August 13, 2025 • 75 mins
In this episode of Christendom and the World, Pastor Andrew Preus takes a deep look at the hardening of hearts—how it happens, why it’s dangerous, and how Christians can guard against it. Using vivid examples from both the Old and New Testaments, he shows how even those who champion pure doctrine can fall into hypocrisy when God’s Word is treated as nothing more than a set of rules. Pastor Preus also addresses the impact of scandals within the church—how they can shake faith, breed cynicism, and tempt believers to downplay or even abandon sound teaching altogether. Rather than letting these challenges rob us of the joy of the Gospel, he encourages us to see pure doctrine for what it truly is: the life-giving truth of Christ crucified, a treasure meant to bring rest for our souls and shape every part of our lives.
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Episode Transcript
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Then I heard the Lord ask, Whom should I send and who will go for us?
Then I said, Here I am, send me.
He said to me, Go and tell these people, You may go on hearing but never understand, andgo on seeing but never know anything.
Make the mind of these people dull, deafen their hearing, shut their eyes, that they maynot see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their minds, and turn.
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and be healed.
These words from Isaiah chapter 6 are well known, especially when we talk about thecalling of pastors into the ministry of the church.
Those words of obedience from Isaiah are words that serve as an example for all those whodesire to preach the gospel and answer the call of God through His church to go to His
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people and proclaim what Christ has won for them.
Here I am.
Send me.
And yet, when we read these words in context, what does God first tell Isaiah to do?
To go to these people and tell them to keep on hearing, but not know anything, to keep onseeing, but not perceive.
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He goes to tell them that their hearts have been hardened.
And this is a topic that we often don't like to talk about, but it is all too common.
in the Church today and throughout the history of Christendom.
So today we are going to speak about the hardening of hearts.
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My name is Pastor Andrew Proyce.
You are listening to Christendom in the World.
Recently Christian News published an article, an op-ed or editorial, whatever you want tocall it, that I wrote.
uh which was entitled Scandal, Cynicism, and Pure Doctrine.
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And in that article, I gave a warning to those who have experienced this common phenomenonuh where they will encounter abuse or negligence or some kind of hypocritical action uh
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wielded at them or at other people.
Maybe they notice it.
it's from the hands of those
who wield the sword of pure doctrine.
And these are those who harp on the importance of teaching the right thing, practicing theright thing, and being faithful to the word of God.
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And what often happens with such people when they see uh others who, you know,
make themselves out to be good confessional, Lutheran, know, Orthodox, dogmatic people, isthat they then start to conclude that there's something wrong with this strict adherence
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to pure doctrine.
And so I gave a warning to those uh who have experienced this scandal.
Let's say, for example, you have a pastor who is preaching the pure word of God, and thenhe cheats on his wife, right?
And uh then he covers it up, and he's able to use his position of power and influence tocover it up in some way and to continue to have a certain amount of
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respect and rapport among other people uh and other people who maybe were victims of thisor were affected by this in some way notice this and they get jaded and they get a bad
taste in their mouth about pure doctrine because when they think of the purity of doctrineit reminds them of these people who have abused their power and their authority and
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So what I was warning against was don't fall into that ditch of cynicism where you beginto look at the doctrine itself as the problem.
Now with all that said, and you can go ahead and read my article in Christian News if youwould like,
With all that said, I think it's also important to dive a little bit deeper into how doesthis happen?
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Because one of the things that is so frustrating for someone who goes through some kind ofabuse, who is mistreated in some way, is that it's difficult to wrap your mind around it.
And this is why a lot of people will do research into psychology and sociology and thingslike that.
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And I was a bit negative about that in my article.
But at the same time, I understand why one would look into what psychology and sociologyhas to say when he has encountered such terrible, awful behavior.
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uh from those who are supposed to be really conservative and orthodox and faithful.
uh You know, this could happen like if your father is always saying everything right andbasically most of what you believe is from your father and yet your father sadly turns out
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to be a bad guy.
You know, maybe he mistreats your mother and then you look back and you find that he wasactually
and you start learning about things like borderline personality disorder and stuff likethat, which of course I am a novice when it comes to that kind of stuff.
I've read a little bit up on that.
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uh And I can see how that can be helpful to get some kind of explanation.
And I don't want to poo poo that entirely either, because I think that that is importantto try to wrap your head around why would this
person who otherwise is speaking the truth in every way and defending the truth in everyway.
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Why would this person behave this way and throw me under the bus?
So while philosophy, natural law, sociology, psychology, they have their place, you canlook at these things in so far as they conform to, like I said, natural law, uh in so far
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as they conform to what is true, they can be helpful in understanding why people behave acertain way.
But as Christians who read scripture,
We know that there is such a thing as sin, and sin is not just breaking a few rules.
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God said about mankind before he destroyed them in the flood that the thoughts andimaginations of man's heart are only evil continually.
Jeremiah in his book of prophecy says that the heart of man is wicked beyond anyunderstanding.
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It is deceitful and wicked so much that we can't even
know it.
We can barely scratch the surface of how wicked the sinful heart is.
And so it's worth our time and attention to see how the Scriptures
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describes sin and how sin causes hearts to be hardened because that's really what's goingon here.
When you have someone who touts the pure doctrine and he's always on the right side of allthe controversies and arguments but then acts in a completely hypocritical and cruel way
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and lacks any love toward the lambs of Christ.
It can really shake you.
It can make you question whether the things that he taught are actually true.
And this is why Jesus warns us about scandal.
He says scandals are bound to come.
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That is scandals are those things that cause people to stumble, that cause people to fallaway, that cause people to question God's Word and the importance of God's Word.
And Jesus says,
uh woe to that man by whom the scandal comes.
