On
the Necessity of Acquiring a Christian Mind and Discerning False
Teaching
Jeremiah
23:13-17
Ephesians 4:11-16
Matthew 7:15-20
I:
-- I
have a friend who is a physician at
Toronto
’s
Sunnybrook
Hospital
. He is also professor of
medicine at the
University
of
Toronto
. Several years ago a
fourth-year medical student was suspected of knowing very little
medicine. University
officials were embarrassed. How
had this fellow managed to get to fourth year and seem so ignorant?
Who had marked his examinations and passed him during his first
three years? Why had he been
passed when he should have been failed?
Fourth-year medical students rarely fail, since less able
students are weeded out much earlier in the programme.
My friend was called in. He
asked the student two or three elementary questions concerning anatomy.
The student could not reply.
Whereupon my physician-friend told university officials to plough
this fellow so deep that he would never surface in a medical classroom
or clinic anywhere.
The one thing my friend did not do was say, “Oh well, it
doesn’t matter. No doubt
there are good qualities in the fellow somewhere.
Let’s avoid hurting his feelings; after all, it’s terrible to
be rejected. If the student
is rejected he may never recover emotionally, and we wouldn’t want that
on our hands!” Instead,
“Expel this fellow right now before he has a chance to damage someone
irrecoverably.”
When I was in Grade XIII chemistry the day came when we were to
make hydrogen gas in the classroom.
I’m told that high school students are not permitted to make
hydrogen gas now because of the risk of explosion the process entails.
That’s why my chemistry teacher (1961) carefully instructed us in the
properties of hydrogen gas and the precise steps we were to follow lest
someone’s face be riddled with glass shards.
Then the teacher proceeded to monitor each student’s
experiment. Suppose the
teacher had said and done nothing and an explosion had occurred.
Wouldn’t parents have been right in pronouncing him negligent,
even criminally negligent?
Prophet and apostle (whose written testimony scripture is) are so
very concerned about false teaching , just
because they know that a teacher or preacher or Sunday School instructor
or UCW devotions leader fitted out with false doctrine is dangerous;
dangerous to others of course, but also dangerous to herself.
And the congregation? Any
congregation that lacks a Christian mind; any congregation indifferent
to false teaching, false doctrine is as negligent as the perpetrator
himself.
II:
--
And yet in congregations everywhere in Christendom we find people
impatient with doctrine, impatience with an insistence on sound
teaching, impatient, in short, with acquiring a Christian mind.
Someone is always saying, “Who needs it?
It’s only cerebralism for those who like head games.
Besides, doctrine is frequently an occasion of dispute.
Let’s get rid of it all and just go with Jesus, a doctrine-less
Jesus.”
To speak like this, however, is not to know what one is saying.
For starters, who is this simple Jesus we are to go with?
Why go with him rather than with Winston Churchill?
Because Winston Churchill isn’t the Son of God.
“Son of God” did someone say?
But to speak of Jesus as the Son of God lands us squarely in the
doctrine of the incarnation. All
right, then, forget the incarnation; we shall speak only of Jesus
Christ. But “Christ”
isn’t our Lord’s surname (in the way that “Shepherd” is mine.)
“Christ”, CHRESTOS,
is Greek for the Hebrew MASHIACH,
meaning Messiah. The Messiah
is God’s agent in righting creation gone wrong.
Two doctrines leap out at us: the doctrine of creation and the
doctrine of the fall. (Remember,
a Messiah is needed only for a world gone wrong.)
Our objector, now grown impatient, retorts, “Forget Messiah;
just give us the simple saviour of our Sunday School days.
Saviour? Saviour from
what? Two doctrines leap out
again: sin and salvation. “Can’t
we just believe without all this mental clutter?”
Believe what? Besides,
how does such belief differ from gullibility or superstition or mere
opinion? Obviously
“belief” presupposes a doctrine of faith.
There is no doctrine-less
Jesus.
III:
--
Doctrine, you see, is the articulation of truth.
Where doctrine is dismissed someone is saying there is no such
thing as truth. But
Christians cannot say this. Where
doctrine is unknown truth cannot be known and cannot be commended.
But Christians are eager to know the truth and commend the truth
since we are born of the truth. Where
teaching is out-and-out false people are put on a road that ends in
swamp or desert, never on a road that ends in the
kingdom
of
God
.
The older testament is everywhere concerned with false prophets
and the damage they do. The
newer testament is everywhere concerned with false teachers and the
damage they do. There are
five New Testament books which are especially concerned with the place
of sound teaching (the acquiring of a Christian mind), the place of
truth within the Christian community.
The five brief books are Paul’s two letters to Timothy (a young
preacher), his letter to Titus, plus Peter’s second letter and
Jude’s only letter. These
five epistles especially emphasize the necessity of sound teaching and
the danger of false teaching.
