Embracing God's Grace: The Whole Christ Explored

The "Marrow Controversy" was not an argument Scots had about how to work the vegetables in their garden. It was a controversy in the early 1700s that took place in the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, over the influence of a book that had been written in 1645 entitled "The Marrow of Modern Divinity." And by "marrow," it meant "Let's get to the very heart of the best of Christian theology." [00:05:27]

And Evangelista, the pastor, walks these people through the story of the gospel, the way in which the law of God and the grace of God relate to one another. And he did so by means of many quotations from some of the best theological writers. And so this was the book, "The Marrow of Modern Divinity." And it raised a very heated controversy in Scotland in the early eighteenth century. [00:07:10]

They asked them if they thought it was orthodox to teach -- "Is it orthodox to teach that you forsake sin in order to come to Christ?" And what they were trying to ferret out was this question: "Does this person think that there is some standard I need to meet, some qualification I need to have, some measure of repentance that I need to have gone through before I can come to Christ?" [00:08:15]

And I discovered everywhere I went -- and this was true virtually without exception for the next 20 years, extraordinarily -- everywhere I went, somebody would come up to me and say "I've listened to those tapes of yours on the Marrow controversy." Tapes. Some of you don't know what a tape is. It was that long ago. But everywhere I went, this happened. [00:14:04]

How do we relate the grace of God and the gospel to the law of God, without either becoming legalists on the one hand, or reacting to all that and becoming antinomians on the other? And how is it that we actually present Christ in the gospel? And how does the gospel bring us the assurance of salvation? Those were the themes that The Marrow of Modern Divinity had dealt with. [00:14:55]

Now, my own sense is that if you are to ask the question about this passage, "What is it that the serpent is doing here?" in my admittedly limited experience, the standard and partially true answer largely given by Bible-believing evangelical Christians is "Satan is rejecting the Word of God. Satan is seeking to bring Adam and Eve to deny the inherency, infallibility, and authority of God's Word." [00:17:47]

The ultimate truth in this passage is "Yes, Satan is seeking to deny the authority of God's Word, but he's also doing something more sinister. He's seeking to distort the character of the God who has given the Word." So, in a sense, he's aiming beyond deceiving them about the authority of His Word, to deceiving them about the character of God Himself. [00:18:38]

And beginning to twist it in this way, that what the serpent is saying is this: "The kind of God you have is the kind of God who will bless you on the basis of the qualifications that you can earn on your way to His blessing." You see how that begins to turn on its head the way in which God has come to them. [00:21:14]

And the fascinating thing to me has for many decades now been, that this is exactly what the parable of the prodigal son is about, isn't it? It's the story of a legalistic son who does not see his father as gracious and generous to him unless he meets the standards, throwing over the traces. [00:25:41]

And, my children, that is the starting place for the relationship. And that actually is the gospel, everything, the Father has is yours. That's what He offers to you. All He has to offer to you is Himself, His Son, and His Holy Spirit, and He offers all of that to you before you have done one decent thing in your life. [00:27:31]

The most fundamental question that the Christian can ever ask and answer: "What is God really like?" And is it not true that the answer I give to that question is going to be reflected in my life? That's especially true, incidentally, if you're a minister of the gospel. That's what's at stake. [00:28:19]

And that's why The Marrow of Modern Divinity caused a controversy, and why some of the brethren in early eighteenth century Scotland thought they found some of the most profound answers to the deepest pastoral problems they faced in understanding what it means to believe in the grace of God, in Jesus Christ. [00:28:34]