And so hopefully this might be of benefit to anyone who has to encounter that kind ofscandal in the church when those who are otherwise teaching what's true and have been
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faithful in many ways uh
will fall into a horrible sin or a horrible error and they will use whatever influence orpower or authority that God has given them to circumvent their blame, circumvent any kind
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of accountability and project any kind of blame onto those who are
the victims.
um Now, the first thing that we need to understand about the hardening of hearts is thatGod, in his word, calls on all people everywhere to repent.
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So we stand before God, no matter how squeaky clean we are before men, we stand before Godby nature, sinful and unclean.
And one of the, I mentioned this in the article that I wrote, but I remember this sermonthat my victory supervisor uh preached in Waterloo, Ontario, Pastor Krestic.
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And I don't remember the entire sermon, but I remember, and I don't even remember what thetext was, but I do remember him talking about sin and how the sin from other people can
affect you.
and how it can actually do more damage to you spiritually than it does to you in themoment in that you are experiencing an injustice.
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Because the reason why someone has sinned against you, the reason why someone has takenGod's Word for granted and has used God's Word as a cloak for vice is because his
heart has been hardened.
Now the other thing too to consider about the hardening of hearts is that it doesn'thappen overnight.
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It's not just a one-time thing like you wake up and suddenly you're not a Christian.
All of us uh as even as Christians, all of us Christians in so far as we still live in theflesh experience the hardening of hearts.
Right?
It is the dullness of our own sinful flesh.
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We get bored with God's Word or we begin to treat God's Word as if it's just, you know,some kind of principle that we have figured out and we can then move on and uh pursue the
things that really satisfy our own flesh.
And we are always battling against this.
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you know, there's a certain hardening that takes place uh in an individual Christian.
Maybe as he gets older he might get tired uh of speaking the truth.
Maybe, you know, his kids continue to rebel and he gets tired of fighting and so he sortof gives up and then he starts to, in his mind, make allowances for their rebellion.
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But this might also happen in
in more of a collective community, like of a congregation or of an institution, of aschool, of a synod, of a church body, of a culture where the heart grows dull.
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Now, how this happens though to someone who actually uh is a Christian,
is that the way it happens is that you hear the word.
And the word of God, which is what?
The word of God is a two-edged sword.
It pierces through bone and marrow.
It separates soul from the spirit.
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And most importantly, it is the Holy Spirit giving you life through Christ.
That's what the word of God is.
It is rest for your souls.
But the hardening happens when the word of God, which is supposed to give rest to yoursouls, becomes something different to you.
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and it becomes simply a list of rules or a list of principles that you imagine that youcan easily fulfill, right?
So I could say, so I could treat, for example, uh the teaching that Jesus is both God andman as just simply a rule.
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Right?
I could treat it as something that just is just a principle.
So that I say I believe that I confess the Nicene Creed, I confess the Athanasian Creed.
I am a Trinitarian.
I believe Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three distinct persons, one God.
And I believe that Jesus is true God and true man.
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And then what I do is I take that doctrine and instead of it being my life,
Instead of it being that which I meditate upon day and night, and I find my strength fromit, instead it becomes simply a marker or signal that I'm on this right orthodox side.
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And so it therefore doesn't have any real effect upon how I think and how I...
act toward my neighbor.
And this is what Paul is talking about when he says that I can have all the faith as tomove mountains, but if I have not love, then I am nothing.
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And so this would be, in other words, I can confess the faith.
I can know the Christian faith, but
If the gospel, the free forgiveness of sins won for us by the blood and righteousness ofJesus Christ who died for us and rose again, if that's some canned principle that I can
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just put up here and know that, okay, I believe that, but then I just move on with my lifeand seek to please my own sinful flesh, well then that...
Gospel, which is the very life that God gives, becomes simply a cold principle.
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And the scriptures speak to this very precisely in Isaiah, in fact.
And so Isaiah, who is told to go to this people and tell them that their hearts arehardened, and in fact, as a judgment against them to say, yeah, keep on hardening your
hearts.
This is God's judgment against you.
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He also then later on in his book of prophecy in chapter 28 describes how this hardeningtakes place.
If you're like me, you like to read a few different translations of the Bible.
Cross-referencing various passages in the Bible gives me insight into how words andphrases are used and repeated throughout the Scriptures.
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And of course, as a pastor and teacher of God's Word, I often consult the Hebrew and theGreek sources as well.
But if you're like me, you also want your children to read and understand the Bible.
While there are many cross-references we can find when we dive deeply into scripture, it'snice for the simple Christian to see the basic connections between the Old and New
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Testaments without getting overwhelmed.
An American translation of the Holy Bible, first translated by Rev.
Dr.
William F.
Beck, is specifically translated in the words of American English.
I especially appreciate using Pastor Beck's translation while I'm at home leading mychildren in devotions and daily Bible readings.
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It reads almost like a novel, as the biblical accounts are clearly presented from theiroriginal languages into contemporary American English.
The simple references between the Old and New Testaments, found on almost every page, alsoshow the reader
how all the scriptures point to Christ and His fulfillment of God's will.
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The maps in the back are also very simple and straightforward and detailed without beingintimidating to the simple student of scripture.
An American translation of the Holy Bible is a perfect gift for confirmation or for anyonewho is looking for an accessible translation of scripture in plain American language.
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To order a copy for yourself or for a loved one, visit ChristianNewsMo.com.
You can click on the link at the bottom of this podcast.
Then just scroll down on the home page and you'll find a link on the left side of yourscreen.
An American translation of the Holy Bible.
A Bible for every English speaker who needs to learn of Jesus and His redemption.
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And I'd like to read to you from Isaiah chapter 28.
I'm going to begin
with verse seven.
These men also stagger with wine.
