite goodness has allowed me to continue.

At the start I wondered, “Who’s gonna read what I write?” While there’s value in writing to clarify one’s thinking, it doesn’t mean a whole lot if no one else “clicks” in. For the first months (many) I struggled to get out of the single digits. Now 73! And over the last 90 days, I’ve had almost 300 “uses” from Russia. I don’t know what that means, unless the Holy Spirit is working on Putin’s heart . . .

Anyway, this really isn’t about me. It’s a testimony to God’s grace that he’s still using me in some small way for his purposes. I used to say that I hoped to die preaching in the pulpit. Now I say that I hope to die sitting at my computer working on theoldpreacher.com.

Thank you for reading. And if you have a friend who will sign up for money (not too much now), let me know. Seriously, it would be great if you would spread the word—which I pray will always be God’s for his glory.

Cut the “Body” from the Bible?

May 6, 2015 / Allan Babcock

Ready to “scissors-surgery” 1 Corinthians 12? Previous posts (“Gifts to Love” and “When the Perfect Comes”) hopefully make us hesitate. But, if you’re still a cessationist (one who believes the gifts of the Spirit ended with the apostles) you have no other choice. Cut the Body of Christ from 1 Corinthians 12!

But holster your scissors for a bit there, partner, and get comfy. We’re going to take a round-about route to answer why cessationism logically compels cutting.

CONTEXT. Paul’s subject in chapter 12 is spiritual gifts—not a full theology of the gifts, though. Paul wrote to address the Corinthians’ abuse of one gift—speaking in tongues. To them that gift was the supreme sign of “spirituality.” In chapter 12 Paul lays the theological groundwork for correcting their error.

CONFESSIONAL CONTENT: JESUS IS LORD (12:1-3). (For the sake of space, I can quote only portions of the text throughout. Reading it all would be helpful.) Here’s the last clause of this paragraph: ” . . . no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit” (12:3b). “Jesus is Lord!”—that was the early church’s supreme confession of faith. It was also the test to determine if a person was speaking “by the Spirit” or some other spirit. Because only the Holy Spirit can transform a self-allegiant heart to confess absolute allegiance to Jesus. Therefore, any speaking that demeans or detracts from the supremacy of Jesus is not of the Spirit.

UNITY WITH DIVERSITY IN THE BODY OF CHRIST (12:4-11). “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone” (12:4-6). God is three persons in one person. In this paragraph Paul calls God “Spirit,” Lord” and “God.” In God there is diversity (three Persons) in unity (one Person). So there is unity with diversity in God. Accordingly, there is unity (the church is one Body) with diversity of gifts. (“Gifts”, “service”, and “activities” are nuanced ways of referring to the Spirit’s gifts or “manifestations”.) Therefore, to elevate one gift as the sign of “spirituality” contradicts both the nature of the gifts in the Body of Christ and the Triune God himself. Furthermore, each “manifestation” (a “going public”) of the Spirit is “for the common good” (12:7)—that is, for the whole Body of Christ.

Paul lists (representative not exhaustive) the Spirit’s manifestations or gifts—the utterance of wisdom, the utterance of knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, working of miracles, prophecy, the ability to distinguish between spirits, various kinds of tongues, the interpretation of tongues (12:8-10). Who gets what? That’s up to the Spirit. “All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit (unity of source with diversity of manifestation), who apportions to each one individually as he wills” (12:11).

THE HUMAN BODY AND THE BODY OF CHRIST (12:12,13). “For just as the (human) body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.” The human body is “one” (a single unit made up of many members). So the Body of Christ (the church) is “one” (a single unit made up of many members). What makes the diverse church “one Body”? All members were baptized “in one Spirit” and “were made to drink of one Spirit.” We ask, “Are you a believer?” For Paul, the question was, “Do you have the Spirit?” To him, the Christian life begins with and is marked by the transforming work of the Holy Spirit—a work evidenced one way by the gifts of the Spirit.

AN ANALOGY: THE HUMAN BODY (12:14-26). ” . . . the (human) body does not consist of one member but of many” (12:14). The foot is as much a part of the body as a hand; the ear belongs as much as the eye. “God arranged the members in the (human) body, each one of them, as he chose” (12:19). Many parts, one body (12:20) according to the Creator’s design. Furthermore, each part is needed—eye, hand, head, feet, etc. The “parts-connection” is so tight, in fact, that when our stomach is sick, we often say, “I’m sick” or we actually feel sick all over (12:21-26).

THE BODY OF CHRIST (12:27-31). Paul moves from analogy (the human body) to reality: “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (12:27). But don’t miss who these members are and what they have been equipped with: “And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, helping, administrating, and various kinds of tongues” (12:28). In the one Body of Christ God has established a diversity of gifts.

CONCLUSIONS (finally!). If cessationists are correct, if the gifts of the Spirit ended with the death of the apostles or the close of the biblical canon . . .

the very nature of the Body of Christ as Paul describes it here has died too.
This is because the gifts of the Spirit empower individual members of the body to serve as a means of good for the body.
If the Spirit no longer manifests himself by gifts through the members, the means of the members’ ministry to one another as the body no longer exists.
If continuationism is biblical, the cessationist church is missing out on a veritable cornucopia of the Spirit’s gifts for the church’s good.

