TULIP - an acronym for grace alone

Salvation by grace alone is summarised well in the acronym "TULIP". Like the flower, this truth is beautiful and glorious too. I would like to briefly explain the basic meaning of TULIP, and how it biblically describes how we are saved.

T is for TOTAL DEPRAVITY: In our natural condition, every single person has a totally corrupt heart, and therefore, all our thoughts, decisions, actions; everything that proceeds from our heart, is totally evil. We cannot please God, nor do anything morally good in His sight. Superficially, we can seem very pious, but its all for the wrong reasons, and so we can do nothing to save ourselves, and are subject to the wrath of God.

U is for UNCONDITIONAL ELECTION: Before the foundation of the world, God the Father, eternally, graciously and lovingly chose a limited number of particular individuals to be saved from this terrible wrath that we deserve. The others were appointed to perish eternally in hell in the way of their sins and total depravity as a testimony to the elect of God's glory and power and what we also truly deserve. His choice was not based upon anything in us whatsoever. There were no conditions, or criteria in us (which would then be merit) that God used to choose, because it was before we had done anything good or evil, that we should be to the praise of the glory of God's grace alone.

L is for LIMITED ATONEMENT: This is often misunderstood, it is those who teach salvation by the "free" will of man who limit the atonement. They limit its power to save. The Bible does not limit its power to save despite our sin, but it does limit its extent to the elect. God the eternal Son, Jesus Christ, came to earth as fully human and fully God, and suffered and died and rose again to fully take the wrath of God in the stead of the people God had unconditionally elected, so that their sins were fully paid for (and theirs only). God is just in justifying the elect who were by nature totally depraved because of the cross of Christ. This is central to the Gospel. God is just in condemning the impenitent because Christ did not pay for their sins - the atonement is limited to the elect.

I is for IRRESISTIBLE GRACE: God the Holy Spirit, in time, changes the hearts of these elect people, for whom Christ has died, so that they are granted faith in what Christ has done for them as a gift. The Spirit of Christ raises these dead sinners to life, and reveals the beautiful and glorious Gospel to them by the Word (which God sends by means of preachers), so that they irresistibly believe it, and are consciously justified by faith alone in what Christ has done for them, and are joined to Christ by faith so that His righteousness is imputed to us, and we are partakers of Him and all His benefits - adoption, co-heirs, and the list goes on. This unmerited favour is irresistible because the Almighty Spirit puts a new heart in God's people so that they love Him, where before they only hated Him. Apart from this, there is no grace of God, since every other gift is only a curse to those who will end up in hell.

P is for PERSEVERANCE OF THE SAINTS: These unconditionally elected people, who by nature were totally depraved, whose deserved punishment was fully taken by Christ, and who have been brought to faith irresistibly by the Holy Spirit, are all (every single one) perserved by that same Spirit to the very end. The Spirit of holiness works in them to produce an increasing godliness of character and likeness to Christ, and to keep them faithful and repentant to the end, even though they may often have doubts and fall into sins. This is not a licentious doctrine, since the regenerate have died to sin, and can no longer live any longer in it. The elect struggle fiercely in battle with their sinful flesh all their lives until their death or Christ's return, and are then are made perfect in glory to dwell with God forever, to delight in Him and glorify Him.

These are the doctrines of grace alone, and nicknamed the five points of Calvinism. These are not the teachings of man but of Scripture however, even though Calvin faithfully taught them. Since he did, by the grace of God alone, it is appropriate to post this in 2009, the 500th birthday of that Genevan Reformer. May we see such reformation and such preachers in our day too, and may God be glorified in the church now and forevermore.

- Sam W.

P.S. There will be a public lecture on "John Calvin's Battle for the Reformation" in Limerick on Friday the 6th of March at 7:30pm held in the Limerick School Project on O'Connell Avenue. See more details here: http://www.cprf.co.uk/limerick.htm.

Lecture: Music's Indispensible Place in (the) Reformation

Prof. Barry Gritters from the Protestant Reformed Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, recently gave a remarkable lecture in Limerick on the above subject. I haven't written anything extensively reviewing it since I've been quite busy with various other things recently.

A great review can be found here:
http://manuelkuhs.blogspot.com/2009/01/lecture-on-indispensable-place-of-music.html

And the lecture itself can be found here:
http://www.cprc.co.uk/musicinreformation.m3u

There will hopefully a blogpost coming up again shortly.

The particularly pertinent points to me were:

• The importance of congregational singing in worship.
• The kind of music most appropriate to this.
• The role and nature of music as God's creation.
  

Especially good was the point that our music ought not to be like the music of the world with all its connotations. It ought to be not worldly, and have majesty and gravity.

- Sam W.

Cosmology and Biblical Creation: God stretched out the heavens!

I have a book by Dr. John Hartnett called "Starlight, Time, and New Physics" which I had not quite finished reading yet (it was so exciting, I had to lend it to someone else). But I would nevertheless like to quote some info about it from this article: http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/6184

But this is only the beginning of the exciting implications of this
revolutionary book. Hartnett refers to recent observational data that
overwhelmingly leads to the conclusion that the universe must have a centre, with our galaxy somewhere near it. By plugging this ‘galactocentric’ universe into Carmeli’s equations, and then adding the biblical ‘stretching out of the heavens’ by God at creation (big bangers can scarcely disagree, as they call something like that ‘inflation’), what ‘falls out’ is an astonishing by-product. Namely, that there are built-in gravitational time-dilating effects such that:

a) Adam would have seen light from most of the same stars we see today
when he looked up on the sixth day and
b) light from even the most distant quasar, billions of light-years away from Earth, would reach us now within the six or so thousand years since creation.

Note that this is not the product of wishful thinking, or mathematics designed to give that outcome—just a straightforward chain of scientific reasoning:

a) Carmelian cosmology fits the observational data overwhelmingly, data which has been so puzzling that mysterious (and now unnecessary) fudge factors have been invented.
b) Observations also indicate that we are in a galactocentric universe.
c) Combining a) and b) mathematically shows that it is inevitable that an initial rapid ‘stretching out’ completely eliminates the so-called light-travel time problem for biblical creation.

I highly recommend reading the short article for more info on how to appropriately respond to the common attacks on God's Word from this area, even without Hartnett's book, and how to follow 2Co 10:3-5 in tearing down the fallacies of modern "big-bang theory" foolishness. I also highly recommend the book (although I cannot as yet give it a proper review).

- Sam W.