Here he's talking about the people of Israel, specifically the leaders who are supposed tobe teaching the flock the true word of God.
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He says, they reel with liquor, priests and prophets totter from drink.
They're dazed with wine, they go wrong with liquor.
They stagger when they see visions and stumble when they judge.
Every table is covered with filthy vomit.
there isn't a clean spot left.
Here he's describing the state of their hearts.
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That even though they are priests and prophets and they have the word of God, they'relike, as Jesus describes the Pharisees as whitewashed tombs.
They're beautiful on the outside, but it's just dead on the inside.
And he goes on, whom does he think he's teaching?
Whom does he explain his message to?
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babies just weaned from milk and taken from the breasts.
So here he's talking uh about how they teach to little children and how do little childrenneed to be taught.
They need to be taught according to just very basic principles, right?
Because that's how children are.
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So again, it's not as if this, okay, so here's this principle that Jesus is true God, trueman, right?
begotten of the Father from eternity, born of the Virgin Mary, and he's our Lord, and thatyou memorize that, you learn that, and that does become a principle, right?
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It's a standard that you live on, and it's something you kind of have to learn that as achild in a rudimentary kind of way.
And so here he describes it.
He says, there's rule upon rule, rule upon rule, line upon line, line upon line.
You're a little, they're a little.
That's how children learn.
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They learn their ABCs, they learn some hymns, ah they learn some Bible verses, they learnthe basic principles of Christian doctrine, and that's good.
But the purpose of that is so that these children would what?
What are children supposed to do, Hannah?
Are they supposed to stay children?
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No, they're supposed to grow up.
They're supposed to mature into
perfect manhood as Paul describes.
But those who continue to harden their hearts, who hear the word and treat it like it'sjust, you know, it's no more than just this memory work that I learned when I was a kid,
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or that I learned at seminary, or that I learned in school, or whatever, they begin toharden their hearts because they don't allow
the word of God to give them what it is meant to give them, that is, rest for their souls.
So Isaiah goes on, and here he describes God's judgment.
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uh
So this is Jesus saying, to me, everyone who labors and is heavy laden, and I will giveyou rest.
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Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.
For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
Here Jesus is teaching us, and Isaiah is saying the same thing, that God's word is, yes,we learn it, we learn the basic principles of it.
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We're instructed in it, and so it comes to us as like, okay, so we learn the TenCommandments, we learn the Creed, we learn the Lord's Prayer, we learn about baptism, we
learn about the Office of the Keys, we learn about the Sacrament of the Altar, right?
We learn these Bible verses that teach us about God's law, God's gospel, and these thingsare important to learn, but they're meant to give us rest.
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They're meant to free us so that we would think like Christians, think not like slaves,but as free sons of God and have rest for our souls.
But here he says they don't listen.
Now does this mean that they just reject the principles of what God's word says?
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No, they don't outright reject it.
So in other words, they're not denying that necessarily that
the Messiah is going to come, right?
They're not denying that God created the universe.
They're not denying that God brought the people out of Egypt.
They're not denying that Israel uh has been called by God.
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They're not denying that they should uh perform sacrifices according to the law of Moses.
They're not necessarily denying that.
The problem is that they're not listening to the main
point of God's Word.
And the main point of God's Word is that He has come to give them rest, He has come togive them peace with Him, to give them life in Him.
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And instead, they treat His Word like it's just a bunch of rules.
So this is what Isaiah says.
So what the Lord said, what the Lord now says is to them, just rule upon rule,
rule upon rule, line upon line, line upon line, here a little and there a little.
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As a result, when they leave, they will fall backwards and be hurt, trapped and captured.
And so this is how the hardening of hearts happens.
You hear the word, but the word simply remains a bunch of rules and principles to you.
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And this is something that is, our sinful nature is always trying to turn the Word of Godinto this.
This is why it can be very subtle and it doesn't happen overnight.
And this can help explain how people who are very orthodox or sound very orthodox can thenforget about the true purpose of
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the Word, that it is to free your conscience from the dead sinful works ah with the bloodof Jesus to be cleansed and free to serve the living God and know that you can be at peace
with him in what you do.
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ah And so that's that freedom that God
promises us in Christ and he does it through the word, he does it through doctrine, right,which is taught in an orderly way.
But when we treat the doctrine like it's just a bunch of rules and principles or some kindof uh status symbol, like we're on the right team, we're not those liberals over there.
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ah Then it becomes simply a repeat after me sort of theology where we just say the rightanswers, but the consequences of that, uh how we think, how we live, how we look at one
another as Christians, how we look at God and his word and our lives uh are not affectedby that uh because what is really
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driving us is the flesh, is satisfying our own desires.
uh so let's give some examples in scripture of how this hardening takes place.
Now the first example I'm gonna give is from someone who already was not a believer.
Okay, so what we're talking about today is mainly the hardening of the hearts of those whohave God's work.
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But we're going to first talk about the hardening of someone's heart who didn't have God'sword, but God's word came to him.
And can you guess who that is in the Bible?
Who's...
Well, no, they had God's word.
Someone who didn't have God's word, who was a pagan.
And yet when God's word came to him, he rejected it.
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Pharaoh, right?
The king of Egypt.
Now.
It's not entirely true though that he didn't have God's word.
Because who, so who was, who came down to Egypt?
Who of Jacob's kids came down to Egypt?
Joseph, yeah, Joseph came down to Egypt and then the rest of Jacob's kids are Israel,right?
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They came down to Egypt and they lived there.
And Pharaoh knew Joseph at the time.
But then there arose a Pharaoh who did not know Joseph.
So if he knew Joseph, it follows that he would have known what?
He would have known God's word.
So the Pharaohs did know God's word for a while, but now there arose a Pharaoh who did notknow God's word.