So which will it be? Cut 1 Corinthians 12 from our Bibles? If you believe the Spirit’s gifts are gone with the apostles, you have no choice. Logically you have to don your surgical gown and remove the Body of Christ as Paul describes it. Or you can review the evidence in these blog postings, put your scissors back in the desk, take the risk, and “Pursue love, and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy” (14:1).

(One more thing: For whatever it’s worth, I doubt God would look kindly on anybody cutting out any part of his Word.)

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“When the Perfect Comes”

May 4, 2015 / Allan Babcock

Before we take scissors to 1 Corinthians 12, let’s take a closer look at “the Perfect” in 1 Corinthians 13. Because this is the text that reveals when the gifts of the Spirit will end.

“Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease, as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known (13:8-12).”

WHY THIS MATTERS. We’re not splitting theological hairs. The gifts of the Spirit are from God and good for building up the church—that’s us together (1 Corinthians12:7; 14:12). So if we believe spiritual gifts have ceased but they haven’t, our church is missing some of God’s good for us. On the other hand, if we believe they haven’t but they have, we’re being deceived by “gifts” not of God.

THE NATURE OF THE GIFTS. They are “partial.” ” . . . we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes the partial will pass away” (13:9,10). The Greek meros essentially means “a part as distinct from the whole.” Paul uses it in 12:27—“Now you are the body of Christ and individually (meros) members of it.” The individual isn’t the whole body; but each individual is part of the whole body. So the Spirit’s gifts are “partial” in this sense: each spiritual gift is just part of what will soon be the completed whole (“the perfect”). Teliown means perfect in the sense of “complete” or “total.” So we can paraphrase: “For now we know and prophesy incompletely, but when the complete comes the incomplete will pass away.”

The gifts will also “pass away/cease”. The Greek word (pauontie) translated here “cease” simply means “stop”. Luke used it of Jesus: “And when he had finished speaking . . . ” (Luke 5:4). ” . . . as for tongues they will stop.” The Greek word (katargeo) is an eschatological (last days) word. Paul used it of the wisdom and rulers of this age “who are doomed to pass away” (2:6). He doesn’t mean that these rulers will merely die, but that this present age which defines them and their wisdom will pass away. That will happen, of course, when the eternal age is consummated at Christ’s coming. He uses katargeo again in 1 Corinthians 15:24-26 where it’s translated “destroying” and “destroyed.” ‘ Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power . . . The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” Here Paul uses the word of the very end of the end times. So in 13:8—“As for prophecies they will pass away”—“pass away” (katargeo) at least implies end times

THE STRUCTURE OF THE PASSAGE. Here’s the passage again . . .

Notice Paul contrasts love with gifts. Love “never ends” but the gifts (represented here by prophecies, tongues and knowledge will “pass away/cease.” He makes that contrast, not to disparage spiritual gifts, but to show the Corinthians shouldn’t be making spiritual gifts (especially tongues) the sign of spirituality. They should be esteeming love as the sign—because the gifts will pass away but love will never end.

After explaining love never ends but spiritual gifts will pass away, Paul gives two reasons (both beginning with the word “For”) and one illustration to support that statement. First reason why spiritual gifts will pass away: they are partial and will pass away when the perfect comes.

One illustration: there is a time for childhood and childish ways and there is a time for adulthood when childish ways are given up. (I don’t think Paul means God’s good spiritual gifts are “childish.” Rather he simply uses childhood into adulthood as a picture of passing away of spiritual gifts for the perfect.)

Second reason why spiritual gifts will pass away: now our knowledge is “partial”, like seeing “dimly” in a mirror (ancient Corinth was famous as the producer of fine bronze mirrors), but when the perfect comes our knowledge will be full. Not like looking face to bronze mirror, but face to face. Gifts won’t be needed to “know” the Lord any longer, because we will see him up close and personal!

The way Paul structured this passage argues strongly for only one interpretation of “the perfect.”

THE PERFECT. On a blog called “The Cripplegate”, Nathan Busenitz (Professor of Theology at The Master’s Seminary), claims the biblical interpreter can believe “the perfect” is love or the completed Scripture canon or the mature church or the believer’s entrance into Christ’s presence at death or the return of Christ or the eternal state and still remain a cessationist. Furthermore, he goes on to say, “Anthony Thiselton (Church of England theologian and author) notes in his commentary on this passage: ‘The one important point to make here is that few or none of the serious ‘cessationist’ arguments depends on a specific exegesis of 1 Cor 13:8–11

. . . . These verses should not be used as a polemic (argument of support) for either side in this debate’ (NIGTC, pp. 1063–64)”. What? My mouth is dropping. How can someone be a cessationist if he believes “the perfect” refers to the return of Christ? Why should 1 Corinthians 13:8-12 not be used to support continuationism?

Pardon me if I respectfully reject Busenitz’s and Thiselton’s views. “The perfect” is clearly the end of this present age when Christ returns. When “the perfect” comes the Spirit’s gifts will pass away. Until then they continue as they have from the outpouring of the Spirit in Acts 2. I am a continuationist and will be until someone convinces me differently from Scripture (not from church history nor from a list of cessationist giants of the faith).

But before we leave our scissors in the drawer and save 1 Corinthians12 in our Bibles, we have one more bit of evidence to consider. To that we’ll turn next time . . .