Hello, this is Pastor Patrick Hines, and I want to press on in the series on Christianity and Liberalism by Jake Russell Machen, and try to just put out a little more content. I keep saying I want to do that, but hopefully things will be calm enough to do maybe a half hour more days of the week. So anyway, I don't want to talk a whole lot except the content itself. So I've pulled up the Christianity and Liberalism by J. Gressom Machen. And I wanted to back up a little bit here because this is a really important section. We're still early on in the book. We're only 15% into the book. Where Machen describes Paul's attitude towards doctrine, his attitude about the gospel. And I just want to pick up here at the top of the page. Paul, as well as the Judaizers, believed that the keeping of the law of God in its deepest import is inseparably connected with faith. The difference concerned only the logical, not even perhaps the temporal, order of three steps. Paul said that a man believes on Christ, then is justified before God, then immediately proceeds to keep God's law. Now that's just breaking for the quotation. Exactly right. Okay, we believe the gospel, we're justified, and then good works follow. The changed heart will usher in a changed life, a changed priorities, and a desire, a longing to obey, and there will be some measure of obedience on that person's part. The Judaizers said that a man, number one, believes on Christ, number two, keeps the law of God the best he can, and then is justified. Now, listen to how Machen describes this, because the liberals didn't care about this at all. He says, "...the difference would seem to modern practical Christians..." Now, just bear in mind, what he means by modern practical Christians, quote-unquote, is the liberals of the 1920s. Okay, so this is a century ago he's saying this. The difference between those two things, you know, believing on Jesus, then you're justified, and then a changed life follows, and believing in Christ, keeping the law as best you can, and then you're justified by that, the difference would seem to modern practical Christians to be a highly subtle and intangible matter, hardly worthy of consideration at all, in view of the large measure of agreement in the practical realm. What a splendid cleaning up of the Gentile cities it would have been if the Judaizers had succeeded in extending to those cities the observance of the Mosaic law, even including the unfortunate ceremonial observances. I mean, that's what kind of Chuck Colson and that whole gang was saying. The moral majority needs to get together. We have so much in common. You know, we don't, it's okay. So we disagree on some of the fine print. When it comes to the gospel, there is no fine print. When it comes to how you write with God, how you get into heaven, you got to get that one right. And he's saying, oh, he could have really, I mean, cleaning up the Gentile cities if he had just introduced them to the law of Moses. Surely Paul ought to have made common cause with teachers who were so nearly in agreement with him. Surely he ought to have applied to them the great principle of Christian unity. Okay, I just want to break from the quotation again here. Unity that is not based on a common gospel, but namely the biblical one, of Sola Fide, justification by faith alone, is not unity at all. You can call it unity. We're united, but if it's not united in your confession of what the truth is about how you get to heaven and who Christ is and how he saves us, then you have only external unity. You don't have real unity. As a matter of fact, however, Paul did nothing of the kind, and only because he and others did nothing of the kind does the Christian Church exist today. Okay, breaking from the quotation here. You see, if they had just gone out and said, Jesus will help you be good enough to go to heaven, Christianity would have disappeared. It would have disappeared and had no impact on the world at all. But because Paul would have none of that, and he preached a full and free salvation by faith alone, completely apart from works, that's why we have the church now. Paul saw very clearly that the differences between the Judaizers and himself was the differences between two entirely distinct types of religion. It was the differences between a religion of merit and a religion of grace. If Christ provides only a part of our salvation, leaving us to provide the rest, then we are still hopeless under the load of sin. For no matter how small the gap, which must be bridged before salvation can be obtained, the awakened conscience sees clearly that our wretched attempt at goodness is insufficient even to bridge that gap. You hear what he's saying? No matter how small of a gap, even if, no matter how small you say the gap is, even if Jesus, I mean, he does 99.9999999%, but you have to do this other little thing. You have to do this, without which God will not declare you just. That's all the difference in the world. I always think of, I remember this