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And then he ends up dying after Moses leaves and his son takes his place.
And this guy's just a rank heathen.
uh But so here we have a kind of generational hardening that has taken place, where youkind of get used to the Word of God and you start treating it like it's just one of many
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other lifestyle choices or something, or hobby horses or whatever, and then it justbecomes sort of, you know, old hat or passe.
So at any rate, Moses comes to Pharaoh and God tells Pharaoh,
or God tells Moses that he is going to harden Pharaoh's heart.
But the way that Pharaoh's heart is hardened is by hearing the word of God from Moses.
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Moses says, thus says the Lord, let my people go so that they may serve me.
And what does Pharaoh say?
Who is the Lord?
Right?
Who is the Lord that I should obey him?
He does not care.
about who God is, even though he's hearing God's Word.
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And so the way that that hardening begins to take place is always through the Word.
But it's when the heart is not, in this mysterious way, is not softened and is not givenfaith.
And so instead of faith responding to God's Word,
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you have the natural heart responding to God's word.
And so Pharaoh continues to harden his heart even though Moses, God through Moses performsall these great signs and plagues and Moses and Pharaoh would seem to be softening his
heart but then he would double down, right?
So that doubling down again and again and again makes his heart finally totally hardeneduntil it leads to his army being destroyed in the Red Sea, right?
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Now there's another example though, someone whose heart was hardened and you mentionedhim.
And who is that?
Saul.
Yeah.
So the people of Israel wanted a king and this was actually a symptom of their heartsbeing hardened because they forgot that actually, no, God is your king.
And yet they also had reason to ask for a king because the physical uh
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government that they were living under at the time was a government of judges.
This is the kind of government that Moses established where they had various judges and atthis time Samuel and his sons were serving as the judges.
But Samuel's sons were evil.
Samuel was a faithful preacher of God's Word.
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He was Orthodox.
His sons likely were
able to talk the talk when they needed to and be on that right side of Samuel, right, theorthodox side, and yet what they were doing is they were behaving like heathen and they
were being unjust to the people.
And so the people were scandalized and they then became jaded and forgot about the wordand promise of God that he would be their king.
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And this is what the whole Bible is about.
is Christ is our King.
He is the one who rules our hearts and minds.
By His Holy Spirit, He came to rescue us from slavery and from sin and condemnation.
And so they forgot that.
Well, then God gives them a king from the tribe of Benjamin and his name is Saul.
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And at first, Saul is uh actually following God's word.
He seems to be pious, he's on the right side, he's a good Israelite, seemingly.
But then he disobeys God's word.
So he disobeys God's word uh in a couple different ways.
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One is he undertakes for himself to make sacrifices when he is not authorized to do sobecause he won't patiently wait for Samuel to show up as priest.
perform the sacrifices.
But the other one is that he did not kill all of the Amalekites when he was commanded tokill them, and he kept all of their...he was supposed to kill all their livestock too to
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show that God's uh judgment was being spent on them and that there was no sacrifice thatcould be made for them.
And so he did not carry out the judgment that God authorized him to carry out, but
presumed to be more compassionate and more equitable than God.
And that was then, you know, really what got him rejected by God.
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But the hardening doesn't all happen at once, right?
Because Saul is still weeping after Samuel.
Samuel walks away from him and he tears a piece of Samuel's garment and Samuel says, sowill the kingdom be torn from you.
And it's really a sad story.
And then you have uh Saul being afflicted by this evil spirit.
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And it all goes back to him not listening and heeding God's word and really treating God'sword like it's some sort of do-it-yourself sort of manual rather than the lifeblood of the
Christian life.
uh
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that which he should depend upon at all times.
But what's really sad then is we see how Saul continues to behave toward David.
So David is anointed king.
And of course, David, experiences his own kind of hardening later on, ah even though Godis able to bring him back to the faith and keep him in the faith.
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But he still has that kind of sluggishness that is...
that comes about because of sin.
And again, it happens this...
Again, that's just to say that this hardening, uh even though a full hardening doesn'thappen, this hardening is experienced even in the Christian life because we have our
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sinful nature.
Our sinful nature grows dull, and we shouldn't despair when we see that that happens, butwe should take warning and learn that we stay awake
and rest in the light of God's grace only through faith in the Word of the Gospel.
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uh But at any rate, so Saul continues to pursue David and he's being afflicted by thisevil spirit and David is the one who's able to drive out the evil spirit by singing hymns
to him.
Right?
He goes there with his harp or with his lute.
He plays songs, plays music for him.
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Well, what do you think he's doing also?
Well, he's singing.
He's under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
He's probably singing, Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
Right?
He's probably singing, uh you know, that, you uh know, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at myright hand till I put your enemies under your feet.
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You know, he's singing the gospel to Saul.
And the gospel is driving out this wicked spirit.
And yet, what does Saul continue to do?
He continues to take refuge in his own desires and he treats the word of God that Samueltaught him and that David sang to him as just a kind of short-term remedy at best and
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really just a bunch of line upon line, rule upon rule, precept upon precept, principlesthat are just sort of there that you can kind of...
take off the shelf and look at when you really need to, but then put back on the shelf andforget about.
That is how the hardening took place.
ah Now you also have this hardening taking place, I mean there are many examples of this,but you have this hardening taking place in the kings, as Isaiah was just describing here,
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to the kings of Israel uh and of Judah, where...
The word of God again is just like, okay, we'll make the right sacrifices, make sure thatwe have the feasts.
uh But really the word of God is just a bunch of rules that we follow.
It's uh we have to have our 4th of July parade because we're Americans and we're doingthat because we're patriotic and blah, blah.
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And it's all just tradition.
uh
The word of God isn't just some tradition that makes you feel like nostalgically at homeor something like that.
