Dennis Tuuri

Worship the Father in spirit and in truth. For the Father seeketh such to worship him. God is a spirit and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.

Let’s pray.

Almighty, our presence before you this day in holy convocation of worship. We thank you, Father, for your call to worship and we thank you for giving us hearts that are obedient to that call. And as we come before your presence now, Almighty God, we acknowledge that we are but dust and that we are sinners who have broken your law and have no standing in your presence but instead deserve only your wrath.

But we gratefully acknowledge and confess Lord God that you have provided an atonement for our sins to make appeasement to you for your just wrath against our disobedience through the work of Jesus Christ. We thank you almighty God for calling us forward then with our sins forgiven for giving us remission of those sins through the shed blood of our savior and for giving us his imputed righteousness in which we stand before your presence now.

And so you accept our worship. Almighty God, we thank you that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners and we acknowledge that we are sinners and that we have been saved by the Savior Jesus Christ, our Lord and King as well. Father, we pray then that this day and what we offer you this day in terms of worship may redound to your glory and we may be built up in the faith to praise you and to give back the breath you’ve given to us in songs of praise and words of obedience now and forever more.

In Jesus name we pray. Amen.

Praise ye the Lord. Praise ye the name of the Lord. Praise him, oh ye servants of the Lord. Ye that stand in the house of the Lord in the courts of the house of our God, praise the Lord, for the Lord is good. Sing praises unto his name, for it is pleasant.

Judge me, oh God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation. For thou art the God of my strength. Why dost thou cast me off? Oh, send out thy light and thy truth. Let them bring me into thy holy hill. Then will I go into the altar of God. Upon the harp will I praise thee, God, why art thou cast down, oh my soul? Hope in God, who is the health of my countenance found in Psalm 119, verse 18.

Psalm 119, verse 18. Open thou mine eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.

Teaching my oldest daughter and a couple of other homeschoolers who don’t go to this church world history notes this year for their history class. And it’s been a blessing to me, I’m sure, much more than it has been to the children to go through that material and study it and understand it enough to teach it.

This last Friday, we talked about early church. We’re at the part of world history that talks about the early church, the first six or seven centuries of the church. And I noticed as we were going through that material, there is much in common to our days.

The early church was marked by two specific and very real influences upon them. One was heresy and the other was persecution. And we went through 12 heresies and 10 persecutions this last Friday. And the children have to pick out three heresies and three persecutions to try to do a report on. And it really had much to do with the early church in its history.

Now today, of course, heresies abound in the church in America. And persecutions are also here, although not anywhere near as physical or perhaps as visible as the tremendous persecutions that the Christians suffered under Diocletian, for instance, the worst and the 10th set of persecutions against them. But the heat is beginning to be turned up a bit and will probably be turned up several notches this summer. The heat on Orthodox Christians with the publication of Hal Lindsey’s newest book, The Road to Holocaust.

I spoke with David Chilton last night who has the book now. It is available apparently. I’m told that it sold out in New York City when it hit the market. This is from the flyleaf to let you know what we’re in for of the book. From best-selling author Hal Lindsey, here is the shocking revelation of a spiritual movement that would take over our churches and government and lead us to disaster.

This movement, commonly known as dominion theology, is the resurgence of an old error that brought disaster to the church and the dark ages to the world. This old error also produced the legacy of contempt for the Jews that ultimately resulted in the Holocaust of Nazi Germany.

On the back of the book, there’s a single quote by Hal Lindsey, a little more overt on what he wants to have happen. “Let Christians not sit idly by while a system of prophetic interpretation that historically furnished a philosophical basis for anti-Semitism infects the church again.”

Well, we’ve been saying for some time in this church there are real battles we’re going to have to go through apart from the sometimes petty battles we face in our own midst. Real battles. And this book will certainly make us aware of that fact in a more heightened form.

Hal Lindsey, of course, comes from that heretical part of the church, non-Orthodox part of the church that finds no wondrous things in God’s law, but only evil to be stamped out.

So in the midst of heresies and beginnings of persecutions, why are we talking about church worship? What we do on Sunday morning? Seemingly, this is pretty irrelevant stuff. What with all the problems we face in the church and the world. And yet what we’re discussing this morning—specifically this element of church worship, the prayer of illumination—has great relevance at least to the church side of the equation which we’ll make application to later in the talk.

What we do on Sunday, we’ve been saying this all along, forms a pattern for our lives and the prayer for illumination, its biblical basis properly understood is critical for a proper understanding of the Christian Orthodox faith. The faith of the historic church which Reformation Covenant Church stands squarely in the midst of, Hal Lindsey notwithstanding.