Ponder for a minute Paul’s line in his first letter to Timothy
where he speaks of “...God our saviour, who desires all men to be
saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth”; or in J.B.
Phillips’ paraphrase, “The purpose of God our saviour is that all
men should be saved and come to know the truth”.
Plainly it is Paul’s conviction that we need to be saved
– not helped, not boosted, not fixed up – saved (i.e., spared
spiritual futility now and from eternal loss ultimately); it is his
conviction that God longs to save us all without exception; it is his
conviction too that God does so only as we come to know the truth, that
truth which God himself is and that truth concerning ourselves which God
discloses to us. Knowledge
of God’s truth is essential to our possession of God’s salvation.
On the other hand it is just as plain that dissemination of false
doctrine, false teaching which renders people ignorant of the truth;
this imperils their salvation.
If we have a raging infection our physician prescribes an
antibiotic (penicillin or something like it).
We take the medicine because we believe it is the cure for our
infection. If penicillin
were prescribed and we had already been told that it was not the cure
for our infection, we should only disdain the medicine and have our
infection worsen until we were sick unto death.
People rejoiced to hear the Christmas announcement just because
they believed that what God had prescribed for them was the cure they
needed. The good news of
Christmas was that to them, to them even as they were helpless and
hopeless in their predicament before God, there had been given a saviour.
Not any saviour; the effectual saviour, none other than Jesus of Nazareth and him
only. John insists that
Jesus Christ has been given us as “the remedy for the defilement of
our sins”. Whenever false
teachers with their false doctrine obscure this truth, deny this truth,
diminish this truth, or cast aspersion upon it; whenever this truth is
“fudged” in any way men and women are imperilled before God, since
they will remain without the only saviour any of us can ever have.
Do not think I am exaggerating when I compare God’s truth to
antibiotic medicine without which the infected person sickens unto
death. When Paul speaks of
“sound doctrine” in his letters to Timothy and Titus the one word he
uses over and over for “sound” is HUGIAINOUSA; HUGIAINOUSA is an
everyday medical term which means health-giving.
In other words, sound doctrine, sound teaching, is health-giving
just as surely as false teaching is death-dealing.
In his first letter to Timothy Paul reminds the young man of what
appears when a Christian mind is absent; i.e., when sound doctrine is
absent and false teaching proliferates: “murderers, immoral persons,
sodomites, kidnappers, liars and perjurers”.
Are these people contrasted with virtuous persons?
No. They are
contrasted with “sound doctrine”, health-giving teaching.
At the end of his first letter to Timothy Paul speaks of “the
teaching which accords with godliness”.
Not only does he insist that the young preacher “be able to
give instruction in sound doctrine”, he tells Timothy why: “for by
so doing you will be able to save both yourself and your hearers”.
When I used to interview candidates for the ministry in the
courts of the church I let other committee-members probe the students’
social skills and marital history and career plans and psychological
profile. Instead I always
concentrated on the students’ grasp of God’s truth; I wanted to see
the Christian furniture of their mind.
When I was told eventually that this was none of my business (can
you believe it?) I resigned from the committee, for then I could no
longer protect congregations who would be endangered a year or two later
when these candidates were ordained.
The danger, after all, is not slight.
Jesus speaks of those who address a congregation all the while
appearing to be warm, affectionate sheep when in fact they are ravenous
wolves. They aren’t
ravenous wolves because they are nasty or cruel; they turn out to be
ravenous wolves -- lethal, deadly -- just because they are mindless with
respect to the gospel (even if, perchance, sincere), just because they
have substituted false teaching for God’s truth.
Little wonder, then, that Paul writes the congregation in
Ephesus
and urges the people in it – all
the people in it – to grow up, to get beyond a child’s
understanding. As long as a
congregation has only a child’s understanding, says the apostle, it
will always be “tossed to and fro, carried about with every wind of
doctrine”. “Tossed to
and fro, carried about with every wind of doctrine”: false teaching
blows Christians off course, at the very least.
It likely leaves them upset (spiritually and emotionally seasick)
and may even find them drowning.
For this reason the apostle Jude fulminates against false
teachers in his one-chapter book. In
the most scorching language Jude tells us that false teachers are
“waterless clouds”: they promise life-giving rain but they never
produce a drop for spiritually parched people.
They are “barren fruit-trees”: they yield nothing that is of
any help to anyone. They are
like “wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own
shame”: not only are they as destructive as a typhoon, their own lives
are shameful. Finally, says
Jude, they are like “wandering stars”; today we should say
“shooting stars” which fall out of the sky and fizzle out into the
darkness. Jude’s language,
scorching as it is, is no more severe than our Lord’s when he
says that false teachers appear to be cuddly sheep when in fact they are
lethal wolves.