convert to Eastern Orthodoxy told me, well, our liturgy is like 85% of it's taken from scripture. And my response, I think I actually did say this, that's like telling me that 85% of the brownies were made from brownie mix and sugar and the ingredients, and it's only 15% dog poo. I mean, that is the illustration Paul uses, human attempts at earning salvation, meriting salvation, or not meriting or earning, but our works confirming the reality of our faith, which gets us in it. However you want to do it, Paul called that skubalon, dung. I'm not going to take a bite of brownies that has 15% dung in it, 15% skubalon in it. It's Christ's righteousness alone so that the brownies taste fine. Even if there's like 1% dung in it, I'm still not going to want to taste the brownies. It's the very same thing with God. It's either you rely on Christ's righteousness alone or you're not going to heaven. And that's why Paul blows a gasket when he wrote Galatians and says you're under the curse of God. You preach a gospel other than justification by faith apart from works, apart from anything done in us or by us, you don't have the true Christian religion anymore. And that's what Machen God bless him and what a gift to the church. That's what he saw so clearly and wrote so poignantly here about. Listen to that again. No matter how small the gap which must be bridged before salvation can be obtained, in other words, no matter how small you say the works are we have to do, the awakened conscience sees clearly that our wretched attempt at goodness is insufficient even to bridge that gap, no matter how small you say it is. Someone under the conviction of the Holy Spirit of God is going to recognize nothing other than a perfect righteousness will do. And that's why Rome's attempts to assuage the conscience of Martin Luther didn't work. Because when you're under the convicting work of the Holy Spirit, nothing other than the pure gospel is going to give you a sense of peace with God. It's only knowing that I am dressed in His righteousness, divine. Okay? Clothed in His righteousness alone, faultless to stand before the throne. That's it. Okay. Christ will do everything or nothing. He says, the guilty soul enters again into the hopeless reckoning with God to determine whether we have really done our part. And thus we groan again under the old bondage of the law. Such an attempt to peace out the work of Christ by our own merit, Paul saw clearly is the very essence of unbelief. Now listen to this last sentence here in this last little paragraph I'm reading right here. Listen to this. Christ will do everything or nothing. And the only hope is to throw ourselves unreservedly on His mercy and trust Him for all. And Paul does address the Christ gives us grace as an aid and it makes good works possible which are then viewed under the auspices of grace such that we can merit decongruo eternal life. Paul addressed that completely. He said Christ will be of no benefit to you. You who seek to be justified by law, you who say you believe in Jesus and couldn't do it without him, but seek to get into heaven, you who seek to be welcomed into heaven by good works, Christ will be of no benefit to you. That's why Machen said this, Christ will do everything or nothing. there's no middle ground with that. It's either Christ alone or Christ isn't in there. The minute you add works, the minute you rely on something you've done, Christ is not in the equation anymore. And you, by doing that, by relying on yourself or something you've done, even with the help of grace or through infused grace, you are saying what Christ did is not sufficient to save. Machen continues here, Paul was certainly right. The differences which divided him from the Judaizers was no mere theological subtlety, but concerned the very heart and core of the religion of Christ. Quote, just as I am without one plea, but that thy blood was shed for me. That was what Paul was contending for in Galatia. That hymn would never have been written if the Judaizers had won. There's a lot of other hymns that would never, the hymn, the modern hymn, In Christ Alone, which is a wonderful hymn, In Christ Alone would never have been written, because the Judaizers' understanding of the gospel is Christ plus. That hymn would never have been written, just as I am without one plea, but that thy blood was shed for me. It's a great hymn, I love that hymn. And without the thing which that hymn expresses, there is no Christianity at all. And so a believer in Christ, a true Christian, is relying upon only Christ to get them into heaven. And that's the only thing that gives us a sense of peace with God. There's always going to be, at times, a mighty struggle for assurance. People go through seasons where they really, really deal with not having assurance. But at the end of the day, it's Christ alone. It's Christ alone even when I'm really doing well in my Christian walk and I'm victorious over my besetting sins for a season. Even then, it's still Christ alone. It's