We’ll look this morning at the biblical basis for the prayer of illumination, the theological importance of the prayer for illumination. Then we’ll make some application of the prayer of illumination in church and then in our daily lives as well relating it to special convocative worship as well as the rest of the week.

First, the biblical basis for the prayer of illumination.

We begin with an Old Testament witness. The verse we read a couple of minutes ago from Psalm 119:18. “Open thou my eyes,” and this is obviously a prayer to God by David. “Open thou my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.”

And David in this short prayer makes known the limitations under which he is operating. He is blind to the word of God. That’s obvious in the prayer. He needs God to illumine his eyes because he is blind to the law, to God’s revealed word. Apart from that illumination, he makes known his desire. He desires to behold wondrous things out of the scriptures.

The scriptures, we can imply from this verse, are a wonderland as one commentator has put it. And the law is a wonderland of delights. But the problem is that there is a veil not over the book. The book is not hard to understand. The veil is over our minds. And so we cannot see this landscape shrouded in darkness apart from God’s illuminating spirit for which we pray every week when we begin our sermon.

Thomas Manton was one of the great divines of the Westminster Assembly, one of the greatest and most able Puritan preachers. He was a chaplain to Cromwell’s army. And he himself gave the installation prayer of Cromwell. And one of his great works is a commentary on Psalm 119. He said that the saints, speaking of this verse, the saints do not complain about the obscurity of the law, but of their own blindness.

“The psalmist doth not say, Lord, Lord, make the law plainer, but Lord, open my eyes.” Very important difference.

David makes known his source of assistance in this prayer as well. He directs the prayer to the one who can answer it, the only one who can answer it, which is the person of God, the one who brings the revelation of the written word and brings it and illumines it to the heart.

Now, it’s important that we pause briefly here to realize who it is that is writing this psalm. It’s not somebody who doesn’t want anything to do with God saying, “Oh, regenerate me.” This is a man who desires God in his inward being. A man who loves God with all his heart. Okay? And so this is a man who wants very badly to do what God wants him to do.

In other words, we’re not talking about a salvation prayer here. We’re talking about illumination for a saint, somebody who is in covenant relationship with God. The point being here that his plea is not uttered forth from a person outside of the covenant, but from somebody inside of the covenant. And he recognizes while yet in covenant relationship with God, that he needs to understand God’s word through the illumination of the Holy Spirit and that will bring him to delight in God’s law in a greater sense than he has. But he obviously delights in that law; he wants to delight in it more.

He is a good theonomist and yet he goes hand in hand—as the word of God—crying out for what he knows he cannot have apart from God’s quickening and God’s spirit illuminating his holy word.

And another point we should make here before we move on from the Old Testament witness: this prayer of the psalmist here is repeated any number of times just in Psalm 119, and I’ve listed some references there for you.

Verse 12: “Blessed art thou, oh Lord, teach me thy statutes.”

Verse 18: “Open thou mine eyes,” as we read.

Verse 19: “Am I a stranger in the earth? Hide not thy commandments from me.”

Verse 26: “I have declared my ways and thou hearest me. Teach me thy statutes.”

Verse 27: “Make me to understand the way of thy precepts. So shall I talk of thy wondrous works.”

Verse 33: “Teach me, oh Lord, the way of thy statutes, and I shall keep it unto the end.”

Verse 64: “The earth, oh Lord, is full of thy mercy. Teach me thy statutes.”

Verse 68: “Thou art good and doest good. Teach me thy statutes.”

Verse 73: “Thy hands have made me and fashioned me. Give me understanding that I may learn thy commandments.” Can’t learn apart from God’s understanding.

Verse 124: “Deal with thy servant according to thy mercy. Teach me thy statutes.”

Verse 125: “I am thy servant. Give me understanding that I may know thy testimonies.” Cannot have understanding apart from God’s giving understanding.

Verse 130: “The entrance of thy words giveth light. It giveth understanding unto the simple. I opened my mouth and panted, for I longed for thy commandments.” Great desire here, but recognizing even with that kind of desire, he can’t get understanding unless God teaches him.

Verse 135: “Make thy face to shine upon thy servant and teach me thy statutes.”

Verse 169: “Let my cry come near before thee, oh Lord. Give me understanding according to thy word.”

Robert Murray McChain commenting on this psalm said that David wanted divine teaching, the aid of the spirit, and therefore he would not open the Bible without this prayer. And Psalm 119 repeats this fifteen, twenty times, I suppose—at least explicitly, many more times implicitly.

That’s the Old Testament witness. Let’s look at a few verses in the New Testament.