No, the word of God is that new wine, that promise of life and salvation, forgiveness ofsins given to us by the Son of God.
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And so when you forget that, when that becomes sort of just, when that itself becomes justsort of like,
details in the background, uh then that's when that hardening of hearts is beingaccelerated.
And of course, then fast forward, we see this in the days uh when Christ appears on theearth.
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And he calls out the hardening of the hearts of the Pharisees, of the Sadducees, of Herod,and he warns his disciples to stay away from...
the leaven or the yeast of the Pharisees and the Sadducees and of Herod.
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And what is he talking about?
He's not talking about bread.
He's talking about their doctrine.
And this is the thing, what Jesus does is he brings it back to doctrine.
The problem with the Pharisees and the Sadducees and of Herod is not that they are takingdoctrine too seriously.
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It's that they are treating God's doctrine as just a bunch of rules and then overshadowingGod's commandments with their own traditions.
Because if you treat it like a bunch of rules, well then you can just come up with otherrules that you think work better.
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As if the point of God's word is for you to be able to figure out how to fix everythingand make everything run smoothly.
So for them, the word of God became simply rules.
Line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little, there a little.
And they got it all under control.
And Jesus says, beware of that.
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He calls that leaven, evil leaven.
And what he really calls it then is false doctrine.
And so you see the point here is that, okay, a guy who is saying all the right doctrinaltalking points, but then...
his entire MO is to serve his own agenda and to persecute those who actually preach thegospel and to uh go after those who can't defend themselves and he's completely lacking in
(40:46):
love.
This isn't merely a moral problem.
This isn't merely an ethical problem.
It certainly is that.
But at the heart of it, it's a doctrinal problem because the highest false doctrine is notwhen you are saying things that are explicitly contrary to what God's word clearly
(41:11):
teaches.
The highest and most disgusting uh false doctrine is when you treat the doctrine as ifit's sort of passe rules.
that can go right hand in hand and share the throne with your own traditions.
And you can set up your own way of doing things and your own authority and use that tosmother and overshadow that pure word of God.
(41:46):
This is what Paul describes as the man of lawlessness and what he's doing.
He sets himself up
in the temple of God above all things that are worshipped, making himself out to be God.
This is the spirit of Antichrist.
When you treat God's word, even if you can articulate it beautifully, but you treat itlike it's just a bunch of principles that you hold to, that you subscribe to, but
(42:21):
It's really just collecting dust on the shelf and it's only taken off the shelf when youneed to be able to win an argument.
And this is something that happens, that happened to Israel.
It doesn't happen overnight, but it happened to Israel.
It happens to the church.
uh This was, you know, when I uh was a kid, well, I was, I guess, an adult.
(42:48):
I was a young adult, just graduated high school.
graduating high school.
My dad was kicked out of his church.
And I'm not gonna go into all the details, but before they removed him, one of my dad'ssupporters made a motion at the voters assembly for everyone to vote on whether he had
(43:13):
faithfully preached the gospel and ministered the sacraments.
So they voted on whether he was like,
faithfully taught what was true.
And they all voted and they voted unanimously that he had.
But the majority of them still voted to remove him because he was out of step with what uhthe synodical officials wanted them to do.
(43:47):
And so here what happened is that the doctrine, they could acknowledge that it was true.
They're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good.
Pastor, you do a good job with all the doctrine stuff.
But we got a problem here.
and we want to get rid of this problem here.
So for them, the doctrine is just simply some line upon line, precept upon precept, here alittle, there a little.
(44:10):
know, it's like, you know, we have this wonderful thing called the Book of Concord, whichis uh our confessions drawn from the clear fountains of Scripture, and they serve as the
standard for what we teach.
that rule our teaching and our lives and our confession, our life together.
(44:33):
And how often does it happen that this Book of Concord just becomes this book on theshelf, like any of these books, and just collects dust?
And that's not to say that everyone needs to be a scholar in this Book of Concord.
But...
This standard of confession that we know in the six chief parts of the small catechism,the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, Baptism, the Office of the Keys, the
(45:03):
Sacrament of the Altar.
When we treat these things like they're just the tidbits that we learned when we were incatechism class, and then we got confirmed and now we don't have to learn them anymore.
That is how our hearts get hardened when we treat God's word like it's just a bunch ofrules and principles.
(45:29):
It seems that people don't like to read as much as they used to.
Newspapers seem old fashioned, they say.
Instead, they just listen to podcasts or they watch videos.
But as helpful as it is to have a good podcast on while you drive or cook or clean or mowthe lawn, you just can't replace the printed text.
(45:49):
Reading words on a page allows you to slow down and read at your own pace, not distractedby lights and pop-ups at every turn.
Published weekly with 48 issues a year, Christian News is designed to supply rank and fileChristians with information needed to face the present crisis in Christendom.
(46:10):
With this weekly printed paper, you will find devotions, editorials, and articlesaddressing biblical, theological topics
affecting the Christian Church in the world today.
You'll also find information about books published by Lutheran News.
The various articles are accessible to any faithful Christian who's interested in God'sWord and how it relates to our time and to our culture.
(46:33):
To learn more about Christian news and to subscribe, visit ChristianNewsMo.com.
Just scroll down on the homepage and click on subscriptions.
An issue of Christian news
printed on good old fashioned newsprint will be delivered to your door.
So you can sit down, rid yourself of distractions and read.
(46:56):
Go to ChristianNewsMo.com or just click on the link at the bottom of this podcast.
Christian News, we preach Christ crucified.
We talk about the hardening of hearts and what are the effects then of the hardening ofhearts?
Well, I mean, the main effect and the main danger is that you would eventually lose yourfaith altogether and you'd be condemned forever.
