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Wednesday 27 September 2017

Can Satan influence a Christian?

The answer is: Yes and No

No

When someone is "born again" they move from Satan's "dominion of darkness" into the "Kingdom of God's Son." Before they were converted they were under Satan's authority, since the "whole world is under the control of the evil one" but now they have been gloriously set free by Christ Jesus who defeated him on the cross. Praise God!

Yes

But can Satan influence a believer after he or she has come to Christ? The answer according to the New Testament is a resounding tragic yes. A believer cannot be possessed by the devil but they sure can be oppressed by the devil - and they can give Satan the "green light."

Here's a half dozen ways.....

(1) Sometimes God allows a Christian to be tested by the devil for a season
This happened to Job - a season of intense testing. The purpose is to glorify God and to refine the saint. The Lord Jesus himself was led into the wilderness to be tempted by the evil one, not to refine him for he was perfect but to gain the victory Adam lost.

(2) Sometime God allows a believer to experience a long-term thorn "messenger of Satan" to lead them to rest in God's power
The apostle Paul was given a "thorn in the flesh" (2 Cor 12) so that he would not become proud about the incredible insights he had been given but rather trust in God's almighty power. He called this thorn a "messenger of Satan" and as far as we can tell, it clung to him like a shadow.

(3) Anger gives Satan a green light
When a believer is angry, they give to Satan a foothold in their lives, according to Ephesians 4:26-27. We all know what this means: angry at one person can easily spill over to cross at everyone / unhappy with everything. 

(4) Disorder gives Satan a green light 
Satan hates the order God has wired into creation, and where ever there is disorder he finds a crack. If a man refuses to lead his wife, for example, or if a woman takes the lead in a marriage, Satan has found the perfect avenue of influence. Genesis 3 records the first of these opportunities. Eve took the lead, Adam backed out and Satan found his opportunity to pounce - and pounce he did. A disordered marriage is a green light for Satan.

(5) Opposition to church leaders makes a believer "captive to Satan's will"
A lesser-known way a believer can be influenced by Satan is if he or she opposes the leaders the Holy Spirit has appointed to lead the church. Paul says that all such must be gently instructed "in the hope that they will come to their senses and escape the trap of the devil who has taken them captive to do his will." (2 Tim 2:25-26). That is pretty serious! A Christian can become not a captive to Satan, but a captive to his will.

(6) When we rebel against God's will - especially God's will for suffering
Good disciple Peter told Jesus that he would not suffer the agonies of the cross. Jesus replied to him, "Get behind me Satan." At that moment, when Peter resisted God's will for Jesus' life - and especially his will for suffering  - he became a spokesperson for Satan.

In our western evangelicalism whose rationalism can easily filter out all talk of the supernatural, whether of God or Satan, we can easily disregard the influence of Satan upon us. But these six avenues of influence reveal how pernicious the evil one is and remind us of our need every day to pray "Deliver us from the Evil one."

Tuesday 26 September 2017

Our Biggest Errors (& the Water We Swim In)

Reformation Errors
You and I look back at the European Reformation and can see - with the clarity of distance - what enormous mistakes the great reformers made. Along with the amazing triumphs they were childrne of their time and could not see what we now can see as big mistakes, according to the Scriptures.

 In Switzerland, Zurich was the heart of the Reformation and Zwingli the main reformer. Zwingli was unable to see that it was wrong for the church and the state to be intimately connected. For a man who loved the NT this seems absolutely incredible to us. There is no hint in the NT that church and state should work hand in hand. In the NT the only relationship between church and state is, if anything, a hostile one - the state persecuted the church. From the church's point of view obedience, from the state's point of view persecution. Light vs darkness.

Zwingli's great error was manifest perhaps most unpleasantly in his ruthless persecution of the Anabaptists who he was pleased were hounded to death because they wanted to start a New Testament church separated from the state. 

Zwingli was heir to that monstrosity, "Christendom". For over 1000 years the church and state had become one confused single entity. Such a union did the state good, but did the church much harm. 

This was the "water" Zwingli swam in. Now if you ask a gold fish what water is, they will say "Water, what water?" Fish are completely blind to the water they swim in, and so it was with Zwingli.

Zwingli could see the errors of the mass, he could see the error with putting up idolatrous images in church buildings but he could not see the error of infant baptism because this error was intrinsically connected with "the water": when a human being was born they naturally entered society, when they were baptised, they entered the church, and these two events, only separated by a few days welded the church-state monstrosity called Christendom together.

We learn two things from the good man Zwingli. First our biggest errors are ones we cannot see, and secondly, those errors are structural but sinful ways in which our culture of the day works.

