This is a lightly edited transcript of what I actually said when I taught this session at Spring Creek Bible Church on December 13, 2015, as Part 9 (the final session) of The Doctrines of Man and Sin class. It differs from what I planned to say; for the prepared text, see the manuscript.
Father, we thank you for this opportunity to gather again this morning on this rainy day. Thank you for your Word, for your people, for the gospel of Jesus, and for saving us from our sins and making us new—giving us your Word to study, understand, and apply to our lives. I pray you’d bless our time together as we do that, in Jesus’ name, amen.
We’re at the end of our nine-part series on the doctrines of man and sin. We’ve covered most of the major topics—introductory matters, the origin of man, the nature of man, the image of God (in two parts), the fall, original sin, and the nature of sin—and today we’ll wrap up by applying some of it to modern-day issues. We’ll do that in four parts: first, the concept of thinking theologically and what it means for us; then some issues that are culturally hot, both outside and inside the church; then some newer issues raised by living in a digital age; and finally, a focus on love as the guiding principle for applying the doctrines of man and sin to these issues.
Thinking Theologically
My first point is that right doctrine isn’t enough. We spent eight weeks digging mainly into systematic theology, exploring these key teachings, but not merely to improve the accuracy of our doctrinal understanding. Getting it right matters—thinking true thoughts about God and what he has made is worthy in itself—but it’s not the end. We know from James 2:19 that the demons have good doctrine; they have a right view of God, yet their hearts don’t respond appropriately to the truth they possess. John Piper has argued that Satan’s and the demons’ theology is probably far better and more accurate than our own. So doctrinal knowledge by itself is not enough.
It’s vital in our day to develop the skill of thinking theologically—by which I mean thinking about everything in relationship to God and his revelation. We start, of course, by applying the explicit commands and prohibitions of Scripture. When we read that God forbids murder, we should ask what that means. It means you shouldn’t take another person’s life—but does it mean that in every context, and does it mean more than that? Jesus helps us see that it does. In Matthew 5:21–22 he tells us the command reaches even to anger against another person. So thinking theologically means looking below the surface of a text to understand what it means more deeply, rather than stopping at “don’t murder means don’t kill people” without asking what it means for the heart.
There’s a lifetime of work in thinking theologically just about the Bible’s explicit commands, but we also have to move beyond that foundational level. There are many things the Bible doesn’t directly address, and we need to piece together various passages and strands of truth woven through Scripture and draw conclusions about what God expects of us. If we believe in the sufficiency of Scripture—and I hope we all do—then we need to do the hard work of thinking theologically about all of life, or else we’re left to our own devices for much of what we encounter today. So thinking theologically works on two levels: taking what Scripture says explicitly and grasping it more deeply, and inferring from various strands of teaching conclusions that should shape how we live.
Let me show a couple of examples from Jesus and then from Paul. We saw last week that Jesus taught this deeper thinking in the Sermon on the Mount, on anger and murder, lust and adultery. Consider also Matthew 22:23–33, where the Sadducees—who say there is no resurrection—try to trap him with the case of a woman married in turn to seven brothers: “In the resurrection, whose wife will she be?” Jesus answers, “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God,” and then points them to God’s own words: “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” God identifies himself as the God of three men long dead, and “he is not God of the dead, but of the living”—so there must be a resurrection. Jesus faults the Sadducees for not thinking theologically about that text and drawing the obvious conclusion.
Now, the Sadducees actually were thinking theologically—just not accurately. They ignored one truth at the expense of another, elevating their assumption about how the difficulty must be solved and concluding there could be no resurrection. So there’s a danger here: theological thinking shouldn’t be done in a vacuum. We have to do it in the context of the rest of Scripture, which interprets itself, and within the context of the local church, the church universal, and the historical church. God has preserved his truth and gives us help to keep us from drawing wrong conclusions. There are challenges to thinking theologically, but they shouldn’t keep us from pursuing it.
One more example: in Luke 24:13–27, on the road to Emmaus, Jesus rebukes two disciples for not realizing that the Christ had to suffer before entering his glory. “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them the things concerning himself. They had missed and misunderstood the Old Testament’s teaching—a matter of faith and unbelief—and Jesus expected them to have dug into God’s Word and understood it even below the surface.