(47:25):
But there's also a public effect or there is an effect on other people.
And this is often the effect that scandal has.
that this scandal leads to this kind of cynicism.
(47:47):
So again, to recap, you are going to church, you learn the word of God, you learn aboutthe law and the gospel, you learn about what your baptism does and that we live in daily
repentance and faith.
(48:08):
You learn the Ten Commandments, you learn about the new obedience, living in the Christianlife, uh not following what the world says or does, loving your neighbor, and taking
refuge in the forgiveness of sins, which you know that you need.
You learn this and you're hearing this.
(48:31):
And then uh you have some people come along and kind of...
you know, downplay it and you think, no, no, those guys are downplaying the word of Godand they're trying to make it about other things.
But this guy over here, he's teaching the true word of God.
He's really good, he's solid.
And then that guy turns out to be not who you thought he was.
(48:56):
And that's what a scandal is.
That's what really shakes you.
And so it can lead then to that cynicism.
in thinking that, there must be something wrong then with the word of God itself.
There must be something wrong with the, and maybe you wouldn't say with the word of Goditself, but maybe you'd say with taking doctrine seriously.
(49:22):
There must be something wrong with that.
And a strict adherence to pure doctrine must be the problem.
And.
What I'm telling you is that that's not the problem.
The problem is not a strict adherence to pure doctrine.
The problem is rather how people treat the pure doctrine.
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If they treat the pure doctrine legalistically, that is as if, not to say that the puredoctrine doesn't teach us the law and how to live.
No, that's not a problem to acknowledge that.
But to treat the pure doctrine legalistically is to treat it like it's just a bunch ofrules that you can somehow control if you just know them enough.
(50:13):
And you can use them to optimize your situation, ah whether you're standing in the socialstanding of your church or of your family or whatever.
uh
That is a misuse of God's Word.
It's a misuse of the pure doctrine and it inevitably is setting up beside the puredoctrine your own traditions that ah your sinful flesh and the devil is gonna spur you on
(50:46):
to do, uh your sinful flesh is going to use to overthrow the pure doctrine and toobfuscate it and obscure it.
And so what often happens to those who experience the abuse of authority, uh who hearpeople use the pure doctrine and orthodoxy as a way to silence anyone who would uh ask any
(51:17):
questions about whether people are being treated fairly or unfairly.
The effect then is that they feel like they're being gaslit.
So you might feel like you must be a liberal or something.
(51:41):
That maybe you must not be orthodox.
Maybe you are not a confessional Lutheran because you have experienced
injustice or unfair treatment from those who champion the confessional Lutheran cause.
And so you think, man, they must be, so you know what gaslighting is?
(52:05):
It's from a movie and it's become kind of a popular term being used in recent years, thatgaslighting is when people are doing things to you.
but they're convincing you that you are actually the problem.
they're doing things to you and uh when you are convinced that they're doing things toyou, they try to convince you that no, no, you're just crazy.
(52:32):
um And this is used in a lot of political and cultural uh discussions these days.
So, you know, if you're convinced that, you know, COVID, for example, is overblown or someof the claims about COVID are overblown and you've done like your research
(52:52):
or whatever, then other people say, no, no, no, no, you're just being a conspiracytheorist or whatever.
So that's one example of where people say that they're being gaslit.
They're being treated as if they're the crazy conspiracy theorists.
Another example that I've heard of being gaslit is like, and this is actually more, uh
(53:18):
closer to how it was used in the movie is like a woman is being abused by her husband andthen she's convinced that she's just being overbearing or she's just being difficult when
she tries to point out that uh her husband's being abusive.
(53:40):
So everyone just.
puts it back down on her and says, no, no, no, you're the one who is in the wrong.
uh So there are all sorts of ways in which this word, gaslit, is used.
And it can be used in the church where, OK, uh these people who claim to be the Orthodoxchampions are treating me like I am a problem, like I am being schismatic, like I am not
(54:09):
following the word of God.
And what I'm saying is, you, okay, first of all, we should always examine ourselves beforeGod.
if you think that you're being gaslit in that way, don't stop there.
(54:29):
You might very well be being, that may very well be the case.
But we gotta go back to the beginning.
go back to what God has called us to do, and that is to hear His word.
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And remember that just because people are touting and championing orthodoxy and puredoctrine does not mean that the pure doctrine belongs exclusively to them.
they don't have the only right to the pure doctrine.
The pure doctrine has been given to you as a child of God.
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So listen to the word of God and examine yourself before the word of God.
And I think this is often the hardest thing to do because when people accuse you of allsorts of things,
often what they're accusing you of might ring true and that's why it is so frustrating.
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That's one of the reasons why it's so frustrating.
Other times it might be complete lies, right?
And that's frustrating too because then you think like, I taking crazy pills?
ah I didn't do this, why are people accusing me of this?
But it's important to be still and know that the Lord is God and no one else, not you.
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not the people who are going after you, but the Lord, he is God.
Jesus Christ is the one true Lord.
And his word reigns supreme.
So examine yourself before his word.
So for example, uh it's possible that you, let's say that you have sinned in some way.
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And then,
people are gonna use that sin to then discredit you for every other thing that you eversay or do.
And they're then going to use that as leverage to promote evil.
Well, what you should do is turn to the word of God and repent of that sin.
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uh Now, it might depend, so then how do you approach this?
in your life, well, if it is a sin, if the sin that you have repented of, right, you'verepented of, but you did commit, if that is a sin that has caused scandal ah in the
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church, that you actually have contributed to public scandal in the church, ah and thatpeople know about, if that's the case, it's gonna be a little bit different.
than if you're just, you kind of slipped up on something in a way that most people slip upin, but it wasn't something that really caused a scandal, but it was still something that
(57:36):
kind of discredits you to an extent.
ah If you yourself participated in an affair with someone, but then you also notice thatthere's a lot of other injustice going on, you...
you also, the fact that you were involved in the affair kind of limits how much, itdefinitely limits how much you're able to say.