Our biggest errors?
What are your and my biggest errors? Most likely things we simply cannot see in ourselves - and hence the need for pastors to help us and brothers and sisters to admonish us, and most of all the work of the Holy Spirit through the Word to convict us.

What about the biggest errors of our evangelical churches today? If we think that we are beyond the reformers we are gravely mistaken. In a 1000 years, should the Lord tarry, Christians will say of us "they surely did not believe or do that did they?"

What, I wonder, are those big errors?

Wednesday 20 September 2017

Two Big Books from the Reformation

Books from the Reformation
Many important books emerged from the Reformation of the 1500s. Some are well known, some now forgotten. Two of the most important were....

(1) John Calvin's Institutes - 1541
One of the most famous of them all was John Calvin's Institutes. Calvin was, perhaps more than any other of the reformers, a great "systematiser" of truth. He wanted to put together a comprehensive book full of Christian teaching. His desire was to share the Gospel with his french countryfolk. Whether a 1000 page book was quite what common folk were looking for is up for debate! The book is worth reading even today and remains in print. Get the new translation by Robert White.

(2) Van Bright's Martyrs Mirror - 1659
Many of my readers will have heard of Calvin's Institutes, but my guess is that none of them have heard of "Martyrs Mirror." And that is a tragedy of history. Martyr's Mirror (or to give it its unsellable title "The Bloody Theatre or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenceless Christians") is a massive book - over 1000 A4 sized pages. Unlike Calvin's doctrinal book, this is a book full of the stories of Christians who have been persecuted from the days of the apostles to around 1660. In other words it's an expansion of the book of Acts (but not inspired, of course).

What drove Van Bright to put it together was in particular the savage persecution levelled against the Anabaptists of the 1500s. He shows that true Christians of all ages are persecuted. In point of fact "everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted." (2 Tim 3:12).

Persecution is a mark of a true Christian and a true church.

In our day, and in particular in the evangelical churches of the west, many attempts are being made to avoid persecution and the reproach of Christ.

Here are some of them:

(i) Run with the culture on gay issues. Tony Compalo and Eugene Peterson are two of the latest "leaders" who have sided with same-sex marriage to avoid the reproach of Christ. For men like this, it is much more important to be respected and accepted by the world, than to be faithfully persecuted by the world. In a smaller way, churches are embarrassed to preach about the sin of homosexual practice (which like the sin of theft or adultery can be forgiven and left behind).

(ii) Run with the culture on gender issues. This is far more subtle. The central gender issue in the church today is the divine created order between men and women, not the transgender confusion. Do the commands of the NT that men alone lead and preach in the church stand or can they be ignored? It starts in the home. Do men lead their families and their wives?  Or has Adam and Eve's gender-disordering disobedience become the norm?  Many churches are too afraid to preach these things and too afraid to follow them up in practise.

(iii) Run with the culture's addiction to man-made titles.  In the NT servants of the church were defined by spiritual characteristics such as  "slaves", "servants", "filled with the Holy Spirit." When Paul boasts he boasts about his sufferings and beatings and rejection by the world. But read today the blurb on the back of any Christian book and it will be full of earthly and useless titles, "President of", "Professor of", "Founder of", "Doctor of" and so on. Why? Because the church is deeply affected by the spirit of the world and desperately wants the approval of the world.

Can you imagine the following blurbs todsay:

    John Smith, pastor of a small church in Nothing-hampton
    Simon Nobody, slave of the church in Backwater
    Henry Jack, imprisoned at the pleasure of  HM Government and despised by many

The Evangelical church would laugh at such titles!  But if the truth be told, they are far far closer to the cross-carrying spirit of the NT than any of the clap-trap Dr / Professor types.

If the church stood up against the sin of homosexuality, stood up for God's creation order in the family and the church, and stood against the foolish addiction to passing fads and titles she would be persecuted.

And to be sure, churches and pastors who stand for the truth will be lied about and persecuted.

But persecution is a cause for rejoicing!

"Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the Prophets who were before you." (Matthew 5:11-12)

Institutes vs Martyrs Mirror?
So which tome tunes in with NT Christianity best? We need both. We need the good doctrine of the NT, and we need the true living of persecuted Christians.

But if I was marooned on a desert island with only one to choose from, after the Scriptures, Martyr's Mirror would be the more useful.

Saturday 2 September 2017

The Forgotten Reformation - the wonderful (but despised) Anabaptists

The forgotten Reformation
At a pastors' conference this year, we were all encouraged to read "Reformation Theology", a big tome about the reformation five hundred years ago. For the uninitiated, pastors feel they have to "keep up with the Jones's" like everyone else - which means for us, reading all the latest books. The older you get the fewer you buy, because you learn that much that passes for advice is publishers hype: a book is generally worth buying if it is still in print a decade later.