Ephesians 1:16. Now Paul’s not talking about prayer for himself; he’s talking about prayer for the church but it applies to what David’s talking about as well. Paul says, “He ceases not to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers. That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him.”

And so Paul’s writing to Christians here. Essentially the same prayer is repeated in Colossians 1, Philippians 1. I give you the references there. Paul is writing to Christians, people that have been illumined to salvation in Jesus Christ and have been illumined to certain truths in the word, and yet he prays that they might grow in understanding and knowledge.

And he prays to God because Paul knew—like David knew—that the source of all knowledge is in God and we don’t have a rationalistic book here which can be understood simply by the intellect. This is unlike all other books. Paul knew that and so he prayed for the church that they might be illumined by the Holy Spirit, that the spirit might teach them things out of God’s word.

He writes to those who are Christians in covenant with God. He’s not praying for their salvation but for their growth in sanctification, their growth in grace, and specifically for their growth in wisdom, revelation, the knowledge of God, which we know comes through the scriptures, the word of revelation of who God is.

Again, here we have the inadequacy of men. If Paul must pray for these Christians, then their inadequacy is certainly the basis for that prayer.

So we have the inadequacy of men apart from God’s enablement to understand his holy word and to grow in grace. We have the great longing of the saints again spoken of here—to the end that as David prayed, “that I might behold wondrous things out of thy law.” So Paul says that God gives you the spirit of wisdom, revelation in the knowledge of him.

Okay? Him being Jesus Christ, in the knowledge of our savior. And so Paul also wants to see wondrous things out of the law. And Jesus is the one that Isaiah 9:6 tells us his name is Wonderful. See, the law speaks of Jesus. And David wanted to behold wondrous things. He wanted to see Jesus as it were—the Messiah, the covenant keeper—out of that law. And Jesus comes then and reveals himself and teaches people from the law and the prophets who he is. And then the Holy Spirit comes later and he teaches us who Jesus is.

So the end of all these is the same. The great longing of the saints is to know Jesus, to know his law which teaches who he is, to know the scriptures and understand their weakness in these things, their inability to see correctly without the illumination of God, and they pray to the God then who is alone able to give them that illumination.

So the prayer for illumination—which is a prayer for God to take his word, the sermon scripture, and illumine it to our hearts, to teach us things out of the word by his holy spirit—that prayer for illumination meets the requirements of the regulative principle that we’ve talked about. It is stated repeatedly in the double witness of all the Old and New Testaments that man needs God’s grace to understand God’s revelation of himself in the holy word, to see Jesus in the text before us every Sunday.

We need the grace of the Holy Spirit to teach us wondrous things out of the law. Now, that God will bring about that understanding spoken of is obviously indicated here by these texts. He will answer these prayers. He delights in the prayer of the saints to understand who he is and understand his scriptures and he will surely answer it.

In fact, it’s one of the marks of New Testament times that we will understand these things and he will illumine our hearts. And I’ve listed there under the New Testament witness Isaiah 29, because Isaiah 29:11 and following speak of the New Covenant times. And they’re specifically said to be times in which we understand the scriptures.

Verse 11 of Isaiah 29 says that the vision of all is to come unto you as the words of a book that is sealed, which men deliver to one that is learned, saying, “Read this I pray thee.” And he says, “I can’t, for it is sealed.” And the book is delivered him who has not learned, saying, “Read this I pray thee.” But he saith, “I’m not learned.”

That’s Old Covenant times. Yet in verse 17, he says, “It is not yet a very little while, and Lebanon shall be turned into a fruitful field. The fruitful field shall be esteemed as a forest. And in that day shall the deaf hear the words of the book, and the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity, and out of darkness God will illumine the Gentiles. He will open to them the book that is sealed. The people don’t understand.”

Verse 19: “The meek also shall increase their joy in the Lord, and the poor among men shall rejoice in the Holy One of Israel.”

Alexander commenting on this text said, “The time was coming when they who would not break the seal or learn the letters of the written word should be abandoned to their chosen state of ignorance. While on the other hand, the blind and deaf whose case before seemed utterly hopeless should without the word of God—in other words, should begin to see and hear the revelation once entirely inaccessible to them.”

We are those who were formerly excluded from the covenants of promise. We are those to whom the scriptures have now been brought to our understanding and have been to us by God in the wondrous days of the Savior. We are those meek who have increased their joy. And we are those who have been brought to rejoice in the Holy One of Israel because we understand who he is, because the book has been opened and God has taught us the words through his Holy Spirit.