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So you still should take uh comfort in the forgiveness of sins.
one of the hardest things to do is to recognize your own limitations.
That you are not necessarily the herald.
uh to call and the watchmen to call people to account.
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But what is a better thing to do is to entrust your burdens to God and to find and takerefuge in faithful friends who can speak to this.
And uh so, you know, but now let's say that you, you you weren't involved in a publicscandal, but you are, you you maybe spoke foolishly or did some foolish things that people
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are holding over you.
Well, that's where you, again, you repent before God, you examine yourself before God, andyou also take refuge in faithful friends who can speak on your behalf.
And perhaps you even, you know, you also got to recognize your limitations, and you're notgoing
be able to be the herald, you know, voice in the wilderness that's going to uh fix all theproblems.
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Not even John the Baptist could do that, right?
Recognize that God's Word is going to take care of itself and convict and convince on itsown, but you might be able to be more in a public uh position, right?
So you take, for example, like uh
take a pastor who's been removed from his congregation and along the way he perhaps saidsome things that were
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that were driven by pride and driven by anger and not driven by love and concern for theweaker brethren.
Okay, well, you know, he can, you know, he should take refuge in the forgiveness of sins,repent before God and take refuge in the forgiveness of sins and the word and maybe kind
(01:00:08):
of...
lay back for a while, but he hasn't scandalized the flock.
know, there's obviously a difference between a guy who just, you know, speaks...
uh
in an overzealous manner in which he offends the weak uh and someone who has completelydisgraced the ministry.
(01:00:29):
uh So in that case, that guy can actually be in pretty good position to speak up againstabuses of God's Word, uh speak up against abuses of the pure doctrine.
But this is the...
uh
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The takeaway though that we have to, that we can't forget is that at the end of it all,your conclusion should be that God's word, his pure teaching is that pure spiritual milk.
(01:01:13):
It is the answer.
Now with that then, I want to then discuss three other examples of those who respond toscandal, but then their response to scandal ends up leading to a downplaying of doctrine
and a hardening of hearts.
(01:01:33):
uh so there are three examples of this.
One is a group uh from like the fourth, fifth century,
known as the uh Donatists.
So the Donatists were a group that were responding to these bishops and ministers who haduh caved under pressure and left the faith during Great Persecution.
(01:02:08):
But then they came back to the faith.
And the Donatists are responding to a kind laxadaisical attitude, but they overreact tothe point where they say that if a priest is an evil priest, therefore is, everything he
therefore does is illegitimate.
(01:02:31):
Right?
So if you receive ordination or baptism or the Lord's Supper from a priest who even isstill evil,
um or used to be evil, ah then it doesn't really count and you're not really in thechurch.
And guys like St.
Augustine responded to that and basically...
(01:02:54):
put it to rest, they kind of died out eventually, that no, no, as we say in our OxfordConfession, those, the sacraments that are administered even by those who are evil are
still in themselves effective, right?
They're efficacious.
They still have the power because the Word of God is powerful in and of itself.
(01:03:16):
uh And so the problem with the docetists though is that they overreacted and they made itabout the person uh of the priest or of the pastor instead of about the doctrine.
Another example would be the mystics, which became pretty prominent in the Middle Ages,and they were getting sick and tired of this scholastic theology where God's word was
(01:03:47):
being arranged in these, know, but the scholastics were just the school men, so God's wordwas being arranged in these kind of doctrinal categories and explained in kind of orderly
way, which that's good to do.
that, right?
But what ended up happening was they would mix in it philosophical principles and try toexplain things from a philosophical standpoint.
(01:04:14):
And it turned Christian instruction into a very wooden thing.
And so, you you have these highfalutin school men who are, you know, waxing eloquentlyabout all sorts of
doctrinal uh issues, but from a very, you know, egg-headed sort of way.
(01:04:37):
And people were then not, they were losing sight of the true spiritual life that God'sWord is supposed to give you.
But again, the problem with these mystics though is that their solution was to try to findsome kind of uh inner life uh through deep meditation that ultimately was not
(01:05:01):
grounded in the Word of God.
And so you'd get people claiming that they see visions or that they have been called to dothis or that, but they don't do it with the external command and promise of God in the
scripture.
So again, that's an example of those who see people misusing God's word, but they react insuch a way where they themselves lose sight of God's word.
(01:05:26):
They lose sight of the pure doctrine and they don't realize that no, the problem was not
the strict adherence to the pure doctrine, the problem was rather the way they treated thepure doctrine.
Like it was just a bunch of talking points and nerd notes and you know a way to to showthat you're smarter and more intelligent than other people.
(01:05:51):
That's evil but that doesn't mean that the doctrine itself and the and even thearrangement of the doctrine and the rigorous teaching of the doctrine is bad.
No, that's good as long
as the center of it is Christ crucified for sinners and giving himself for the life of theworld.
(01:06:13):
And then you have another group that are kind of like the mystics.
um And they are, they rose up in the 19th, late 18th and no, no, 17th and early 18thcenturies.
And they were responding and they still even to this day, have, you know, these allmanifest themselves throughout history, but they were responding to these church leaders.
(01:06:42):
ah and these kind of rationalist thinkers who were treating
orthodoxy as a way to, as kind of a ticket for them to be able to just push their weightaround.
And whether for political causes or what have you.
And so you would have, you would have, for example, the, you know, a prince of a territorywho would be fornicating and acting and behaving like a heathen.
(01:07:14):
And yet he would hold to the doctrine.
He would hold to the book of Concord.
protect the Orthodox pastors in his region.