Christ alone at the beginning, it's Christ alone when I'm doing great, it's Christ alone when I'm doing bad, it's Christ alone when I draw my final breath. It's always Christ and only Christ. And that's the only way you can be saved. You can't be saved on any other terms than that. You either rely on Him alone and nothing else, nothing done in you or done by you, and what motivates your Christian life of pursuing holiness and putting sin to death is gratitude, not fear. That's the Christian life. Certainly then, Paul was no advocate of an undogmatic religion. He was interested, above everything else, in the objective and universal truth of his message. So much will probably be admitted by serious historians, no matter what their own personal attitude toward the religion of Paul may be. Sometimes, indeed, the modern liberal preacher seeks to produce an opposite impression by quoting out of their context words of Paul, which he interprets in a way as far removed as possible from the original sense. The truth is, it is hard to give Paul up. The modern liberal desires to produce upon the minds of simple Christians, and upon his own mind, the impression of some sort of continuity between modern liberalism in the thought and the life of the great apostle. But such an impression is altogether misleading. Paul was not interested merely in the ethical principles of Jesus. He was not interested merely in general principles of religion or of ethics. On the contrary, he was interested in the redeeming work of Christ and its effect upon us. His primary interest was in Christian doctrine, and Christian doctrine not merely in its presuppositions, but at its center. If Christianity is to be made independent of doctrine, then Paulinism, must be removed from Christianity root and branch." And Machen is exactly correct. He is exactly correct. And everywhere liberalism gains a foothold, the Christian faith degenerates into ethics. In fact, wasn't it Thomas Jefferson who removed all the supernatural elements out of the New Testament? And what did he call it? What was the title of his New Testament? As I recall, it was the Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. If you remove the supernatural elements, if you remove the gospel, if you remove that there's a supernatural redemption of the people of God from the punishment for sin at the cross, everything degenerates into ethics. Everything degenerates into, here's how you live a good life and can go to a better place, supposedly, when you die. You lose everything when you do that. Machen continues here, but what of that? What of that? Some men are not afraid of the conclusion. If Paulinism must be removed out of Paul's theology, then they say we can get along without it. May it not turn out that in introducing a doctrinal element into the life of the Church, Paul was only perverting a primitive Christianity which was as independent of doctrine as even the modern liberal preacher could desire? This suggestion is clearly overruled by the historical evidence. The problem certainly cannot be solved in so easy a way. Now, just stopping here, I watched a little bit of a conversation that Michael Shermer and Bart Ehrman had. There's two guys that have a lot to say. Shermer, of course, an atheist. Ehrman, functionally, is an atheist, but claims to be an agnostic. They were just talking, you know, Jesus, he didn't think he was God. He was just some Jewish guy who thought he had the right understanding of the Old Testament and everything else. How does he know that? How does he know that? You can't take seriously the historical works of the New Testament, the gospel accounts, and say that. Jesus' claim to deity were direct and forceful and emphatic, and even his hearers understood that. Now, if you're gonna say, oh, that stuff was all added later, show me some evidence. Was John 8, 58 added later to John's gospel? The fact that they took up stones to stone him after he said, before Abraham was, I am, is that interpolation? Is that something added later to John's gospel? No. So you have to dismiss the historical evidence. You just have to discard all this stuff as legendary or something. But you can't prove that these things were added later. Okay, so the suggestion is overruled by the historical evidence. or even was the founder of a new religion, but all such attempts have resulted in failure. The Pauline epistles themselves attest a fundamental unity of principle between Paul and the original companions of Jesus, and the whole early history of the Church becomes unintelligible except on the basis of such unity. Certainly with regard to the fundamentally doctrinal character of Christianity, Paul was no innovator. The fact appears in the whole character of Paul's relationship to the Jerusalem church, as it is attested by the epistles, and it also appears with startling clearness in the precious passage of 1 Corinthians 15, 3-7, where Paul summarizes the tradition which he had received from the primitive church. What is it that