Now, before we leave this text and get to the next part of our outline, I want us not to miss a warning that is implicit in the text before us here from Isaiah. The people that is being chastised here in the book of Isaiah—those who refuse to break the seal or learn the language—and we are now grafted into Israel as it were, the covenant people. But if we’re disobedient as they were, the scriptures are quite plain; the fact that we can be plucked out as well.

The point is, this verse should also teach us that we need to break the seal. Jesus having broken it once for us, opening the covenant. We need to open the pages. Okay? We need to open the book up, not have it sealed up in front of us on our desks. And we need to study to know the language in which it is given to us. We need to know the words. And so we have to study language. We have to study and understand what God will teach us here.

We have an obligation on this side of it as it were. Now we have a great privilege. We have the book in the vernacular, in the mother tongue, in the native tongue that is in our own language. We have many translations of it. And so we have requirements to open that book, to know the language and to read it. And God then will illumine us as we pray to him for understanding in it.

John Kerr, who wrote a sermon called “God’s Word Suited to Man’s Sense of Wonder” in 1877, wrote that “if prayer without effort is presumptuous, an effort without prayer certainly is vain.” And so when we talk about the prayer for illumination, the understanding is we’re going to open the book up. We’re going to study it and then we pray having done the work that God requires of us as we come to his word.

Now I said that we have numerous Bibles in the mother tongue, in our native language, and that’s a great blessing. Men have died for this blessing, for this right. Men have lost lives, limbs, eyes, children, wives, that the Bible might be translated into the mother tongue that we might enjoy this privilege in which we now sit.

But do we just sit? And does the book sit collecting dust on our shelf, the book of books? And do we then not open it or bother to understand it by reading it diligently and studying it?

Shame on us if that is what we have done.

Because men shed blood that we might accomplish that. Beyond that, of course, the covenant mediator Jesus Christ gave his own life on the cross and more than that, suffered the pains of hell that we will be brought to salvation to know this book. Men—particularly I’m talking to you now—attend to this book or it will shout out as a curse against you in the time of judgment. The blood of the martyrs who paid the price for this book cries out now.

Take. Break the seal. Open the book. Learn the language. Read. Study. Pray for God’s illumination and find out who he is and what you have to do in relationship to that.

It’s interesting. We were talking last week, my wife and I, about the martyrs singing the psalms and we said that if the persecution gets that way in this country, what are we going to sing as they’re setting us ablaze? Suppose we know a few psalms. I’m afraid some of us though might be the only songs that would come to us are country and western songs or rock and roll songs or maybe a few bars of a jazz tune or something because we haven’t taken the time to memorize the scriptures to put them on our hearts and sing them to God in the midst of our persecutions.

If we refuse to attend to the duties of opening and reading, then we pray with hypocrisy. It’s as if we said, “Lord, illumine my eyes while I keep them tightly shut, closed.” And that’s not the point. We want to have our eyes open. There’s scales on them. God must wash them off for us to understand his scriptures again and again as we come to it.

But it implies that we want to open our eyes quite badly.

Obedience is another requirement.

Keith Hansen in our prayer meeting Wednesday night opened our prayer time with a quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn said, “God wants us to pray and he wants to answer our prayers, but he makes our use of prayer as a privilege to coincide with his use of prayer as a discipline. To receive answers to prayer, we must meet God’s terms. If we neglect his commandments, our petitions will not be honored. He will alter situations only at the request of obedient and humble souls.”

The scriptures are replete with the fact that if you break God’s law and don’t have regard for God’s law, your prayers go up to a brass heaven. They’re not answered by God. We, though, are those obedient and humble souls because of his sovereign grace. The deaf are given ears to hear the new covenant and we’ve been brought into that.

Our ears have been circumcised, opened up as it were, to hear God’s word. We’ve had them open that we might hear his word and we might then rejoice in who he is. Let us be careful then as we go through this text not to forget, not to put wax in our ears. God having opened them through the shed blood of our savior.

Okay. So we have good Old Testament witness and good New Testament witness and the regulative principle. Prayer for illumination is a good thing to pray because it reminds us that we are reliant upon God for understanding of his word.

We’re going to talk now about some of its theological importance and in terms of an understanding of who we are as well.

Now, first of all, the prayer of illumination teaches us on a weekly basis and hopefully on a daily basis in our homes. It teaches us our own inadequacy, man’s inadequacy to understand God.

Now, David, in his great love for God, still was inadequate to understand the word of God. Then so are we.

In Lydia in Acts 16:14, it is said of Lydia that she was one which worshiped God. I think the word there means feared God greatly and worshiped him. And yet it says that she heard us and whose heart the Lord opened that she attended unto the things which were spoken of Paul.