Anyway, I bought this particular must-have book and there is some good stuff in there, but what is most striking about it is the near-absence of the Anabaptists. In the index there is no mention of Felix Manz or Conrad Grebel or George Blaurock.

Perhaps these names are unknown to my readers - which makes the point twice!

Who were the Anabaptists? 
The Anabaptists were a group of Christians who arose at the time of the Reformation in the 1500s when great truths such as Justification by Faith alone - the central doctrine of the Gospel - were being rediscovered by men such as Luther (Germany) and Zwingli (Switzerland). The big reformers, such as Luther and Zwingli are called Magisterial Reformers, not because of the majesty of the doctrines they proclaimed - though for some of those doctrines, majestic is a good description - but because of their biggest mistake: they refused to separate the church from the state and relied on the magistrates (hence "magisterial") to support the church, even though the magistrates may be unbelievers. This seemed to make sense to them in "Christian" Europe, because wasn't everyone a Christian?

Supporting this church-state view of the Magisterial Reformers (MRs) was the doctrine of infant baptism. How did a citizen of the state also become a member of the church? By being baptised as an infant, that's how. The moment a citizen was baptised as an infant they entered the church and became part of the entangled Church-state system called "Christendom".  We, from the standpoint of the 21st century can see what a terrible error this was, but they could not, and as I say, the MRs all defended infant baptism and the church-state connection.

However, a group of Christians reading their Bibles - and just as importantly, wanting to follow Jesus faithfully - noticed that infant baptism is just not taught anywhere in the Bible. So in January 1525 they held the first private baptism (for centuries?) in a home, somewhere near Zurich. They baptised each other (still only with water on the head) and my own view is that 1525 is just as important for the reformation as 1517.

The biggest consequence of this seemingly simple act was the restoration of the New Testament church as a group of believers meeting separate to the state's knowledge or interference or permission in a home.

No big deal, we say. But unbelievably gi-normous deal in 1525. Baptising an adult believer in a private home was seen by the MRs as an act of treason against the state! Because you were disrupting the centuries old connection between church and state and thereby threatening the stability of the state (and hence the stability of the compromised church).

Apart from being totally unbiblical, the stance of the MRs had a terrible side-consequence: the "church" was filled with unbelievers! You can't reform a nation by baptising every child who is born into the church. Men and women must be born again. So the church was filled with unbelievers - a problem Luther himself lamented.

The Anabaptists say that in order for the church to be pure, and in line with the New Testamant, it must be separated from the state and be allowed to choose its own godly pastors and to exercise discipline where necessary.
Conrad Grebel

That cold winter's day in January was the start of an amazing forgotten reformation started by men like Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz and George Blaurock; a reformation which attempted to go much further than the MRs and return to the simple separated worship and life of the NT church. They went from village to village preaching the Gospel and winning many converts to Christ, baptising them on the way.

Why are they forgotten?
So why little mention of them today?

(i) History is written by the victors. The Anabaptists were hounded to death by both the Catholics and the MRs.  Whole communities were wiped out, tens of thousands imprisoned, tortured and killed. The favourite way was by drowning: "You want to be baptised again? We'll do it for you." The victors wrote the Reformation History and the losers were lost in time.

(ii) The Anabaptists were common folk. By and large the Anabaptists were ordinary folks, and once again, history is written by those who can write, the scholars of the age, not the losers.

(iii) The Anabaptists were not great doctrine writers. Because western evangelicalism at least, prides itself in itself scholarly doctrines, it pays little attention to the fishermen / tax-collector types. So because these guys didn't write great tomes they are ignored - even though they made up in their zeal ten times what they lacked in theology.

(iv) A few men who are - falsely -  connected with the Anabaptists taught crazy stuff, and gave them all a bad name. There was even a city take over where some guy proclaimed himself to be king! But these excesses were on the fringe of the movement, and by an large excesses like this are found in any renewal movement.

What can we learn from the Anabaptists?
I'll return to this in another blog, but first and foremost, we learn the true cost of following Jesus - in any age. The Martyrs Mirror records the moving account of their lives and deaths. In every age - including our own - faithfulness to Christ will bring persecution - from the religious establishment as well as the world. But the joy of following  Christ far far outweighs the mocking, the jeers, the cruel and false accusations.

In many ways, as we read their story, it resembles Acts far more than the story of the MRs does and I find myself for one much more at home with the Anabaptists that with the Luthers or Zwinglis - as good as those men were, for, oddly enough, we are far closer to them in our independent evangelical churches than we are to Luther, Zwingli or Calvin.