Now a couple of examples from Paul, whose writings are probably the most theological in the Bible. Several of his letters follow the pattern of indicative followed by imperative—theology followed by application. He tells us what is true, then what we should do. Romans is the clearest case: chapters 1–11 are the doctrinal portion, and chapters 12–16 apply those truths to life. After unpacking universal sin, the justifying righteousness of God received by faith, the transforming power of grace, the role of the law, the power of the Spirit, and God’s sovereignty in saving Jews and Gentiles, Paul turns the corner in 12:1–2: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice.”
That “therefore” is crucial. It means “on the basis of”—on the basis of everything I’ve just laid out, here is how you should live. As you read your Bible, watch for those connecting words: the “thens,” the “therefores,” the words that signal a result or conclusion. If you miss that connection in Romans—or if you skip to chapter 12 and simply try to obey the commands there—you lose the power to obey that flows from the first eleven chapters, and you may end up legalistic, moralistic, going through external behaviors without being rooted in the sound theology that drives obedience up through the heart.
By the way, thinking theologically is not less than thinking in a gospel-centered way; it’s just a bit broader. There’s a view that persists among evangelicals that treats the gospel as a narrow message of how to get saved—you’re a sinner, Jesus died for you, repent and believe and you’ll go to heaven. The gospel certainly is that, but it’s far more. The whole New Testament, and even the Old, is about the gospel—God’s work of redeeming a people for himself—and it’s among the deepest and richest of theological truths. Its primary audience, in fact, is the church: Paul’s letters are written to churches, unpacking the gospel for believers. All of the Christian life is rooted in the gospel, and everything we do flows out of what God has done for us in Christ by the Spirit. So thinking theologically means, very much, developing a robust view of the gospel.
Ephesians shows the same pattern: chapters 1–3 are doctrinal, and then 4:1 turns to application—“I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called”—grounded in the rich truth of how God chose us in Christ from all eternity. Galatians is similar: the first four chapters are more doctrinal, and chapters 5–6 hold most of the imperatives. “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (5:1). That first clause sums up the previous four chapters; on that basis we stand firm and don’t slip back. Not all of Paul’s letters are so neatly compartmentalized, but throughout them all he roots application in truth. So whenever you come to a command about how to live, look in the context for the truth underneath it, so you don’t try to obey it in a vacuum, apart from the power of the gospel.
Cultural Issues
Now let’s apply what we’ve studied to some cultural issues—and I want this to be a discussion, so jump in and help us think through them. Five stood out to me as hot, debated, and important, both in the culture and in the church, demanding careful theological thinking: homosexuality, gender roles, abortion, evolution, and violence. We won’t unpack all of them fully, but let’s talk through what theological thinking looks like as we approach them.
Homosexuality is gaining broad support in our culture of tolerance—and not only in the secular culture but in the church. Two recent examples. Calvin College, a school of the Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids (we have several CRC churches right up the road in Linden), recently ran an article in its official student newspaper about two former male students who were among the first in their county to be granted legal married status. The article celebrated their relationship and described how one of them believed the Holy Spirit told him to embrace who he was as a gay Christian; the comments were flooded with support from current students and alumni, with only a handful standing for the truth. Calvin has many excellent Bible teachers and produces fine evangelical books, which makes it a sad situation. Wheaton College, another strong evangelical school led by the solid pastor-scholar Philip Ryken, has faced its own issues: a former counselor, Julie Rogers, resigned over her support for homosexual relationships, and when Rosaria Butterfield—a former lesbian, now a pastor’s wife—came to share her testimony, she was met by a crowd of protesting students. A group called One Wheaton, organized around LGBTQ identity, published an open letter to current students with nearly a thousand former-student signatures. These are real issues facing the church, from without and within.