So if David, with his great love, still needed illumination, was inadequate of himself, and Lydia, with her great fear of God—which is the beginning of wisdom—still needed the illumination of God to understand the word spoken, they need to have our ears opened. So we do also on a regular basis.

Finally, one of the great examples of the importance of this truth is found in Luke 24:45. Jesus on the road to Emmaus is teaching the disciples, two disciples on the road to Emmaus, all things the Old Covenant that spoke of him.

Now here we’ve got an incredible picture. We’ve got disciples, okay? Not people in rebellion against Jesus. So they’ve got the relationship to the great master, being his disciples. We’ve got the master himself, the ultimate teacher of teachers, right? Got the best teacher of all using the best text of all, the scriptures itself. And yet still, as he explains these things, do they understand it? They do not.

They don’t understand it until verse 45 comes along when he opens their understanding. And then they then understand the scriptures, how they relate to him.

You see, it just is a picture—a tremendously strong picture—of our own inadequacy. Love, fear, having the best teachers we can have, attending to the words of scripture with our minds is not enough. God must sovereignly open our hearts and our souls with his holy spirit and minister this word to us on a regular basis.

And so it teaches our inadequacies. It teaches us that it is not reason that approaches the scriptures apart the illumination of God.

Calvin said, “Our reason is overwhelmed by so many forms of deceptions. It’s subject to so many errors. It dashes itself against so many obstacles. It’s caught in so many difficulties that it is far from directing us to right.” And if any of us are honest with ourselves, we can say that of ourselves, can’t we? We’ve bumped into problems and obstacles we had no idea existed. We’ve thought incorrectly and crookedly. We’re fallen creatures.

While we’ve been regenerated in Jesus Christ, our reason is still prone to error and sin and many kinds of limitations. And so reason can’t do it. We need the spirit of God to illumine us. We are inadequate of ourselves.

1 Corinthians 3:20, quoting from Psalm 94:11, says that all the thoughts of the wise are futile. Again he says the Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise that they are vain. Wise as you can be, as good reason as you can apply to things apart from illumination of God, they are vain thoughts.

Augustine commenting on this said, “The grace of illumination is no less necessary for our minds than the light of the sun is for our eyes. But even here,” he said, “the illustration breaks down because the illumination—because rather we must open our eyes to receive the sun—but the eyes of our mind we cannot open. Only the Lord can open them because they remain shut apart from his enabling grace.”

Okay. So it teaches us our own inadequacy and it teaches, on the other hand, God’s adequacy. It teaches us who the person of God is, first, that he’s adequate to answer these prayers.

As Spurgeon said, commenting on Psalm 119:18, “The prayer implies a conscious darkness of dimness of spiritual vision, powerlessness to remove the defect, and a full assurance that God can remove it and indeed he can.”

And so this prayer of illumination reminds us we pray to the one who can do it, that God—we’re inadequate but God is adequate for the task—and he can illumine us and he will do so.

Throughout the New Testament verses that speak of the requirement of the Holy Spirit to teach us, the point of it all is that the Spirit—remember Paul says in 1 Corinthians, “No man knows the things of God except the spirit of God.” See, the spirit comes to us. Jesus gives us the spirit. The spirit knows God’s mind. He knows the scriptures. Only God can reveal what’s in those scriptures to us.

The spirit knows them. We don’t. And so the spirit is given that we might be given insight into the scriptures.

So there’s theological reasons in terms of God’s adequacy. There’s also an important demonstration in this particular reality of God’s sovereignty at work as well.

Isaiah 44:18 talks about what he’s done to the people—that they have not known nor understand. “For he hath shut their eyes that they cannot see and their hearts that they cannot understand.” God, if we understand that we need to have the illumination of the Holy Spirit to understand whatever is in here, then it’s obvious that the sovereignty of God is what’s behind who understands things and who doesn’t.

He grants to some understanding and he closes the eyes. It’s a self-conscious expression from the book of Isaiah. God closes the eyes of some men. They cannot understand this word. And so God’s sovereignty is stressed and understood more properly as we pray the prayer of illumination.

Calvin writing on this text from Isaiah and this whole general concept says, “The supreme judge then makes way for his predestination when he leaves in blindness those whom he has once condemned and deprived participation in the light.”

And so then we are taught the sovereignty of God in this.

Augustine said of this, “God could, he says, turn the will of evil men to good because he is almighty. Obviously, he could. Why then does he not? Because he wills otherwise. Why he wills otherwise rests with him.”

And so the sovereignty of God—both in closing the eyes of some and opening the eyes of the others—is properly taught through the prayer of illumination.

