We arrived in Louisville after two good and uneventful flights, including one that is the shortest I’ve ever been on. Our first hop took us from Toronto to Cincinnati, a flight of about an hour and a half. The flight from Cincy to Louisville clocked in at just sixteen minutes or something like that. No sooner were we up than we were down and on our way to the hotel. After waiting through a long check-in line at the hotel (it seems we arrived at the Galt House at the same time as a busload of conference attendees being shuttled in from the airport) we got settled into our beautiful and spacious room. And then we went to find the conference venue, the same venue that will be used for next year’s Together for the Gospel Conference. And here we are.

Now this is definitely not your grandmother’s conference. I don’t say that to be disrespectful to grandmothers. Rather, this is a conference both by and for young Christians. And it shows. It is loud (not quite rock concert loud but pretty close) and boisterous. Yet it is controlled and clearly well put together. There is a lot of excitement in the room along with the 3,000 or so young people in attendance—people representing 39 states, 6 countries and 3 continents. It’s certainly a far cry from some of the more recent conferences I’ve been to: The Basics, Twin Lakes, Ligonier and so on. And that is part of my attraction to it. I am, once again, delighting in diversity.

The conference kicked off at 7:30 and began with a worship set that included a mix of hymns, modern worship songs, choruses and a few Sovereign Grace favorites. Eric Simmons then introduced the conference and its topic—spiritual discernment. It seems that the purpose of this conference, like the New Attitude conferences before it, is to rediscover truth and to live in the light of it. Sounds good to me!

The first teaching session fell, as we might expect, to Josh Harris. His exhortation was simple: we must be humble before truth. When we encounter truth we need to first live it ourselves and then humbly proclaim it to this lost world. We need to proclaim this truth not as people who are right but as people who have been rescued. You can’t have humble orthodoxy without discernment. You can only love the truth if you can distinguish it from error, and this is what discernment is all about. Tonight’s goal is to introduce the topic and to convince us of its importance, thus whetting our appetites for what is going to come over the next three days.

So what is discernment? The simplest definition is “the ability to judge well.” It is the ability to identify something of good quality. A person with a discerning ear is a person who can judge good music or a person with a discerning eye is a person who chooses his decorations or clothes tastefully. Conversely, when people choose poor quality we say that they lack discernment. Discernment is very similar to possessing wisdom and the two are very closely connected. Wisdom is the ability to understand and to see life in light of who God is and how He has created the world and then to make appropriate decisions. Discernment is a part of living a wise life but is specifically the ability to distinguish between things. The root word means “to separate apart.” Discernment is the ability to distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong, truth and error, wise and unwise. 1 Thessalonians 5:21-22 says “Test everything. Hold on to the good. Avoid every kind of evil.” This is a description of the activity of discernment. First you test, examine and look closely. You determine the true nature of what you’re interacting with. And then you have to sort that idea or concept—you need to hold on to or cling to what is good and avoid what is evil. You need to not only see and distinguish but also act on what you see in light of what God values. This is really quite straight forward. If that’s discernment, do we really need a whole conference about this?

Josh provided two reasons we need to give attention to this topic. First, discernment is not as simple as doing something like picking the peanuts from a bowl of Cracker Jacks. We are not born with a full measure of discernment and it is not always obvious what is good and what is evil. If people always announced that they were evil, discernment would always be an easy discipline. Yet the real content and the eventual consequences of ideas and practices that we encounter in this world and in the Christian subculture are not always obvious. There are subtle, unhelpful tendencies; there are pitfalls we don’t immediately see. Discernment between wise and unwise counsel isn’t always easy and it’s sometimes mixed together.

The second reason we need to take the time to focus on discernment is because whether or not we have this discernment is a matter of life and death. These are not exaggerated words. There are portions of life where discernment is of little consequence, but in the spiritual realm we’re talking about our souls. We’re talking about whether or not we will know and obey the truth that has the power to redeem fallen humanity. We’re talking about whether or not we will know the living God for who He is. We’re talking about whether we’ll walk the narrow road leading to life or the broad path leading to destruction. We see this throughout the Bible where people have set before them the path to life or death. Discernment matters because our souls are at stake and we have the chance to distinguish truth and live it in such a way that we can serve those around us—people who need to hear the untainted gospel. Discernment ultimately matters because God’s glory is at stake. The right understanding and right application of God’s Word brings glory to Him.

The Bible tells us in many places how we can grow in discernment. It shows us that this is not the privilege of only a few Christians. There are several passages Josh pointed out: Psalm 119:125, Daniel 2:21 and 1 Kings 3:9. We’re not only to ask for it but to work at it. The first step in gaining this knowledge is studying God’s Word: There are several passages pertaining to this as well: Psalm 119:104, Ephesians 5:10, Hebrews 5:14.

The remainder of the message was based around Romans 12:1-2.

Chapter twelve of Romans is a significant transition in this letter. He has just explained that we can only be justified by faith in Jesus who died as our substitute. The first eleven chapters provide the glorious gospel. In chapter twelve Paul makes the transition from the truth of the gospel and begins to look at the ethical implications for this gospel on our lives. He turns to practical application. These first two verses are very pivotal, holding on to two things: the truth of the gospel and gospel living. And this is what discernment is really all about. Holding on to the truth and to the application. “I appeal to you therefore brothers by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” In light of what Jesus has done for you, here is the perfect response: Give Him everything that you are.

In verse two Paul explains the work that is involved in maintaining a life of worship like this. How do you stay on the altar as a living sacrifice? How do you live a life that is fully given to the Lord? It tells us we need to live in a certain way so we can perceive the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. The reason we want discernment is so that we can know and follow God’s will. The reason we want to grow in discernment is that we want God. We want to please Him and walk humbly with Him, glorifying Him. This passage tells us what this kind of discernment requires:

Discernment requires resistance. “Do not be conformed to this world.” It could also read “do not be conformed to this age.” We need to resist being pulled along by the modern godless way of thinking like the world. Don’t think like the way this world thinks. Resist this! An aspect of discernment is taking the time to understand our age and its values. Do you know how this world is trying to make you conform to it? Have you ever taken the time to truly understand the values of our age? This takes a lifetime of hard work to do and that’s why a conference like this needs to celebrate the teaching of men who are a generation or two ahead of us. We need those who have trained themselves in discernment so they can come along beside us and help us understand the culture. The resistance takes work but inevitably following God’s way and choosing His good and acceptable and perfect way involves being rejected by this world. It involves the loss of this world’s admiration and respect. Not being conformed means that you don’t fit in. It means that you’re going to be left out. You need to count that cost. This is one thing to agree to during a conference like this, but a completely different matter when we get to real life. The practice of discernment requires a break with the world. Christian nonconformity is not the cool kind. When rock stars are nonconformists they are cool, but when Christians are nonconformists we’re idiots; we look silly. If you’re not willing to die to the desire to appear sophisticated and hip and together in the eyes of the world then we will never be willing to risk conformity and we will never be discerning. We want to serve Jesus, but we want to do so in a way where people will say “Those Christians really aren’t so bad. They’re really kind of cool in their Christian kind of way.” If we allow this desire to rule us, we will let our theology and lifestyle be molded by the world’s pattern and discernment dies.

Discernment requires renewal. Instead of being conformed to our age we are to be transformed by the renewal of our minds. This means a constant reclaiming of the truths of God’s Word. We don’t just hear God’s Word once and figure we’ve got it down, but instead we need to constantly review and renew the truths of the Word. They need to be constantly renewed.

Discernment requires action. The purpose of resisting conformity and being transformed is so that by testing you may discern God’s will. You can’t discern God’s will by sitting back and evaluating from a distance. Armchair discernment that is never played out in real life is not true discernment. Rather, it requires theologically-informed action. The only way for you to grow in discernment is to act on what God has already revealed to you. We could say that discernment requires application or implementation. You can’t fully understand or appreciate how good and acceptable and perfect God’s will is until you apply it to your life. We don’t test God’s will in the way a teacher might give a pop quiz. We are not in the position of authority. This is saying that we must test and examine it by obeying it and doing it. When by grace we obey God’s Word we are testing the goodness of His way and we find that it is truly good. It is also important to note that when we fail to act on truth, discernment dies. When God makes something clear and you don’t live in light of that truth, you’re not only disobeying God but you’re also stepping into spiritual blindness; you’re deceiving yourself. For many here, the best thing you can do to grow in discernment is simply to obey God in the places that He has already made His will clear in His Word.

Discernment requires the gospel. In the flow of our text this point really should have been the first point, but it’s here because it’s the most important point to make. The work of Christ undergirds all we say and teach about discernment. We cannot rightly live the Christian life, we cannot be holy, we cannot be discerning unless we understand that the foundation of everything is not what we have done and not what we do, but what Jesus Christ has done for us. Paul points us back to the glorious gospel. Even this application is built upon the gospel. Discernment must never be separated from the gospel because it’s only possible to discern because of the gospel. We can only resist conforming to the world because Jesus’ work on the cross has freed us from the dominion of sin. Because of Christ we can now resist the devil and obey God. Our practice of discernment must be done with great humility because we know that it is through God’s mercy that we can discern anything. We discern in view of God’s mercy. There is no place for an arrogant practice of discernment. Self-righteous views of discernment have no place and make no sense. To have a heart of superiority has nothing to do with the mercy that you have been shown. If we practice discernment in view of God’s mercy we will practice it with humility. Any time you open your Bible and see and understand something, anytime you turn from any kind of error, that moment is a moment for you to thank God for His mercy in your life.

The theme for NA 2007 is discernment, but even while we focus on this, let’s not be preoccupied on it. Let’s be preoccupied by the undeserved mercy we’ve been given. We see only because Jesus died for us. Discernment is not an end in itself and is not our destination. God calls us to something greater. He wants all of us and His call on each person is to offer our very bodies to Him as living sacrifices. He calls us to give up any claim we have on our own life, any desire to rule and decide for ourselves. Discernment is simply the fruit of a life willingly offered to God. It is the result of knowing and enjoying our glorious God.

Josh closed with Roy Ortmund Jr.’s paraphrase of these verses, which went on just a little too long and a little too fast for me to be able to capture…

I’ll be back tomorrow with several updates, including summaries of sessions led by Mark Dever, Al Mohler and C.J. Mahaney.

This is the fourth installment in a series of articles discussing the Christian tendency to put God in a box. In the first article we saw that we tend to feel insecure about God unless we have contained Him within a box in our minds and then saw that God has revealed Himself to us in a way that is incomplete, but which we can understand. God's revelation of Himself provides a framework within which we can understand Him. While incomplete and not exhaustive, this framework is nevertheless accurate and trustworthy. In the second article we examined how we can allow our doctrine to put God in a box through our ignorance, through our imaginations and by making theology and end in itself. In the third article we looked at ways we put God in a box through our attempts to live a life of Christian piety.

As I explained in previous articles, the Christian faith in general, and the Reformed faith in particular, has often been divided into three main thrusts. These overlap, and thus are somewhat false distinctions, but serve to differentiate between diverse emphases of the Christian life. They are the doctrinal (what we believe), the pietist (how we worship on the basis of what we believe) and the transformationalist. Today we will look at the Christian's duty to the world to be a transformationalist and how it can lead us to put God in a box.

The transformationalist emphasis refers to the way Christians relate to the world and to the culture around us. It seeks to avoid isolationism, but to impact the culture in ways consistent with Christian doctrine and piety. It seeks to fulfill the Great Commission to take the Gospel to the whole world, and to respond to the exhortation of James that "faith without works is dead." For some believers it includes the "cultural mandate" which is how they describe the job description God gave to man at the beginning of time: to rule the world with Him. Yet in doing these things—noble pursuits though they may be—we can unknowingly or unintentionally place God in a box of our own making.

When we emphasize God's Sovereignty over Human Responsibility

There is always a tension in the Christian's life between the sovereignty of God and our responsibility to act. We can never come to a full understanding of how God interacts with this world and with its inhabitants for this is a mystery too great for us to conquer. Thankfully God does not expect us to conquer it. Rather, we are to live in this tension and to delight in it. He commands us to go forth in His power in order to do the work He has assigned to us. We do not need to concern ourselves as much with the "why" as with the "how." And then we just begin to do it.

When we over-emphasize God's sovereignty, we can place Him in a box whereby we deny that He can or will act to save people. Taken to its deepest connotations, we know this as hyper-Calvinism, and it is a dangerous belief to slip into. Hyper-Calvinists see no reason to go into the culture or to evangelize the lost. For, they say, God will necessarily save His elect and He does not depend on us to help Him. This view fails to understand that God sees fit to use us to accomplish His work in the world, not out of necessity, but because it fits His plan. We must act in full view of God’s sovereignty and trusting in His sovereignty.

When we emphasize Human Responsibility over God's Sovereignty

Just as we can overemphasize God's sovereignty, in the same way we can place too great an emphasis on human responsibility. When we do this, we tacitly deny that God is the one who is sovereign in the salvation of souls. When we lose sight of God's right to act as He sees fit, and to act in accordance with His plans, we can place God in a box whereby we believe that He is helpless without us. We may then examine our words or actions in light of their results instead of in the light of God's Truth. We may elevate results to the status of ultimate arbiter of right or wrong.

This is known as pragmatism and it is very common in the evangelical churches. It underlies the church growth movement and has done much to damage the church. The biblical truth is that God does not need you or me. God expects us to act in accordance with His wisdom, as revealed in Scripture, instead of human wisdom which is based on human folly. Hudson Taylor, missionary to China in the nineteenth century, said, "God’s work, done in God’s way, will never lack for supplies." They key to doing God's work in a way that pleases Him is to do it in His way, acknowledging that He chooses to use us, despite not needing us. We must act, to be sure, but we act only in the ways God, in His sovereignty, has told us to act.

When We Forget Where We Came From

When we have been justified and are beginning to be sanctified, conforming ever more to the image of Christ, we can become smug, forgetting that it was only the grace of God that saved us and made us new. We can begin to believe that we somehow merited His favor, or that the changes wrought in us have been made through our own power. It is shocking that we can so quickly lose sight of our past and lose sight of God's grace, but this is all too common among believers.

It is crucial that we continually heed the words of Peter where he warns that we must, "Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for "God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble" (1 Peter 5:5). We need to maintain a humility born of knowledge of who we are. We need to realize that God did not choose us because of anything in us or anything we could offer Him. God chose us only through His sovereign free will.

When we forget the past and lose sight of our total and absolute depravity, we place God in a box whereby He chooses those who love Him most or those whom He can use best. And then we hesitate to take the Word to those we deem somehow unfit to hear it or unlikely to respond to it.

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Through the last four articles we have seen that Christians can box God in any and every area of our lives. We are as likely to box Him, denying His power or right to act in our piety as we are in our doctrine. We are as likely to need to break boxes in our attempts to take the Gospel to the world as we are in our understanding of His character.

This short series will conclude with one final article where I’ll attempt to put this together and see what boxing God can do to us. We will see the wonders that can be ours when we let God be God.

This is the third article in a series that discusses that tendency Christians have to put God in a box. In the first article (link) we saw that we tend to feel insecure about God unless we have contained Him within a box in our minds and then saw that God has revealed Himself to us in a way that is incomplete, but which we can understand. God’s revelation of Himself provides a framework within which we can understand Him. While incomplete, this framework is accurate and trustworthy. In the second article (link) we examined how we can allow our doctrine to put God in a box through our ignorance, through our imaginations and by making theology and end in itself.

Today we will look at Christian piety and how it can lead us to put God in a box.

Piety is the desire and willingness to live out what we believe—to live in light of our faith. Any religion can and does encourage piety in its adherents. There are pious Muslims, pious Hindus and pious Christians. The difference between Christians and adherents to other religions is that Christians are indwelt by the Spirit of God, who enables us to live in ways that are consistent with the Scripture and are pleasing to God. This process of sanctification (becoming holy) is a necessary component to the Christian walk and is the very basis of Christian piety. The Spirit gives us both the ability and the desire to live in a way that is pleasing to God; to perform our religious duties for His sake and in His power.

But just as something as wondrous and pure as doctrine can lead us to box God, in the same way we can box God through our piety. Today we’ll look at three ways that we are prone to do this.

Boxing God When I Know That I Know

We put God in a box when we “know that we know” what God can or will not do. This is a popular phrase in evangelical circles and one that people often use to convince others that they are secure in God’s will or understand exactly how God works. In the first article of this series we looked at verses of Scripture written by the prophet Isaiah. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9). We need to keep in mind that what God has revealed of Himself in Scripture is true. We can know with certainty from Scripture, for example, that God can and will not sin. Were God to sin, He would disprove His own existence and Divinity. Were God to send a flood to destroy the entire world, He would contradict a clear and absolute promise. God is entirely rational and trustworthy. So what the Scriptures plainly teach, we can believe with confidence.

But too often we limit our belief in what God can or will do in areas far beyond those He has expressly told us. We need to be careful when we say “God wouldn’t do that” or “God doesn’t act like that in the world today.” If God did miracles in days past, He can do so today. If He healed the sick and raised the dead, He has proven that He can and will act in that way. For us to flatly deny that He acts in that way today is to deny Him an ability that is His. He may choose not to act like that in our day or even in our culture, but we need to be careful with what we state He will never do (or what He will always do).

Some of the most shocking verses in the Bible come from Mark 11:23, where Jesus says, “Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him.” Do we really believe this, or have we filed it away as metaphor or exaggeration? A similar passage is 1 John 5:14-15 which reads “And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.” God places no limits on His own ability to act in and through us. But often we impose those limits in Him.

Boxing God by Knowing the Unknowable

We put God in a box when we believe we know exactly why things happen the way they do. “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deuteronomy 29:29). The starting point of Reformed doctrine is often taught to be the depravity of man, but it really needs to begin and end with God’s sovereignty. God is overwhelmingly sovereign in this world, so that there is nothing that happens that is beyond his knowledge and control. When calamity strikes, God not only knows about it, but has in some way ordained that it should happen (yet in a way that does not make Him the author of evil). As the Shorter Catechism tells us, “The decrees of God are, his eternal purpose, according to the counsel of his will, whereby, for his own glory, he hath foreordained whatsoever comes to pass” (Question and Answer 7). Somehow, mysteriously, everything that happens brings glory to God. God has necessarily withheld from us why many things happen. Why the tsunami of 2004 had to take so many lives and destroy so many families, we do not know. And we do not know why God allowed and decreed that thousands of lives would be lost on September 11. But God does. We need to rest in our knowledge of His foreknowledge and sovereignty.

When we determine why things have happened, we place God in a box, believing that we can know the unknowable and that we can understand what He has not given us to understand. Soon after the tsunami I heard Christian leaders suggesting that the tsunami was sent to punish people in areas of the world where Christians are undergoing particularly harsh persecution. But we do not know this. After September 11, vocal Christian leaders decreed that the events of that day were sent as a punishment for America’s moral decay. But we do not know that either. God has hidden that knowledge from us, and we should not place Him in a box by making up in our minds why these things have come to pass. We need only look to Job’s friends to see the danger and the folly of declaring the hidden things. Perhaps in eternity God will reveal these things to us and make the reasons clear. Perhaps not. In either way, this is His world and He is free to act in it as He sees fit. Rather than boxing God as the one who sends calamity to punish evil, we need to understand Him as the one who controls the world, yet dispenses knowledge only as He sees fit.

Boxing God By a Faith/Values Split

We put God in a box when we separate our piety from our every day lives. We live in a society which makes it easy to claim to be a Christian, but also makes it too easy to separate our faith from our everyday lives. Nancy Pearcey, in her book Total Truth, says that Christianity is in “cultural captivity.” She shows how far too many Christians have succumbed to society’s belief that there are two spheres in society, the private and the public. The private sphere is awash in moral relativism. Religion is to be kept in the private sphere and is considered a subjective choice, not an objective reality. This is the sphere of values. Conversely, the public sphere is the dwelling place of facts — that which is objective and can be proven scientifically. The public sphere, the sphere of facts, is objective and binding on everyone.

Far too many Christians see the world in this way. We see this often in the words and the faith of politicians. They constantly claim to be Christians, yet are always careful to separate their faith from the decisions they make in ruling the nations. They claim to hold Christians beliefs but also claim that these beliefs have no real bearing on the way they act as politicians. Privately they are Christians but publicly they are not. Sadly, this is in no way unique as it is probably safe to say that the majority of those who claim to be Christians hold similar beliefs. In Total Truth Pearcey writes about a woman she met who claimed to be a Christian, yet worked at a Planned Parenthood clinic (which, sadly, was staffed by many other Christians). She did not see the clear conflict between her values and her job — she had compartmentalized God in the values sphere while her job was part of the objective, facts sphere.

When we view the world through this lens we have placed God in a box (or a sphere — I’m beginning to mix my metaphors). We have practically, though in all likelihood unknowingly, defined our faith as a private, subjective belief. We have boxed God as One who is important to us privately, yet has little impact on our daily lives. We need to understand that we cannot and must not separate our piety from our doctrine. We must always live what we believe, at home, in church and in the workplace.

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I made it clear in the last article that the Bible does not contain God. Rather, the Bible contains and restrains us. This is as important to note in our piety as in our doctrine. We must live lives that are consistently pleasing to God, never placing limits on His ability to act in a way that is consistent with His revelation of Himself. At the same time, we must maintain a piety that reaches every corner of our lives, for His grace and in His power.

In our next article we will look at how we place God in a box Transformationally.

This is the second article in a short series dealing with the tendency Christians have to put God in a box (click here for the first article). Several people, commenting on this first article, remarked that this is a topic usually reserved for people attacked Reformed theology rather than defending it. Bear with me and I think you’ll have to agree that we, even as Bible-loving Christians, can put God in a box. We can find ourselves feeling insecure about Him unless we have contained Him within a structure of our own making. We saw yesterday that God has revealed Himself to us in the Scripture in a way that is incomplete, yet in a way that we can understand—in a way that is sufficient and true but not exhaustive. This revelation of Himself provides a framework within which we can begin to comprehend Him. To close the article I suggested that there are three predominant ways we box God and these correlate with the three emphasizes of Reformed theology - the doctrinalist, the pietist and the transformationalist. Today we will examine the first of these.

The tragedy of the Fall is often seen most vividly in times of war. It is overwhelmingly tragic when humans fight against humans, destroying lives, tearing apart families and plunging whole nations into terrible chaos. There is often a strange irony in war, where each side claims to be fighting for God. The American Civil War pitted a nation against itself, with each side being blessed by the presence of some inspiring, godly men who felt they were fighting for the Lord. In the Second World War, while millions of Christians were praying for God’s help in defeating the Nazis, the German army marched against nation after nation wearing belt buckles inscribed with the words, “God with us.” Each side in these conflicts felt God was on their side and that He was neatly boxed and bundled ready to be called on to wage war against the enemy.

Christians can box God in just this way, even through their knowledge of Him. Let me affirm that doctrine is of critical importance to the Christian walk. I love doctrine and love theology! Few things excite me as much as learning something new about God and about coming to a more accurate understanding of who God is and how He acts. The Bible continually exhorts us to be sure of our doctrine and to ensure that we are walking rightly before God. There are many passages of Scripture that speak to this. In Ephesians 3 Paul expresses his willingness to suffer for Christ, “that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (Ephesians 3:10). Paul exhorts Titus to “teach what accords with sound doctrine” (Titus 2:1). There are repeated warnings in Scripture that we ensure we do not allow ourselves to be deceived by false doctrine. The Bible paints a clear picture of the importance of doctrine—of knowing God precisely as He has revealed Himself to us.

So while we dare not downplay doctrine, at the same time we must admit that it can lead us to place limitations on God. This should not convince us to conclude that the fault is with doctrine in general or with biblical doctrine in particular. The fault is with us. Today we’ll look at three ways Christians are prone to box God through their doctrine.

Boxing God With Our Ignorance

We have the responsibility to know and believe what God has revealed of Himself in the Scripture. Sometimes, though, we get it wrong. So the first way we can put God in a box is through our misunderstandings of Him and His nature. Furthermore, we may also try to define God in a way that is simplistic or that is inconsistent with who He is. A classic example would be the statement that “God is love.” Of course this is true for the Bible affirms that God is the very embodiment of love. Love is part of the very fabric of His being. But this is simplistic if we do not take into account God’s other attributes, such as His wrath. If we create a definition or understanding of God that overemphasizes one of His attributes at the expense of others, we have constructed a false view. We have put Him in a box of our own making. In the end we have created a view of God that is based on ignorance. Quite simply we do not know God as we should based on the information He has given in His Word.

I am sure you can see the danger here. Most of the false views of God we encounter are based on just this type of ignorance. People, sometimes deliberately but more often acting out of ignorance, ignore an aspect of God that they do not understand or that makes them uncomfortable.

We see then, that to avoid constructing this type of box, we need to know Him and to know Him as He truly is. We need to study all that His Word tells us about Him, His character, His attributes and the ways He acts. We need to always keep in mind the limitations of language that we discussed yesterday—that God’s attributes are infinite, yet we can only define them by comparing them to the finite examples we know and understand. When we say that “God is like” something, we mean that He bears a vague resemblance to it, not that He truly is the same as it.

In the example above, we cannot accurately say that God is love until we have reconciled His love with the other attributes He has seen fit to reveal to us and until we have seen how this attributes work themselves out. God’s love cannot be separated from or dealt with in isolation from wrath and justice. Just this morning I finished reading a book dealing with penal substitution and was grateful to see how often the authors emphasize how many of God’s attributes were seen clearly and without conflict at the cross. God’s love, justice, wrath, mercy, grace and so many others were all in full display at the cross. Those who consider penal substitution a vulgar or distasteful doctrine so often portray God in such a way that they ignore one or more of His attributes that are clearly revealed in Scripture.

Boxing God With Human Wisdom

A second way we can put God in a box is through creating or assuming knowledge of Him that He has not revealed to us. When we understand our limitations, we will have to conclude that there are some things that are simply too wondrous for us to comprehend. There are some areas where we need to understand and believe what Scripture tells us, but probe no deeper. Yesterday we read the verses of Psalm 131, “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me.” David’s humility and confidence need to be ours. We are to let God be God, realizing that there are some things that He has withheld from us based on necessity (those things that we simply cannot understand) and based on His wisdom.

Perhaps the clearest example of something that is beyond our comprehension is the doctrine of the Trinity. We can know and understand from Scripture that God exists as three persons, yet one being. We can understand some of what this means and can begin to grapple with the nature of the Godhead. Yet we can never come to a complete understanding of a doctrine so wondrous. The same is true of the correlation between human responsibility and Divine sovereignty. We know they both exist, yet we cannot always understand how they relate. The best of men, the greatest of theologians, have had no choice but to admit their own inability when faced with such grandeur.

And so we must, in humility, refuse to create a full, complete or exhaustive understanding of God in those areas He has kept silent. While we can have confidence that He knows these things and that they are consistent with His nature, we should not jump to conclusions about the finer details. Where God has kept silent, so should we, in an attitude of awe towards Him. If we feel we have mastered the doctrine of the Trinity, we have placed God in a box of our own making, for the reality is that God does not give us sufficient information about this doctrine for us to ever master it.

Boxing God by Sola Theologica

A third way we can put God in a box is by making theology an end in itself. We are all prone to this error, but perhaps Reformed Christians more than others. In our flawed, limited understanding of God, we can make an idol of theology. Rather than studying God with a view to making theology a practical outpouring of the wonder of who He is, we succumb to theology-ology, or “the study of the study of God.” This lazy study leads only to puffed-up knowledge with little practical application. An unbeliever can study the study of God as easily as a Christian, for it does not depend on the Spirit to apply the words to our lives.

Jesus warned “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ (Matthew 7:21-23). In the last days there will be many who have accumulated vast knowledge of God, but who have never truly known Him. They will know about God without ever knowing Him. They will be cast into the lake of fire despite their great knowledge of the Bible and biblical theology.

The warning for us is that we must continually seek the Spirit’s help in applying Scripture to our lives, so that it does not become empty knowledge and an end in itself. Our knowledge of God is useless if it remains only in our minds. All we know about Him should spur us on to worship Him in spirit and truth and to motivate us to take what we know to the world, that others may rejoice with us.

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It bears mentioning once more that the Bible does not contain God. Rather, the Bible contains God’s sufficient (but only partial) revelation of Himself. Yet because God is rational and truthful, we must understand that He will act in accordance with this revelation (lest He prove irrational). Thus any understanding of God that is dependent on doctrine that is outside of the clear teaching of Scripture must be rejected. We can have confidence in the framework of knowledge God provides in the Bible. We can have confidence that it is truly true, even if it is incomplete.

When we study the Bible we must understand that God’s Word is not given to us so that it might restrain or contain God. On the contrary, the Word is given to restrain and contain us! We need to be subject to God, not as He is found in a single verse of Scripture or as He is found in our imaginations, but as He has revealed Himself through the entirety of His revelation.

In our next article we will look at how we are prone to put God in a box through our piety.