forms the content of that primitive teaching? Is it a general principle of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man? Is it a vague admiration for the character of Jesus, such as that which prevails in the modern church? Nothing could be further from the fact. Here it is. Christ died for our sins, says the primitive disciples. According to the scriptures, he was buried. He has been raised on the third day, according to the scriptures. From the beginning, the Christian gospel, as indeed the name gospel or good news implies, consisted in an account of something that had happened. And he bent what Jesus did. Machen says, and from the beginning, the meaning of the happening was set forth. And when the meaning of the happening was set forth there, then there was Christian doctrine. Christ died, that is history. Christ died for our sins, that is doctrine. Without these two elements joined in an absolutely indissoluble union, there is no Christianity. It is perfectly clear then, that the first Christian missionaries did not simply come forward with an exhortation, they did not say, Jesus of Nazareth lived a wonderful life of filial piety, and we call upon you, our hearers, to yield yourselves, as we have done, to the spell of that life, end quote. Certainly, that is what modern historians would have expected the first Christian missionaries to say, but it must be recognized that as a matter of fact, they said nothing of the kind. You know, just breaking from the quotation here, I had a liberal programming friend years ago when I worked at U.S. Bank in Cincinnati, and we used to exchange books, and I'd read her liberal stuff, and I gave her a book on the Apostles' Creed by Michael Horton, and gave her some other stuff that was real good, solid, biblical stuff. And I was able to persuade her that her understanding, her liberal understanding of Christianity was in fact false. She never professed faith in Christ, but she did realize that her idea that Jesus and the apostles, they just went out and told everybody to be nice and stuff. And I told her, if that was the only message that they had, we wouldn't even have a New Testament. It would have just disappeared. And also, Jesus would never have been crucified. I mean, why would anyone crucify someone who went out and said, be nice to everybody? Why would anyone be mad at him then? And she realized that after I said, go read the book of Acts. You look at the sermons in the book of Acts and just ask yourself, is that what they went out and did? They just said, Jesus was a wonderful man and you should try to be like him and be nicer to each other. I remember her saying, that's right, you're right. It's not because I'm brilliant, because I'm not. I just get people to read the Bible. Yeah, that's not what they said. That's not what they preached. I'm like, thank you. Good. That's good. That's a good step in the right direction. Okay, conceivably, the first disciples, after the catastrophe of his death, might have engaged in quiet meditation upon his teaching. They might have said to themselves that our Father, which art in heaven, was a good way of addressing God, even though the one who had taught them that prayer was dead. They might have clung to the ethical principles of Jesus and cherished the vague hope that the one who enunciated such principles had some personal existence beyond the grave. Such redactions might have seemed very natural to the modern man, but to Peter, James, and John, they certainly never occurred. Jesus had raised in them high hopes. Those hopes were destroyed by the cross, and reflections on the general principles of religion and ethics were quite powerless to revive the hopes again. The disciples of Jesus had evidently been far inferior to their master in every possible way. They had not understood his lofty spiritual teaching, but even in the hour of solemn crisis had quarreled over great places in the approaching kingdom. What hope was there that such men could succeed where their master had failed? Even when he had been with them, they had been powerless. And now that he was taken from them, what little power they may have had was gone. Yet those same weak, discouraged men, within a few days after the death of their master, instituted the most important spiritual movement that the world has ever seen. What had produced the astonishing change? What had transformed the weak and cowardly disciples into the spiritual conquerors of the world? Evidently, it was not the mere memory of Jesus's life, for that was a source of sadness rather than joy. Evidently, the disciples of Jesus, within the few days between the crucifixion and the beginning of their work in Jerusalem, had received some new equipment for their task. What that new equipment was, at least the outstanding and external element in it, to say nothing of the endowment which Christian men believed to have been received at Pentecost, is perfectly plain. Now listen, the great weapon with which the disciples of Jesus set out to