And then third, the great glory of God is also taught in terms of a proper theology. All under point B here. We teach God’s inadequacy, our own inadequacy. We teach God’s sovereignty. And we also then understand more and more of God’s glory as this process continues.

When we pray in this matter and the spirit illumines our heart to the revelation of God in the scriptures, then we know God in a fuller sense than when we came to those scriptures.

And Job says in 42, verses 5 and 6, “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eyes seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.”

As God answers the prayer to illumine the word to us, we understand more of who God is. He gives us understanding of who he is apart from just some sort of intellectual assessment. He illumines our heart to it and that then helps us to understand again our own inadequacy and so we rely more upon him.

Again, to quote Thomas Manton, he said that the more we know, indeed the more sensible we are of our ignorance and how liable to mistake we are, so that we then dare not trust ourselves for even an hour as we come to this knowledge.

So the more we understand this process, participate in it, the more aware we are of our own inadequacies and the more reliant upon the person of God we become.

Third, this great truth of the prayer of illumination, the need for God’s illumination, teaches us God’s grace.

God’s grace. In 1 Corinthians 2:12, we read, “We have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God.” Charles Hodge’s commentary on this equates the spirit of the world with reason, the ability to reason apart from God’s illumination.

Verse 13 goes on in 1 Corinthians 2 to say, “Which things we speak not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but in spiritual words.” And so there’s a reason why Hodge equates the spirit of the world with reason itself.

Now I mentioned the heresies of the early church that were predominant. And many people don’t realize just how incredibly broad and widespread they were. Important thing to remember about this is that there is this spirit of the world that Paul talked about as reason or wise words, and then there’s a spirit of God.

The church came into a world in terms of the Roman civilization in which it was born, the Roman control of the known world, the existing biblical world at that time. The church came into a cultural context that put great emphasis upon reason. And so the church and the faith and Christianity got mingled—as it were, new wine into old wineskins. It got commingled with these ideas of reason.

And so it’s very important to recognize that the prayer of illumination teaches God’s grace as the ultimate revealer of who God is, apart from man’s reason, which has fallen. And the early church erred in this time and time again. And so it’s quite important that we don’t follow that error.

For instance, in the First Epistle of Clement, written about 96 AD—I mean this is real early in the church, right—the First Epistle of Clement. Although there’s lots of good things in that epistle and Clement was probably a good Christian man, the Clement that wrote this in 96 AD nonetheless, there was quite a bit of error mixed in with it.

He saw in that epistle not God’s grace in Jesus Christ, but that immortal knowledge of God is what saves man. He said, not the grace of God in Christ. Christ’s death, instead of being an atonement for sin, simply provided an opportunity for repentance. The Greek idea of salvation was by knowledge, and that was mixed into this epistle of Clement.

It’s much like today when people talk about being born again. And I saw the fellow who used to be in control of Egypt before he died. I don’t remember his name now. Talk about how he had a born again experience. And people, when they talk about being born again, what they mean is God gives them a new start. You have forgiveness for all that stuff. So you start all over now and he corrects your reason. And so now you start to live a good life and eventually get heaven with God.

So it’s salvation by knowledge or by man as opposed to by grace. It mixes reason up with the faith once delivered.

Again, Justin Martyr—you know, he wrote many good things. We’re not trying to say these people were bad and you should never read them. But Justin Martyr also said that Jesus Christ is not only the first of God, but as the logos, or word, is at the same time—quoting Justin Martyr—”the reason in which every race of man partakes. This made all men more or less members of Christ. Quoting from Justin Martyr, “These who lived in accordance with reason are Christians, even though they are called godless, such as among the Greeks Socrates and Heraclitus and others like them.”

So they actually thought Socrates was a Christian because he lived according to the principles of reason, you see. And so they mixed reason up with the faith and the Greek idea of salvation through knowledge of God—knowledge, rather, as opposed to through God’s grace to man.

The Alexandrian school of theology had two great adherents: Clement and then Origen. Clement, as well—for him Greek philosophy was true and Christianity was to be found true in terms of the Greek philosophy, which meant reinterpreting Christianity to meet that reason mentality.

Origen actually said that those who believed in predestination were heretics because the initiative should belong with man.

Now I bring that up because these were members of the Alexandrian school of allegorical interpretation. And one of the reasons for allegorical interpretation—that takes the Bible and just makes allegories of the whole thing back to other truths that we know apart from the Bible—one of the reasons for that in the early church was because they wanted to blend reason into this thing as part of the faith.