We need to be prepared to engage them with sound theological thinking and Spirit-wrought love and compassion. Does the Bible really prohibit homosexual practice, or only unfaithful relationships, as some argue? Should those who experience same-sex attraction be welcomed into our churches? What about those who identify as gay but, believing the practice is wrong, commit to celibacy? How should we think about the biblical view of sexuality and marriage, and how do the doctrines of man and sin help us? As we discussed this together, one of the first things that came up is identity. When people identify themselves as “homosexual Christians,” they’re drawing their identity from their orientation rather than from Christ—so we need to engage them about their relationship with Christ and whether he is truly Lord of their lives. Paul acknowledges there were former practicing homosexuals in the church—“such were some of you” (1 Corinthians 6:11)—but he calls that a past identity, not a present one. The desires may be very real, but none of us should identify ourselves by our sinful desires, whether toward same-sex attraction, or alcohol, or anger, or lust; these are impulses of the old man that we continually put to death, knowing our real identity is in Christ. This, of course, is tied to the renewing of the mind. And it goes back to the very beginning: God made humanity male and female, creating the woman to correspond to and complement the man, with a view to fulfilling his command to be fruitful and multiply. God’s design for marriage and sexuality is written into creation itself.
There’s also, I think, a connection between homosexuality and our second issue, gender roles. Egalitarianism seeks to make men and women equal in every respect except the obvious physical ones—but once you’ve done that, you’ve essentially made the parts interchangeable, and homosexuality becomes a logical extension. Many godly evangelicals promote egalitarianism without intending to move us toward homosexuality, but the two are logically connected. And of course we can also point to the passages that explicitly address homosexual practice: Leviticus 18 and 20, Romans 1:26–27, 1 Corinthians 6:9–10, and 1 Timothy 1:9–10. These issues are only going to come closer to home—we’ll increasingly know a cousin, a friend, or someone in our church who is wrestling with these desires—so we need to be prepared to have the conversations, to come alongside, minister, and share God’s truth.
On gender roles more broadly: What does the Bible teach about the relationship between men and women in marriage, and in the church? Does Paul’s teaching on the role of women still apply, or was it limited to New Testament culture? We treat foot-washing, head coverings, and the holy kiss as cultural—is Paul’s teaching about women the same kind of thing? Some make an analogy to slavery: the church once defended slavery from the Bible and later rejected it under cultural pressure—is the same thing now happening with the roles of men and women? Were these roles merely part of the curse of the fall, and are they therefore removed in Christ? Does the gospel obliterate the distinctions? As we talked it through, the key foundation is creation before the fall: gender roles and distinctions aren’t a result of the fall but of God’s original design. Paul himself points us back there, grounding his teaching in the fact that Adam was formed first (1 Timothy 2). That order wasn’t accidental or arbitrary; it was by design, intended to convey a deeper theological truth. Feminism and egalitarianism are nearly universal outside the church and increasingly common within it; complementarian Christians are a shrinking minority. It’s crucial that we learn to think theologically about the roles of men and women and live as God designed us to live.
Abortion is an ever-present issue in our culture. There’s strong opposition to the pro-life view in the secular world and in liberal churches; you can find Christian defenses of a woman’s “right” to take a life in the womb. What we’ve covered these past eight weeks gives us the building blocks for a strong defense of the sanctity of all life—made in God’s image from the moment of conception.
Evolution is another. Outside the church it’s the majority account of where everything came from, and those who hold this belief system and its pseudoscience are winning people through shame and intellectual mockery—you’re treated as unintelligent for giving any credence to the idea that God created. People cave because they don’t want to be embarrassed, and we need to be prepared to give a defense of what Scripture teaches.
One last issue—violence and war—may surprise you, but I’ve seen a growing trend of rethinking it within the church. Pacifism, the belief that all violence is morally wrong, seems to be gaining popularity. There’s a movement—variously called Simple Church or House Church—that aims to return to the practices of the early church and rejects much of what we do today; leaders associated with it, such as Frank Viola, David Bercot, and George Barna, argue that we’ve departed so far from the early church that we must recover it, and many in the movement are pacifists who point to pacifist statements in early Christian writings. I have a cousin in one of these churches whose brother is a police officer up near Vancouver. In a family email discussion, my cousin told his brother that unless he repents, he’ll perish eternally, appealing to Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 5: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye’…But I say to you, do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” He concludes that any and all use of violent force is prohibited—we’re to receive it, not give it. He points, too, to Matthew 26:52, where Jesus tells Peter after he cut off Malchus’s ear, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword,” and reads it as a universal prohibition against weapons.
But is it? God commands us to love our enemies—yet is it impossible to love your enemy while taking his life in a just war or in law enforcement? As we discussed, Romans 13 is a key passage: the government does not bear the sword in vain. These folks would answer that the sword is the government’s role and Christians shouldn’t participate in it—God uses the government, but believers shouldn’t be part of it. Yet there’s also the passage where Jesus tells the apostles to take a sword, which this group struggles with. And on Matthew 5, context matters: Jesus is dealing with personal retaliation and revenge, not with a man protecting his wife and children. Defending others is a different matter—if I see a child being abused, Jesus is not telling me to stand by and pray that the abuser leaves the child alone. The Old Testament also lays out strong principles for government, the judicial system, and restitution, which Jesus affirmed rather than discounted. As someone noted, taking things in context means asking who’s speaking, to whom, and against what background—you can’t build an entire theology from one verse, which underscores the value of working systematically through your whole Bible over a lifetime. At the very start of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says he came not to abolish the Law. And the “eye for an eye” principle, far from commanding personal revenge, actually set the upper limit of punishment—the penalty was not to exceed the offense—administered under the governing authority.
Issues Raised by Technology
Let’s turn to some issues raised by technology—these are especially pertinent to me, since I live in the technology space. If you look at ethics books, you won’t find much discussion of modern technology, and I think part of the reason is that many of our best theological thinkers are among the slower to adopt new tools. The younger generation adopts technology as it rolls out, while the older generation lags—so there’s a disconnect between those who need the Bible applied to new situations and those best equipped to apply it. We need more rigorous Christian thinking here; I’ve found almost no serious theological-ethical treatment of the digital world. Somebody should write that book.
Here are some questions to get us thinking. Is it okay to download or listen to music you didn’t purchase? According to a George Barna study over a decade ago, only one in ten born-again teenagers thought it was wrong; nine in ten thought it was perfectly fine because “everybody does it.” If it were culturally acceptable to walk out of a store with a CD because everyone did it, would that make it right? As someone pointed out, there’s little difference between shoplifting a CD and downloading the same music you didn’t pay for—which raises the question of what the law says, and the deeper question of whether it’s inherently morally wrong or wrong only because the law prohibits it. Is it wrong to connect to your neighbor’s Wi-Fi without asking—they didn’t set a password, so they probably don’t mind, right? Can I use a friend’s Netflix account, shared across states, against the terms of use? Is it okay to use software you didn’t buy? There used to be a website called “What Would Jesus Download?”—a place, believe it or not, where Christians gathered to share things you could download illegally: thousands of volumes of commentaries, Bible software, everything, done unashamedly in Jesus’ name.
Is it okay to accept user agreements without reading them? Anyone who’s used iTunes has probably clicked “I have read and agree” to a ninety-nine-page document—can any of us raise our hand and say we read it? Is it ethical to enter an agreement and indicate you’ve read something you haven’t? As we discussed, this is a bit like the old paper forms at the gas station that nobody read either. A helpful distinction came up: even the drafters don’t really expect you to read every word, but they do expect you to be held to the terms—and most of us already know the substance (you’re not supposed to share the Netflix account). You can find summaries that capture the spirit of an agreement so you can follow it in good conscience. The real issue isn’t the literal claim to have read every page; it’s whether you agree to be held accountable to the terms. It might be unwise to agree to something you haven’t read, so I wish companies would either shorten these documents or word the checkbox as “I agree to be held accountable to the terms” rather than “I have completely read this.” The issue of ghostwriting is another interesting one: more and more, well-known pastors and theologians aren’t doing the writing produced under their names. Does that practice hold up to careful theological scrutiny?
Let me get at the root of these rationalizations. I once read a blog post by a seminarian flaunting how he pirated everything he could get his hands on—including Bible software, including the software we make—and his arguments are worth examining. First: “It’s not really stealing.” When you take a physical item, you deprive the owner of it; when you copy a digital item, you take nothing away, so it isn’t stealing. But there are often hidden costs. Riding on your neighbor’s Wi-Fi can slow their connection, prompt them to pay for an upgrade, or push them past a usage threshold—actually costing them money. Hosting and serving downloadable files costs money in bandwidth, too. Second: “I wasn’t going to buy it anyway, so they’ve lost nothing from me.” Third: “They left the loophole, so they probably don’t mind.” Fourth: “I have a right to this content”—this man argued that with three kids and barely enough money for food, his lack of money shouldn’t keep him from biblical study material he loves. In every one of these you can hear a Jeremiah 17:9 heart—deceitful and desperately wicked—rationalizing a sin it knows it’s committing.
Love as the Guiding Principle
Let me close with love as the guiding principle. Love is at the heart of living as God intended. Jesus taught that loving God and neighbor is the fulfillment of the law, and sin, as we saw last week, is fundamentally the failure to fulfill the law—a failure to love God and neighbor. So sin and love are opposites. Thinking theologically about these issues means asking what it looks like to love God and others in each of them. Matthew 7:12 says, “Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.” Notice the parallel: just as loving others fulfills the law, so treating others as you’d want to be treated fulfills the law. The golden rule captures the essence of love—the central way you love others is to treat them as you’d want to be treated, and the central way you sin against others is to fail to. That should guide us with the cultural issues—gay marriage, gender roles, abortion, evolution, violence—and equally with the technological ones. The man pirating all that software has rationalized it, but he’s never asked the simple question: what does love look like toward the people who created this content? It looks like asking what you’d want if you were the creator. He sins not only by breaking the law of the land but, more fundamentally, by failing to love his neighbor as himself.
Let me offer a few remarks on what love should look like as we apply God’s truth to the issues of our day. First, we must show genuine care for others. Love is seeking the highest good of the one you love, and the well-being of others should be evident in all we say and do. Second, we must kindly and compassionately speak the truth. You can’t fully love others without telling them the truth. We mustn’t replace love with tolerance—tolerance is, in my view, one of the great evils of our day—and we mustn’t tolerate what God despises. We must be unflinching in our commitment to the truth, present it cogently and defensibly, and deliver it with kindness and compassion.
Third, we should acknowledge, repent of, and confess our own sinfulness. We are fallen people ministering to fallen people, and we must be quick to own our sin, repent, and press on in sanctification. It’s easy to see the sins of others; we should ask God for sensitivity to our own hearts and our own need for grace—the beam in our own eye before the speck in our neighbor’s. Fourth, we must be humble, prepared, and careful. God calls us to engage the culture and the church, but he also warns that we ourselves may fall into the same sins if we’re not careful (Galatians 6), that pride makes us susceptible (1 Corinthians 10), and that a lack of theological grounding can leave us doubting our own beliefs. Fifth, we must know when to keep our distance and when not to. Sometimes God calls us to separate from sin; other times he sends us among sinners. We’re not to separate ourselves from the world—we’re called to be in it but not of it (1 Corinthians 5; John 17:15)—yet we are to withdraw fellowship from professing believers who persist unrepentant in sin (1 Corinthians 5), church discipline being one of God’s means of bringing wandering sinners to repentance. And finally, summing it up: we must treat others as we ourselves would want to be forgiven.
As we close this study, my appeal is that we walk away committed to thinking theologically and gospel-centeredly about all of life—developing the skill of seeing below the surface of the text, grappling with Scripture, and applying it, even to the areas Scripture doesn’t directly address, because the Bible is sufficient. And second, that in all our theological thinking, the ethic of love governs everything we do. We are to be known, first and foremost, as those who love one another; that’s how the world should identify us. So as we think theologically, let us wed together truth and love and be a testimony to the world around us.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for your Word, and thank you for the opportunity to do this study on the doctrines of man and sin. Thank you for all you’ve shown us. I pray you would help these things sink deep into our minds and hearts, and that we would think hard about how they should shape the way we live—in relation to the issues of our day, both outside and inside the church, and as we face new questions raised when your image-bearers create new technologies and give us fresh opportunities to apply your Word to new situations. We ask in Jesus’ name, amen.