Year: 2007

For God so loved …

Tony Reinke spurgeon

tsslogo.jpgHello TSS readers! A very lengthy Thanksgiving weekend comes to a close today as my family and I travel home. It was a wonderful time with friends and family back in Nebraska.

I want to bring to your attention a recent and ongoing debate over a critical question — Why does God act? I want to look at this debate in fuller detail (especially the way Jonathan Edwards develops this theme).

For now, here is the recent debate over whether it’s right to say that God acts for His own glory or not. It’s all worth reading …

Ben Witherington (11.20.07) “Let me be clear that of course the Bible says it is our obligation to love, praise, and worship God, but this is a very different matter from the suggestion that God worships himself, is deeply worried about whether he has enough glory or not, and his deepest motivation for doing anything on earth is so that he can up his own glory quotient, or magnify and praise himself.”

Denny Burk responds (11.21.07)

John Piper responds (11.24.07)

Sam Storms responds (11.26.07)

The Church as the Mother of the Faithful

Tony Reinke Church methodology, John Calvin

How many Protestant movements active within America would define the purpose of the Church in these words?

“I shall start, then, with the church, into whose bosom God is pleased to gather his sons, not only that they may be nourished by her help and ministry as long as they are infants and children, but also that they may be guided by her motherly care until they mature and at last reach the goal of faith.”

— John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4.1.1

Introduction to Systematic Theology by Cornelius Van Til

Tony Reinke BR > P&R, Systematic theology, Van Til

Book announcement

“Cornelius Van Til’s Introduction to Systematic Theology is one of his two or three most important books, certainly a must-read for anyone who is trying to understand Van Til. And it is important for Christians to understand Van Til today, as never before. He challenges Christians to think in a distinctively biblical way. That biblical way opposes and challenges all religions and secular philosophies, all ideologies that place the ultimate source of truth and value in human beings rather than in God.” – John Frame

Download the table of contents and intro as PDF here.

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Tozer on the Gentleness of God

Tony Reinke A.W. Tozer, Grace

tss-pop-can-large.jpgA.W. Tozer writing on Psalm 18:35 (“your gentleness made me great”):

“God is easy to live with. Satan’s first attack upon the human race was his sly effort to destroy Eve’s confidence in the kindness of God. Unfortunately for her and for us he succeeded too well. From that day, men have had a false conception of God, and it is exactly this that has cut out from under them the ground of righteousness and driven them to reckless and destructive living.

Nothing twists and deforms the soul more than a low or unworthy conception of God. Certain sects, such as the Pharisees, while they held that God was stern and austere, yet managed to maintain a fairly high level of external morality; but their righteousness was only outward.

Instinctively we try to be like our God, and if He is conceived to be stern and exacting, so will we ourselves be. The truth is that God is the most winsome of all beings and His service one of unspeakable pleasure.

The fellowship of God is delightful beyond all telling. He communes with His redeemed ones in an easy, uninhibited fellowship that is restful and healing to the soul.

He remembers our frame and knows that we are dust. He may sometimes chasten us, it is true, but even this He does with a smile, the proud, tender smile of a Father who is bursting with pleasure over an imperfect but promising son who is coming every day to look more and more like the One whose child he is.”

— A.W. Tozer in The Root of the Righteous, pp. 13-16. As quoted in the newest Banner of Truth Magazine (issue 531; Dec. 2007).