And you see what we’re going to have today: as people rely upon reason instead of God’s grace as the means of salvation to accomplish that and still call themselves Christians, they got to take this word and somehow reinterpret it. And so the allegorical school was developed essentially to wed Greek and biblical thought together. Really, though, bring out Greek thought in biblical terminology.

Now, all this is, I know, somewhat detailed, but the point is that the first couple of centuries of the church faced men who saw reason as the ultimate determiner of faith and salvation as opposed to the illumination of God and God’s sovereign grace.

T.F. Torrance said that many of the early church fathers lived not so much from God but toward God. You get the differentiation there. We believe that grace comes from God and so our life is hid with him and we come from God, then, as opposed to trying to move toward God somehow by applying right reason to the scriptures and then getting more and more knowledge to our reason and moving that way toward him.

Salvation is by grace and that’s taught in the prayer for illumination, which teaches us that every bit of knowledge the scripture has to give us comes from the illumination of the Holy Spirit, not through correct reason.

Now, another reason we’re bringing up this church history stuff is that was the context in which they lived. That was the setting. Well, we have a setting today for our Christian faith. And the setting in America today is one of rampant secularism. It is—if Romans were convinced that reason was the answer to everything, so are we.

Certainly, we live in a rampantly secular society. And as a result of that, we end up with Christians thinking in secular terminology.

I wanted to just quote a couple of things here from an article from Christianity Today that was given to me. It was from about a year ago. The reason I have it is there’s a group of people, Citizens Connection, I believe, who puts this out in their packets, who are trying to get Christians involved in political action and they think this is very important to understand—that this is the way you’re supposed to do it. This paper is called “Bottomline Morality” and I’ll just read a couple of things to this and you can see it’s the same heresy as the first and second century church was going through—mixing reason and some sort of common knowledge given to us apart from the illumination of the Holy Spirit.

Here’s what it says. I’ll just select in quotes. “There is little in political history or scripture to support the idea that Christians have a corner on the moral and social values that will sustain a great nation.”

You know, that’s an incredible statement. It is a more incredible statement being found in a Christian publication. When you read throughout the scriptures of man’s blindness and darkness and moral depravity apart from the illumination of God’s spirit, these guys are trying to say, “No, no, no. Everybody can have moral values and good. You can build a great nation apart from a Christian perspective.”

Well, depends on what you mean by a great nation, I suppose. And if by a great nation you mean Assyria or Babylon, yeah, you can build that kind of great nation apart from the biblical truths. But a nation of justice and righteousness cannot be built apart from scriptural values. We have the legacy of a Christian society here and we don’t seem to realize how much that has determined what we are.

As an example of some of this stuff, he goes on in the article to say—talking about how there are various moralities throughout all religions—”We discover that not only do all cultures have moral structures against murder, but…” and he goes on to speak about other things. And I want to just pause there because he says, you know, it’s evident that Christianity doesn’t have a corner on it because all cultures have a moral restriction against murder.

Well, I guess except America, because after all, you know, millions of babies have been murdered in the last ten, fifteen years in this country. And last week, Marcus Welby was on TV in a movie—I don’t know if you saw it or not—promoting euthanasia, the murder of old people. “What else could I do?” he says. “You tell me.”

Well, you see, murder is defined and those definitions belong to cultures. And as you move away from a Christian culture, you move away from structures against murder. And that’s what we’ve done in this society. These people are just foolish, foolish, foolish.

“Human beings, based on what they see in the created world, come to know right and wrong,” he says. They come to know right and wrong. See, and they can practice right and wrong what they just see in the world.

He quotes from Romans. Of course, in Romans, the point of Romans is that God reveals himself, who he is, that there is a God, that he is all powerful, through the created order. God gives man that through the created order. He does not give man an ability to discern right and wrong. That is based upon scriptures and illumination of the Holy Spirit.

So these people are way off base again. They say that there’s this common morality that we should have with pagans and this common morality includes laws related to murder—which we just shot to pieces his argument there—theft. There’s nothing we can’t talk about theft for some time, couldn’t we? In terms of confiscatory tax scales anyway. Rape, theft. There’s nothing we can talk about theft for some time, couldn’t we? In terms of confiscatory tax scales anyway.

Rape, aspects of personal responsibility such as traffic laws, and certain—get this—well, certain these are like common cultural things we all would adhere to. “Certain baseline standards regulating such things as marriage, education, and minimum wage, right?” These are the commonly accepted things throughout history, all cultures, and certainly religion has no corner on this.

And I would agree with them. Christianity has no corner on these things as Christianity doesn’t teach the regulation by the state of education nor of minimum wage laws. So these guys are obviously just out to lunch, totally.