IV:
--
We haven’t time to explore all the false teaching mentioned in the New
Testament. We have time only
to comment on representative false teaching.
(i)
John identifies as false any teaching which denies the
incarnation. To deny the
incarnation is to deny the atonement; this is to deny that we have been
given a saviour. It’s to
leave people floundering, ignorant and unrepentant, in their sinnership
before God.
(ii)
Peter identifies as false teaching which denies that obedience to
God is required of all Christians, with the result that licentiousness
appears and the name of Jesus is disgraced.
(iii)
Paul identifies as false that teaching which pretends that people
have to earn or merit or deserve their standing with God as pardoned
sinners. Sound doctrine, on
the other hand, insists that we are justified by grace through faith on
account of Christ; we are set right with God, rightly related to him, as
we trust in faith his provision of mercy, fashioned for us and
vouchsafed to us in his Son.
(iv)
James identifies as false the teaching that we can be hearers of
the Word of God without being doers of the selfsame Word.
To be an authentic hearer, says James, is always to be a doer,
especially a doer on behalf of what James calls “the widow and the
orphan”; that is, those people who are marginalized, vulnerable or
defenceless.
(v)
Jude has more to say about false teachers in his tiny letter than
any other NT writer. “Recognize
them and avoid them”, he tells us.
How are we to recognize them?
If they contradict the gospel they give themselves away.
In addition, says Jude, they use fancy language; they are
intellectual snobs; they are slick manipulators; and they claim to have
the Holy Spirit extraordinarily when all the while they behave
shamefully. Recognize them
and avoid them.
V:
--
There is one crucial point you must give me time to make this morning:
while correct teaching, sound doctrine, truth is necessary, it is not
enough. Necessary, always
necessary, but of itself never sufficient.
You see, it is possible to grasp the truth of God with one’s
mind and yet have one’s heart far from God.
The Hebrew prophets always knew this.
The Hebrew prophets didn’t suspect that their people were
ignorant of Torah. They knew
that their people had been schooled in Torah since infancy and therefore
were apprized of God’s nature and God’s purpose and God’s way.
Nevertheless, cried the prophets, what the people have in their
heads they do not yet have in their hearts.
The God they say they believe in they do not obey.
The one whose love rescued them from
Egypt
and sustained them in the wilderness; this one who loves them they do
not love in turn. The God
they know so much about they are personally acquainted with so very
slightly. The Hebrew
prophets plead with their people to encounter intimately the person of
the God whose truth has already informed their minds.
When I was moving step-by-step through my doctoral programme I
had to sit a series of oral examinations on a variety of topics.
One of my examiners was Professor Jakob Jocz, a third-generation
Lithuanian Hebrew-Christian. When
my examination with him was over Jocz leaned forward in his chair, fixed
his eyes on me and said in his pronounced, Eastern European accent,
“Shepherd, you have done well in this examination.
But I want you to remember something.
As important as the truth is that we have probed today, it is by
no means everything: what really counts is the shape of a person’s
life”. I have never
forgotten this.
I like to think that I have made considerable progress in
acquiring a Christian mind. But
this fact does not mean for one minute that I am more intimately
acquainted with the living God than is the old saint who has prayed and
wrestled, suffered and obeyed, pleaded and praised every day for decades
and who can now echo the psalmist from the bottom of her heart: “I
will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me”.
(Psalm 13:6)
Whenever I think about my grasp of sound doctrine I recall the
word of the apostle James. James,
together with all prophets and apostles, knows that sound doctrine is
utterly essential to the calling and equipping and strengthening of
God’s people. Then should
every Christian aspire to be a teacher, an expositor of sound doctrine?
Of course not.
Still, there are six clergy-leaders in the congregation of St
Bride’s who are appointed to teach.
We six are prayed for every Sunday.
Good. We need all the
help we can get. At the same
time, we should be aware, according to James, that those who teach are
going to be judged with greater strictness.
Since we clergy-teachers are going to be judged with greater
strictness, why don’t you do us the favour of judging us now, thereby
sparing us something worse later? “What
counts is the shape of a person’s life.”
Don’t leave us in any ghastly illusion concerning ourselves one
day longer. For I know that
the psalmist is correct when he insists that the upright, and only the
upright, are going to behold the face of God. (Psalm 11:7)
Victor
Shepherd
St Bride’s Anglican Church,
Mississauga
October 2, 2010
Jeremiah
23:13-17
Matthew
7:15
1
Timothy 1:3; 2:4;
1:10
;
4:16
;
Titus
1:9
Ephesians
4:13
Jude
12-13
James
2:19
Psalm
13:6; 11:7