conquer the world was not a mere comprehension of eternal principles. It was a historical message, an account of something that had recently happened. It was the message, He is risen. It's pretty amazing. Christianity's not now, here's stuff you need to go do, now get busy doing it and maybe things will go well with you. Our message is, someone else did it for you. Jesus is alive. He has died. He has conquered death. He's the only Savior that God has given to sinners. Repent and believe in Him and you'll be saved. And it's saved by this historical event, the incarnation of Christ, His life of perfect obedience, His cross work, His burial, His resurrection. And just one more paragraph. But the message of the resurrection was not isolated. It was connected with the death of Jesus, seen now to be not a failure, but a triumphant act of divine grace. It was connected with the entire appearance of Jesus upon earth. The coming of Jesus was understood now as an act of God by which sinful men were saved. The primitive church was concerned not merely with what Jesus had said, but also and primarily with what Jesus had done. The world was to be redeemed through the proclamation of an event. It's pretty amazing, pretty amazing. The proclamation of something that happened in history. That's what the apostles went out. I'm just breaking from agent here. The apostles didn't go out and share their testimonies. I mean, Paul talked about his own conversion and his apostolic call, but they didn't go out. I mean, Peter wasn't like, I denied Jesus and he restored me and he's given me victory over sin. They went out and preached Christ and then crucified and call people to repentance. Now it's not to say that Peter doesn't have an amazing testimony. He does, but they didn't focus on themselves. They focused on preaching what Jesus had done and who he was and called men to believe in him, and they said again and again and again, he who believes in him receives remission of sins. He who believes in him is justified from all the things from which the law of Moses could not justify you. Mation continues here. The world was to be redeemed through the proclamation of an event, and with the event went the meaning of the event. And the setting forth of the event with the meaning of the event was doctrine. These two elements are always combined in the Christian message. The narration of the facts is history. The narration of the facts with the meaning of the facts is doctrine. See, that's why there is doctrine in the epistles, excuse me, in the Gospels, in the four Gospels, but we need the epistles to explicate the death of Christ and the work of Christ. Listen, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. That is history. He loved me and gave himself for me. That's Galatians 2.20. That is doctrine. Such was the Christianity of the primitive church. Now why is Machen emphasizing this? Because the liberals were like, no, we're not into doctrine, we're not into theology. It's just about the ethical principles of the Christian faith. Machen's whole point is that is to do violence to the text of God's Holy Word because that is not the way that the New Testament, if it is what it claims to be, God breathes truth and revelation from God, that is not the way the New Testament portrays itself and does not portray the work of Christ and the mission of Christ. The mission of the Christian church, the mission of Jesus Christ was not to go out and tell the world, everyone be nicer. Now when people are born again, they're radically changed and they will begin to keep God's commandments and they will love and respect their fellow men better. But one of the ways they love and respect their fellow men is to call them to repent and believe the gospel too. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and we'll stop there and we'll pick up right at the word but right there in the next paragraph. But you just gotta love Machen. You just gotta love Machen. He's so clear and courageous and did so much good. And really, his stuff is the stuff that survived the test of time and is still read and cherished today, even though most of the Presbyterian church that he loved had gone liberal. God uses individuals like this. He uses godly people that are committed to the truth, even when they have to hold to that truth and defend it almost seemingly alone at times. And may God raise up a whole army of Machens and give us more men just like him. Thank you for watching or for listening. This is Pastor Patrick Hines of Bridwell Heights Presbyterian Church, and you've been listening to the Pulpit Supplemental Podcast. You can find us on the web at www.bridwellheightspca.org. Our sermons are streamed through sermon audio, and you can listen to that on the iTunes podcast version of Bridwell Heights Presbyterian Church. Feel free to join us any Sunday morning for worship at 11 a.m. sharp at 108 Ridgewell Heights Road in Kingsport, Tennessee. And may the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace.