Our Sufficiency in Christ E-Book

John MacArthur

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1998

Seitenzahl: 318

Beschreibung

Christ's divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness. —2 Peter 1:3 Pure Christianity needs no embellishment whatsoever. We find complete sufficiency in Christ and His provision for our needs. But too many Christians have bought in to the notion that all the spiritual resources we gain at the moment of salvation are not adequate to meet the real needs in today's complex world. So they look for something more—an emotionally exciting and self-edifying experience not found in God's Word. This failure to understand the sufficiency of Christ has opened the door to all kinds of worldy influences, causing many modern believers to mix biblical truths with seemingly helpful man-made methods such as mysticism and psychology. As a result, they wallow in a watered-down, pseudo-Christanity that has been drained of its vitality, effectiveness, and security. In this book John MacArthur exposes the main ways Christians have displaced their spiritual resources and explains how to avoid making the same error. It will make you newly aware of how completely God provides—and give you a renewed understanding of what it means to be "complete in Christ."

Leseprobe

OUR SUFFICIENCY IN

CHRIST

JOHN MACARTHUR

Our Sufficiency in Christ

Copyright © 1991 by John MacArthur

Originally published by Word Publishing

Crossway Books edition first published 1998

Published by Crossway

1300 Crescent Street

Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided by USA copyright law.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations in this book are taken from the New American Standard Bible, copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977 by The Lockman Foundation and are used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible: New International Version,® copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved. The “NIV” and “New International Version” trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James Version.

First Crossway printing, 1998

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

MacArthur, John 1939-

Our sufficiency in Christ / John F. MacArthur.

p.cm.

Originally published : Dallas : Word Pub., cl991.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 13: 978-1-58134-013-6

ISBN 10: 1-58134-013-3

1. Spiritual Life—Christianity.2. Christianity—20th century—Controversial literature.I. Title.

BV4501.2.M16251998

273’.9—dc2198–20910

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

To the memory of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, a gifted servant of God, who in another place and time built his life and ministry on the sufficiency of Christ. May there be many more like him.

In Him all the fulness of Deity dwells in bodily form, and in Him you have been made complete.

Colossians 2:9–10

CONTENTS

Cover PageTitle PageCopyrightDedicationAcknowledgmentsPreface1. Resurrecting an Old HeresyGnosticism’s Invasion of the Early ChurchNeo-Gnosticism’s Attack on the Contemporary Church2. Treasure or Trash?A Rich Legacy to EnjoyTwo Revolutionary ConceptsAdoring God for Our Eternal InheritanceHow We Received Our InheritanceThe Nature of Our InheritanceThe Security of Our Inheritance3. Does God Need a Psychiatrist?The Professionalization of the Counseling MinistryHow Scientific Are the Behavioral Sciences?The Failure of “Christian Psychology”4. Truth in a World of TheoryA Psalm on the Sufficiency of God’s WordMore Than Much Fine Gold5. Psychological Sanctification?Can We Find Reliable Answers within Ourselves?A Testimony about the Power of God’s WordBecoming People of the WordCounseling with the BibleWhatever Happened to the Holy Spirit?Are You Now Being Perfected by the Flesh?6. Bible-Believing DoubtersA Blueprint for DisasterWhat More Can Be Said?What the Divine Author SaysAn Appeal for DiscernmentPreach the Word . . . and Nothing but the Word7. Religious HedonismLiberalism’s LegacyWhat’s Wrong with Pragmatism?“All Things to All Men”“The Power of God for Salvation”How’s Your Spiritual Diet?8. The Quest for Something MoreChrist Plus PhilosophyChrist Plus LegalismChrist Plus MysticismChrist Plus AsceticismChrist Plus Nothing!9. A Balance of Faith and EffortQuietism Versus PietismStriking a Proper BalanceOur Part: Working Out Our SalvationGod’s Part: Working in Us10. Spiritual Warfare: Who’s After Whom?The ParticipantsSatan’s TargetsBelievers’ Role in the WarfareSatan’s StrategyGod’s Sovereign Purpose“Delivered Over to Satan”How Can We Fight the Devil?11. Sufficient GraceGrace upon GraceSuper-Abounding GraceAil-Sufficient GraceThe Lessons of GraceGrace Amid Trials12. Epilogue: Perfect SufficiencyEndnotesTopical IndexScripture IndexBack Cover

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Phil Johnson, Dennis McBride, and Lance Quinn, good friends whose contributions to this effort are known to the Lord.

PREFACE

His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.

2 Peter 1:3

IN HIS BRILLIANT SATIRE THE SCREWTAPE Letters C. S. Lewis imagined this dispatch from the demon Screwtape to his apprentice, Wormwood, who was trying desperately to keep his human “patient” from practicing biblical Christianity:

My Dear Wormwood,

The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merely Christian. They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remains mere Christianity. What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call “Christianity And.” You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. . . .

The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere “understanding.” Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

But the greatest triumph of all is to elevate this horror of the Same Old Thing into a philosophy so that nonsense in the intellect may reinforce corruption in the will. It is here that the general Evolutionary or Historical character of modrn European thought (partly our work) comes in so useful. The Enemy [God, in Screwtape’s reckoning] loves platitudes. Of a proposed course of action He wants men, so far as I can see, to ask very simple questions; is it righteous? is it prudent? is it possible? Now if we can keep men asking “Is it in accordance with the general movement of our time? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History is going?” they will neglect the relevant questions. And the questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will be depends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke the future to help them to make. As a result, while their minds are buzzing in this vacuum, we have the better chance to slip in and bend them to the action we have decided on. And great work has already been done. Once they knew that some changes were for the better, and others for the worse, and others again indifferent. We have largely removed this knowledge. For the descriptive adjective “unchanged” we have substituted the emotional adjective “stagnant.” We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain—not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is,

Your affectionate uncleScrewtape1

That describes precisely the strategy Satan is using with maximum effectiveness against the church today. Lewis exposed in those few words the essence of the problem I hope to address in this book. When he wrote that mythical letter from Uncle Screwtape in the 1940s, Lewis was correctly diagnosing an ailment that has practically crippled the contemporary church.

The villainous Screwtape hated “mere Christianity” and desperately wanted to adorn it with worldly ideas, fads, trendy add-ons, and whatever else he could sell gullible Christians. Why? Because he knew those things can only water down and weaken the purity of the faith. Pure Christianity needs no embellishment: “[Christ’s] divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness” (2 Pet. 1:3, emphasis added).

My last major polemic work, The Gospel According to Jesus, ended with a reference to 2 Peter 1:3. That book dealt with the gospel message and explored the question of what it means to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.

The book struck an emotional chord, which was no surprise to me, but I confess I was startled by the volume of the clamor it generated. I am now working on two more books that will address the “lordship salvation” controversy further from a study of the apostles’ writings.

This book, however, is not about that issue. Here I am concerned with the current erosion of confidence in the perfect sufficiency of our spiritual resources in Christ.

I anticipate that this book, too, will stir some controversy—though it shouldn’t. As Christians, we find complete sufficiency in Christ and His provisions for our needs. There’s no such thing as an incomplete or deficient Christian. Our Savior’s divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness. Human wisdom offers nothing to augment that. Every Christian receives all he or she needs at the moment of salvation. Each one must grow and mature, but no necessary resource is missing. There’s no need to search for something more.

When Jesus completed His redemptive work on Calvary, He cried out triumphantly, “It is finished” (John 19:30). The saving work was fulfilled, completed. Nothing was omitted. And all who are recipients of that salvation are granted everything pertaining to life and godliness through the true knowledge of Christ (2 Pet. 1:3). In Him we have wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption (1 Cor. 1:30). His grace is sufficient for every situation (2 Cor. 12:9). We are blessed with every spiritual blessing in Him (Eph. 1:3). By one offering He has perfected us forever (Heb. 10:14). We are complete in Christ (Col. 2:10). What can anyone add to that?

So to possess the Lord Jesus Christ is to have every spiritual resource. All strength, wisdom, comfort, joy, peace, meaning, value, purpose, hope, and fulfillment in life now and forever is bound up in Him. Christianity is an all-sufficient relationship with an all-sufficient Christ. There’s no reason anyone who believes God’s Word should struggle with such a self-evident truth.

But a widespread lack of confidence in Christ’s sufficiency is threatening the contemporary church. Too many Christians have tacitly acquiesced to the notion that our riches in Christ, including Scripture, prayer, the indwelling Holy Spirit, and all the other spiritual resources we find in Christ simply are not adequate to meet people’s real needs. Entire churches are committed to programs built on the presupposition that the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and prayer (Acts 2:42) aren’t a full enough agenda for the church as it prepares to enter the complex and sophisticated world of the twenty-first century.

Sadly, many Christians are not aware of the truth about our Lord’s sufficiency. I hope they will be after reading this book. The church is in dire need of a renewed appreciation of what it means to be complete in Christ.

The failure of modern Christians to understand and appropriate the riches of Christ has opened the door to all kinds of aberrant influences. Bad doctrine, legalism, libertinism, humanism, and secularization—to name a few—are eroding the foundations of the Christian faith. Those satanic assaults are more subtle and therefore more dangerous than the liberalism that splintered the church at the start of this century—and they are succeeding with alarming effectiveness.

In the past two decades or so, for example, theology has become more and more humanistic. The focus has shifted from God to people and their problems, and counseling has replaced worship and evangelism as the main program of many churches. Most seminaries now put more energy into teaching ministerial students psychology than training them to preach. Evidently they believe therapists can accomplish more good in Christians’ lives than preachers and teachers. That mindset has taken the church by storm. Evangelicalism is infatuated with psychotherapy. Emotional and psychological disorders supposedly requiring prolonged analysis have become almost fashionable. An hour listening to almost any call-in talk show on Christian radio will confirm that these things are so. Or visit your local Christian bookstore and note the proliferation of so-called “Christian” recovery books. Virtually everywhere you look in the evangelical subculture, you can find evidence that Christians are becoming more and more dependent on therapists, support groups and other similar groups.

This shift in the church’s focus did not grow out of some new insight gained from Scripture. Rather, it has seeped into the church from the world. It is an attack at the most basic level, challenging Christians’ confidence in the sufficiency of Christ.

“My grace is sufficient for you,” the Lord said to the apostle Paul (2 Cor. 12:9). The average Christian in our culture cynically views that kind of counsel as simplistic, unsophisticated, and naive. Can you imagine one of today’s professional radio counselors simply telling a hurting caller that God’s grace is enough to meet the need? Contemporary opinion is more utilitarian, valuing physical comfort more than spiritual well-being, self-esteem above Christlikeness, and good feelings over holy living. Many Christians seeking a sense of fulfillment have turned away from the rich resources of God’s all-sufficient grace and are engrossed instead in a fruitless search for contentment in hollow human teachings.

Another evidence that many are losing confidence in Christ’s sufficiency is the church’s increasing fascination with pragmatic methodology. Counseling is not the only program that has supplanted teaching, fellowship, communion, and prayer as the chief activities of church life. Many churches have de-emphasized preaching and worship in favor of entertainment, apparently believing they must lure converts by appealing to fleshly interests. As if Christ Himself were in some way inadequate, many church leaders now believe they must excite people’s fancies in order to win them. Burlesque is evangelicalism’s latest rage, as church after church adopts the new philosophy.

This is precisely the problem that plagued Israel throughout the Old Testament. Again and again the Israelites put their confidence in chariots and horses, alliances with Egypt, fleshly wisdom, material wealth, military might, and other human means—anything other than the sufficiency of their God. Refusing to rely solely on their ample spiritual resources brought them only failure and humiliation.

Yet the church today is behaving exactly like Old Testament Israel. Where will it end? Will biblical Christianity completely fade from the scene before the church enters its third millennium? “When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8).

The church is foundering in a slough of worldliness and self-indulgence. We desperately need a generation of leaders with the courage to confront the trend. We need godly men and women committed to the truth that in Christ we inherit spiritual resources sufficient for every need, every problem—everything that pertains to life and godliness.

1

Resurrecting an Old Heresy

God is able to make all grace abound to you, that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed.

2 Corinthians 9:8

A PASTOR I KNOW OF WAS CONDUCTING A SERIES of meetings in several churches in North and South Carolina. He was staying in the home of some close friends in Asheville and traveling each night to wherever he was speaking that evening.

One night he was scheduled to speak at a church in Greenville, South Carolina, which is several hours from Asheville. Because he didn’t have a car, some friends from Greenville offered to transport him to and from the meeting. When they arrived to pick him up, he bid farewell to his hosts and told them he hoped to be back by midnight or soon afterward.

After ministering at the Greenville church, he stayed awhile to enjoy some fellowship and then rode back to Asheville. Approaching the house, he saw the porch light on and assumed his hosts would be prepared for his arrival because he had discussed the time of his return with them. As he got out of the car, he sent his driver on his way, saying, “You must hurry. You have a long drive back. I’m sure they’re prepared for me; I’ll have no problem.”

He felt the bitter cold of the winter night as he walked the long distance to the house. By the time he reached the porch, his nose and ears were already numb. He tapped gently on the door but no one answered. He tapped a little harder, and then even harder—but still no reply. Finally, concerned about the intense cold, he beat on the kitchen door and on a side window. But there was still no response.

Frustrated and becoming colder by the moment, he decided to walk to a neighboring house so he could call and awaken his hosts. On the way he realized that knocking on someone’s door after midnight wasn’t a safe thing to do, so he decided to find a public telephone. It was as dark as it was cold, and the pastor wasn’t familiar with the area. Consequently he walked for several miles. At one point he slipped in the wet grass growing beside the road and slid down a bank into two feet of water. Soaked and nearly frozen, he crawled back up to the road and walked farther until he finally saw a blinking motel light. He awakened the manager, who was gracious enough to let him use the telephone.

The bedraggled pastor made the call and said to his sleepy host, “I hate to disturb you, but I couldn’t get anyone in the house to wake up. I’m several miles down the road at the motel. Could you come get me?”

To which his host replied, “My dear friend, you have a key in your overcoat pocket. Don’t you remember? I gave it to you before you left.”

The pastor reached into his pocket. Sure enough, there was the key.

That true story illustrates the predicament of Christians who try to gain access to God’s blessings through human means, all the while possessing Christ, who is the key to every spiritual blessing. He alone fulfills the deepest longings of our hearts and supplies every spiritual resource we need.

Believers have in Christ everything they will ever need to meet any trial, any craving, any difficulty they might ever encounter in this life. Even the newest convert possesses sufficient resources for every spiritual need. From the moment of salvation each believer is in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17) and Christ is in the believer (Col. 1:27). The Holy Spirit abides within as well (Rom. 8:9)—the Christian is His temple (1 Cor. 6:19). “Of His fulness we have all received, and grace upon grace” (John 1:16). So every Christian is a self-contained treasury of divinely bestowed spiritual affluence. There is nothing more—no great transcendental secret, no ecstatic experience, no hidden spiritual wisdom—that can take Christians to some higher plane of spiritual life. “His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us” (2 Pet. 1:3, emphasis added). “The true knowledge of Him” refers to a saving knowledge. To seek something more is like frantically knocking on a door, seeking what is inside, not realizing you hold the key in your pocket.

Satan has always tried to beguile Christians away from the purity and simplicity of an all-sufficient Christ (2 Cor. 11:3)—and he has always found people willing to forsake the truth for almost anything new and unusual.

Gnosticism’s Invasion of the Early Church

One of the earliest denials of Christ’s sufficiency was gnosticism, a cult that flourished in the first four centuries of church history. Many of the pseudo-biblical writings, including The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Mary, The Apocryphon of John, The Wisdom of Jesus Christ, and The Gospel of Philip were gnostic works.

Gnostics believed matter is evil and spirit is good. They invented heretical explanations of how Christ could be God (pure, undefiled spirit), yet take on human flesh (which they viewed as a wholly evil material substance). Gnostics taught that there is a spark of divinity within human beings, and that the essence of spirituality is nurturing this immaterial side and denying material and physical urges. They believed that the chief means of releasing the divine element within a person was through attaining intellectual and spiritual enlightenment.

Gnostics therefore believed they were privy to a higher level of spiritual knowledge than the average believer had access to, and this secret realm of knowledge was the key to spiritual illumination. In fact, the Greek word gnōsis means “knowledge.” The gnostic heresy caused many in the church to seek hidden knowledge beyond what God had revealed in His Word and through His Son.

Gnosticism was therefore a very elite, exclusive movement that disdained “unenlightened” and “simplistic” biblical Christians for their naiveté and lack of sophistication. Sadly, many in the church were beguiled by those ideas and drawn away from their confidence in Christ alone.

Gnosticism was an attack on the sufficiency of Christ. It held out the false promise of something more, some higher or more complete spiritual resource, when the truth is that Christ is all anyone could ever need.

Most of the New Testament epistles explicitly confront incipient forms of gnosticism. In Colossians, for example, the apostle Paul was attacking gnostic concepts when he wrote of “all the wealth that comes from the full assurance of understanding, resulting in a true knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ Himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (2:2–3). He warned believers against the emerging heresy’s methodology: “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. For in Him all the fulness of Deity dwells in bodily form, and in Him you have been made complete, and He is the head over all rule and authority” (2:8–10; see further discussion in chapter 8).

Neo-Gnosticism’s Attack on the Contemporary Church

Gnosticism never really died. Strains of gnostic influence have infected the church throughout history. Now a neo-gnostic tendency to seek hidden knowledge is gaining new influence with distressing results.

Where imprecise doctrine and careless biblical exegesis are tolerated, and where biblical wisdom and discernment languish, people always tend to look for something more than the simple sufficiency God has provided in Christ. Today as never before the church has grown careless and hazy with regard to biblical truth, and that has led to an unprecedented quest for hidden knowledge. That is neo-gnosticism, and three major trends in the church today indicate it is gaining momentum: psychology, pragmatism, and mysticism.

Psychology. Nothing epitomizes neo-gnosticism more than the church’s fascination with humanistic psychology. The integration of modern behavioral theory into the church has created an environment in which traditional counseling from the Bible is widely viewed as unsophisticated, naive, and even fatuous. The neo-gnostics would have us believe that sharing Scripture and praying with someone who is deeply hurting emotionally is too superficial. Only those who are trained in psychology—those with the secret knowledge—are qualified to help people with serious spiritual and emotional problems. The acceptance of that attitude is misleading millions and crippling church ministry.

The word psychology is a good one. Literally it means “the study of the soul.” As such it originally carried a connotation that has distinctly Christian implications, for only someone who has been made complete in Christ is properly equipped to study the human soul. But pyschology cannot really study the soul; it is limited to studying human behavior. There is certainly value in that, but a clear distinction must be made between the contribution behavioral studies make to the educational, industrial, and physical needs of a society and their ability to meet the spiritual needs of people. Outside the Word and the Spirit there are no solutions to any of the problems of the human soul. Only God knows the soul and only God can change it. Yet the widely accepted ideas of modern psychology are theories originally developed by atheists on the assumption that there is no God and the individual alone has the power to change himself into a better person through certain techniques.

Surprisingly, the church has embraced many of the popular theories of secular psychology, and their impact over the past few years has been revolutionary. Many in the church believe the atheistic notion that people’s “psychological problems” are distresses that are neither physical nor spiritual. “Christian psychologists” have become the new champions of church counseling. They are now heralded as the true healers of the human heart. Pastors and lay people are made to feel ill-equipped to counsel unless they have formal training in psychological techniques.

The clear message is that simply pointing Christians to their spiritual sufficiency in Christ is inane and maybe even dangerous. But on the contrary, it is inane and dangerous to believe that any problem is beyond the scope of Scripture or unmet by our spiritual riches in Christ.

Pragmatism. Does the end justify the means? Evangelicals like never before appear to be answering yes. Churches zealous to attract the unchurched have baptized virtually every form of amusement.

The early Christians met to worship, pray, fellowship, and be edified—and scattered to evangelize unbelievers. Many today believe instead that church meetings should entertain unbelievers for the purpose of creating a good experience that will make Christ more palatable to them. More and more churches are eliminating preaching from their worship services and opting instead for drama, variety shows, and the like. Some churches relegate Bible teaching to a midweek service; others have dropped it altogether. Those with access to the secret knowledge tell us that biblical preaching by itself cannot possibly be relevant. They say the church must adopt new methods and innovative programs to grab people on the level where they live.

That kind of pragmatism is quickly replacing supernaturalism in many churches. It is an attempt to achieve spiritual objectives by human methodology rather than supernatural power. Its primary criterion is external success. It will employ whatever method draws a crowd and stimulates the desired response. Its underlying presuppositions are that the church can accomplish spiritual goals by fleshly means, and that the power of God’s Word alone is not sufficient to break through a sinner’s blindness and hardness of heart.

I don’t believe that is an overstatement. The wave of pragmatism sweeping the church today seems predicated on the idea that artificial technique and human strategy are crucial to the church’s mission. Many appear to believe that we can capture people for Christ and the church only if our programs are imaginative enough and our sermons are persuasive enough. Therefore they bend their philosophy of ministry to suit whatever techniques seem to satisfy the most unbelievers.

Mysticism. Mysticism is the belief that spiritual reality is perceived apart from the human intellect and natural senses. It looks for truth internally, weighing feelings, intuition, and other internal sensations more heavily than objective, observable, external data. Mysticism ultimately derives its authority from a self-actualized, self-authenticated light rising from within. Its source of truth is spontaneous feeling rather than objective fact. The most extreme and complex forms of mysticism are found in Hinduism and its western reflection, New Age philosophy.

Thus an irrational and anti-intellectual mysticism that is the antithesis of Christian theology has infiltrated the church. In many cases individual feelings and personal experience have replaced sound biblical interpretation. The question “What does the Bible mean to me?” has become more important than “What does the Bible mean?”

That is a frightfully reckless approach to Scripture. It undermines biblical integrity and authority by implying that personal experience is to be sought more than an understanding of Scripture. It often considers private “revelations” and personal opinions equal to the eternal truth of God’s inspired Word. Thus it fails to honor God and exalts man instead. Worst of all, it can—and usually does—lead to the deadly delusion that error is truth.

Extreme varieties of mysticism have flourished in recent decades, hawked by purveyors who make a platform of the religious broadcasting media. Televised religious talk shows have showcased almost every conceivable theological and interpretive whim by careless and untrained people—ranging from those who claim to have traveled to heaven and back, to those who deceive their listeners with new truth supposedly revealed privately to them by God. This kind of mysticism has spawned several aberrations, including the signs and wonders movement and a false gospel that promises health, wealth, and prosperity. It is simply one more evidence of the gnostic revival that is sweeping the church and undermining faith in the sufficiency of Christ.

Given the size of the contemporary church, the neo-gnosticism of today poses a more far-reaching threat than its first-century predecessor. Moreover, the leaders of the early church were united in their opposition to the gnostic heresy. Sadly, that is not true today.

What can be done? Paul confronted gnosticism by pointing to our sufficiency in Christ (Col. 2:10). That remains the answer even today.

We will look closely in the following chapters at each of these three gnostic influences. We will observe how they challenge Christ and His sufficiency, and we will discuss the spiritual resources available to all believers in Christ. As we proceed, you will note several repeated emphases: Scripture is sufficient, God’s grace is sufficient, God’s wisdom is sufficient, God Himself is sufficient, and so on. These overlapping sufficiencies show the incredible richness of the vast inheritance that is ours in our all-sufficient Christ.

2

Treasure or Trash?

We are children of God, and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ.

Romans 8:16–17

HOMER AND LANGLEY COLLYER WERE SONS OF a respected New York doctor. Both had earned college degrees. In fact, Homer had studied at Columbia University to become an attorney. When old Dr. Collyer died in the early part of this century, his sons inherited the family home and estate. The two men—both bachelors—were now financially secure.

But the Collyer brothers chose a peculiar lifestyle not at all consistent with the material status their inheritance gave them. They lived in almost total seclusion. They boarded up the windows of their house and padlocked the doors. All their utilities—including water—were shut off. No one was ever seen coming or going from the house. From the outside it appeared empty.

Though the Collyer family had been quite prominent, almost no one in New York society remembered Homer and Langley Collyer by the time World War II ended.

On March 21, 1947, police received an anonymous telephone tip that a man had died inside the boarded-up house. Unable to force their way in through the front door, they entered the house through a second-story window. Inside they found Homer Collyer’s corpse on a bed. He had died clutching the February 22, 1920, issue of the Jewish Morning Journal, though he had been totally blind for years. This macabre scene was set against an equally grotesque backdrop.

It seems the brothers were collectors. They collected everything—especially junk. Their house was crammed full of broken machinery, auto parts, boxes, appliances, folding chairs, musical instruments, rags, assorted odds and ends, and bundles of old newspapers. Virtually all of it was worthless. An enormous mountain of debris blocked the front door; investigators were forced to continue using the upstairs window for weeks while excavators worked to clear a path to the door.

Nearly three weeks later, as workmen were still hauling heaps of refuse away, someone made a grisly discovery. Langley Collyer’s body was buried beneath a pile of rubbish some six feet away from where Homer had died. Langley had been crushed to death in a crude booby trap he had built to protect his precious collection from intruders.

The garbage eventually removed from the Collyer house totaled more than 140 tons. No one ever learned why the brothers were stockpiling their pathetic treasure, except an old friend of the family recalled that Langley once said he was saving newspapers so Homer could catch up on his reading if he ever regained his sight.

Homer and Langley Collyer make a sad but fitting parable of the way many people in the church live. Although the Collyers’ inheritance was sufficient for all their needs, they lived their lives in unnecessary, self-imposed deprivation. Neglecting abundant resources that were rightfully theirs to enjoy, Homer and Langley instead turned their home into a squalid dump. Spurning their father’s sumptuous legacy, they binged instead on the scraps of the world.

A Rich Legacy to Enjoy

Too many Christians live their spiritual lives that way. Disregarding the bountiful riches of an inheritance that cannot be defiled (1 Pet. 1:4), they scour the wreckage of worldly wisdom, collecting litter. As if the riches of God’s grace (Eph. 1:7) were not enough, as if “everything pertaining to life and godliness” (2 Pet. 1:3) were not sufficient, they try to supplement the resources that are theirs in Christ. They spend their lives pointlessly accumulating sensational experiences, novel teachings, clever gurus, or whatever else they can find to add to their hoard of spiritual experiences. Practically all of it is utterly worthless. Yet some people pack themselves so full of these diversions that they can’t find the door to the truth that would set them free. They forfeit treasure for trash.

Where did Christians ever get the notion that they needed anything other than Christ? Is He somehow inadequate? Is His gift of salvation somehow deficient? Certainly not. We are children of God, joint heirs with Christ, and therefore beneficiaries of a richer legacy than the human mind could ever comprehend (Rom. 8:16–17). Christians are rich beyond measure. All true Christians are heirs together with Christ Himself.

Scripture has much to say about the Christian’s inheritance. It is, in fact, the central point of our New Covenant relationship with Christ. The writer of Hebrews referred to Christ as “the mediator of a new covenant, in order that . . . those who have been called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance” (Heb. 9:15).

We were chosen for adoption into God’s own family before the world began (Eph. 1:4–5). With our adoption came all the rights and privileges of family membership, including an inheritance in time and eternity that is beyond our ability to exhaust.

This was a key element in the theology of the early church. In Acts 26:18 Paul says he was commissioned by Christ to preach to the Gentiles “so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the dominion of Satan to God, in order that they may receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who have been sanctified by faith in [Christ].” In Colossians 1:12 he says that God the Father has “qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.” Paul viewed the believer’s inheritance as so enormous in scope that he prayed the Ephesians would have the spiritual enlightenment to comprehend the richness of its glory (Eph. 1:18).

The concept of an inheritance from God had great significance to early Jewish believers in Christ because their Old Testament forefathers received the land of Canaan as an inheritance as part of God’s covenant with Abraham (Gen. 12:1). Theirs was for the most part an earthly, material inheritance (Deut. 15:4; 19:10), though it included many spiritual blessings. Our inheritance in Christ, however, is primarily spiritual. That is, it is not a promise of wealth and material prosperity. It goes far beyond cheap temporal or transient physical blessings:

We Inherit God. This concept was a key to the Old Testament understanding of a spiritual inheritance. Joshua 13:33 says, “To the tribe of Levi, Moses did not give an [earthly] inheritance; the Lord, the God of Israel, is their inheritance, as He had promised to them.” Of the twelve tribes of Israel, Levi had a uniquely spiritual function: it was the priestly tribe. As such its members did not inherit a portion of the Promised Land. The Lord Himself was their inheritance. They literally inherited God as their own possession.

David said, “The Lord is the portion of my inheritance” (Ps. 16:5). In Psalm 73:25–26 Asaph says, “Whom have I in heaven but Thee? / And besides Thee, I desire nothing on earth. / . . . God is the strength of my heart and my [inheritance] forever.”

The prophet Jeremiah said, “The Lord is my portion . . . therefore I have hope in Him” (Lam. 3:24). That Old Testament principle applies to every Christian. We are “heirs of God” (Rom. 8:17). First Peter 2:9 describes believers as “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession.” We are His and He is ours. What a joy to know that we inherit God Himself and will spend eternity in His presence!

We Inherit Christ