Their application suggestions for Christian action include this fifth suggestion: “Be careful not to support any political action that would give narrow sectarian values the force of law.” You have to understand the article but these are biblical values. “Give narrow sectarian values the force of law.”

“God gave us choice and a moral field within which to move. To force a narrow moral rule on individuals by law is to do more than God is willing to do. We don’t want to force those strictures, those narrow strictures that God’s scriptures tell us about on other people.”

The article is written by two men, one of whom is a professor of psychology at Fuller. He is a member of the brain research institute. I’d like to do some research on his brain or I don’t think we’d find much light. He is one of those apparently whom God has decided to darken the understanding of.

Now I point this out just to show again that’s typical Christianity today and that’s heresy. To think that Jerusalem and Athens can share some sort of common base of knowledge in terms of morality, et cetera, is to mix grace with reason. And that’s what the prayer for illumination says you cannot do. Nothing. You cannot get with reason the word of God and the revelation of who God is. You need the spirit. You need grace.

And so grace is affirmed by the prayer of illumination.

John Carile wrote in the 1600s, “Wonders without grace cannot open the eyes fully, but grace without wonders can.” You see, you’ve got to understand that it’s not miracles and things that open our eyes. It’s God’s grace of the Holy Spirit. It’s not great things that happen around us or circumstances. It’s God grace apart from all that stuff.

Cornelius Van Til—his work, obviously, we could go on for hours here, but the point is that Van Til taught man is in rebellion against God and until God illumines man’s mind he cannot know God aright. And that is true of the Christian as well as the non-Christian, that every time we come to the scriptures we must look at the scriptures and pray for God’s illumination. Okay?

So it teaches a proper understanding of the person of God. It teaches understanding who we are and as a result of that, it teaches and reinforces the concept of grace, which is absolutely essential for rebutting the heresies that are common around us now—including Lindsey’s book in terms of anti-Semitism. I’ll leave you to think through the implications of this to that but it’s quite obvious that there are many of them.

Okay. The fourth thing that the prayer of illumination does for us—it links the spirit with the word.

John 14:26. We’ve been alluding to this, but not directly. Now we will. John 14:26, Jesus says, “The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, shall teach you all things and bring all things to remembrance whatsoever I have said unto you.”

Jesus said what the Father said he gave the law and the prophets. That’s what he gave them. The spirit’s going to come and teach them what Jesus said. And so there’s a continuity of the scriptures taught here. And it’s the spirit specifically that gives illumination to us.

1 Corinthians 2:12. “We have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God, which things also we speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches, which the Holy Ghost teaches. And there’s inspiration of the scriptures.” But the point is, we receive the spirit of God that we can understand this thing.

It’s the spirit that brings us revelation.

1 John 2:26, “These things have I written unto you concerning them that seduce you, but the anointing which you have received of him abideth in you, and you need not that men teach you. But as the same anointing teaches you all things and is truth and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him.” Speaking of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is one who teaches us the word of God. And that’s his function. That’s what that person of the Trinity does.

The spirit knows God’s mind, knows how it’s revealed in the scriptures, and ministers that to us as God is gracious to us and answers those prayers for illumination.

Now, this should combat another heresy of the early church. Tertullian was a real good church father, but he fell into Montanist errors. And the Montanists, what they would get into these frenzied prophesyings, speaking forth new revelations and stuff—often times in complete contradiction to the word of God. Rushdoony also points out that they didn’t like to wash and so they weren’t a real popular sect.

But we have a lot of that today, now don’t we? We have a lot of that today where we have revelation sought for apart from the word of God, when what David wanted was to open the word here up to him and make him understand it—not give me some kind of vision outside of the word.

Again, to quote Thomas Manton, “The light which begged here in the Psalms is not anything besides the word. When God has said to enlighten us, it is not that we should expect new revelation, but that we may see the wonders of the word or get a clear sight of what is already revealed here. Those that vent their own dreams under the name of the spirit and divine light, they do not give you mysteries but monstrous opinions that do not show you the wondrous things of God’s law, but the prodigies of their own brain—unhappy abortives that die as soon as they come to light.”

Then he quotes Isaiah 8:20, “To the law and to the testimony. If they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them. The light which we have is not without the word but by the word.”

And so the spirit and the illumination, the guidance of the Holy Spirit is properly understood in the prayer of illumination linked to the word of God. And so it is a combat also to the great error and heresy of frenzied prophesyings apart from the word of God.

John Calvin wrote on the same subject. He says, “What say these fanatics swollen with pride who consider this the one excellent illumination, when carelessly forsaking and bidding farewell to God’s word, they no less confidently than boldly seize upon whatever they may have conceived while snoring.