And so he sort of was given a pass.
And so you had a guy named Philip Jacob Spaner uh and his successors who understandablyrose up against this stuff.
(01:07:35):
And that from there you had the movement that's known as pietism.
And there were a lot of good things in pietism of these three examples of Donatism,mysticism, and pietism.
I would say that pietism, at least at its, at its beginning,
was certainly the best because these guys were still basically Orthodox.
(01:07:57):
The problem though is that again, they distrusted the clergymen so much and understandablyso in many cases, because the clergymen were often just sort of like, they just kind of
give the right doctrinal talking points but not call to account those who were uh
(01:08:19):
who were in high stations.
Again, this wasn't universal.
They weren't all like this.
But unfortunately, what ended up happening was that the pietism ended up framing the puredoctrine, like those who wanted to teach the pure doctrine and hold to the Book of Concord
(01:08:40):
strictly, that they were then painted as these kind of cold, rationalistic type of peoplewho
really just cared about holding on to their power.
And were there examples of that?
Yes.
But it's a very dangerous thing when we then just...
(01:09:02):
write them all off.
Because then what we're left with, which ended up being the case with Piatus, was simplyrelying on our own kind of emotional sense of connection to God, and you get a very
shallow and vapid uh form of Christianity.
And so what we should remember about scandal,
(01:09:29):
is a scandal is simply the devil's way to try to convince us that the doctrine of our Lordis simply a bunch of cold rules.
And his goal is always then to take our hearts away from that external word of God.
(01:09:52):
and to rely on philosophies or psychological trends or sociological talking points orwhatever is the kind of, promises a more sensitive or loving or equitable uh program that
(01:10:13):
he wants us to trust in those things rather than.
in the pure teaching of the Word of God.
And so, I'm speaking to those who have actually experienced this kind of scandal and haveperhaps felt that, I always consider myself to be conservative, to be orthodox, to care
(01:10:37):
about the true Word of God, but I feel like I'm a liberal for calling out bad behavior.
ah from the hands of those who are, you know, wielding that pure doctrine.
I'm speaking specifically to you to not lose heart.
(01:10:59):
Don't become jaded.
Don't allow the hardening of hearts that you are experiencing and others be transmitted toyou.
Hold on to the doctrine.
Stay away from the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees and of Herod.
Recognize that your own sinful flesh is bound to grow dull and that's why it needs to becrucified every day um as you live in daily repentance.
(01:11:30):
And don't grow bored with the pure doctrine that you have learned from Scripture as you'velearned it through the small catechism.
um
you have read the book of concord and I would encourage you to do so read the largecatechism if you have if you've if you've gone through the small catechism read the large
(01:11:52):
catechism let the word of Christ dwell in you richly and think theologically thinkdoctrinally think even dogmatically don't let
Those who use orthodoxy as a way to promote their own agendas, don't let them spoil thetaste of pure doctrine for you.
(01:12:20):
And don't look down on those who...
take seriously the pure doctrine, assuming that they're somehow just gonna slip into thesame kind of legalistic, cold behavior that you perhaps have noticed in others.
And pray for those who have slipped into that.
(01:12:41):
uh But if you just put down the pure doctrine as if that is the problem,
then you're no better than those who treat God's Word like it's just a bunch of rules.
You're basically seeding their ground, right?
You're allowing them to define how God's Word should be treated and should be understood.
(01:13:10):
Instead, remember that the Word of God is, as Jesus says, Spirit and Life.
Doctrine, as Solomon says,
is life.
It is what holds us together.
That doesn't necessarily mean that we all have the same intellectual capacities to talkabout all of the history of it and all the distinctions and understand them at the same
(01:13:41):
level.
But even a child knows that the church is the dear lambs who hear the voice of their goodshepherd.
So don't stop listening to his voice.
And yes, you're going to find weaknesses in everyone who wields the pure doctrine.
You're going to find people being overzealous.
(01:14:04):
You're going to find people being cowardly.
You're going to find all sorts of weaknesses in these jars of clay, which we all are.
But don't lose sight of that great treasure that we are holding.
Don't despise those who are, ah don't despise people for their weakness because Christdoesn't despise you for your weakness.
(01:14:29):
And he promises that if you share a cup of cold water with a disciple because he is Jesus'disciple, then you will by no means lose your reward.
So listen to Jesus who teaches you, who lays his yoke upon you.
who ensures you that though it may seem hard for this momentary time, that it is easy andit is light and that you will find rest for your souls.
(01:15:01):
You've been listening to Christendom and the World.
Join us next time for another episode.
Then I heard the Lord ask, Whom should I send and who will go for us?
Then I said, Here I am, send me.
He said to me, Go and tell these people, You may go on hearing but never understand, andgo on seeing but never know anything.
Make the mind of these people dull, deafen their hearing, shut their eyes, that they maynot see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their minds, and turn.
(00:29):
and be healed.
These words from Isaiah chapter 6 are well known, especially when we talk about thecalling of pastors into the ministry of the church.
Those words of obedience from Isaiah are words that serve as an example for all those whodesire to preach the gospel and answer the call of God through His church to go to His
(00:53):
people and proclaim what Christ has won for them.
Here I am.
Send me.
And yet, when we read these words in context, what does God first tell Isaiah to do?
To go to these people and tell them to keep on hearing, but not know anything, to keep onseeing, but not perceive.
(01:15):
He goes to tell them that their hearts have been hardened.
And this is a topic that we often don't like to talk about, but it is all too common.
in the Church today and throughout the history of Christendom.
So today we are going to speak about the hardening of hearts.
(01:37):
My name is Pastor Andrew Proyce.
You are listening to Christendom in the World.
Recently Christian News published an article, an op-ed or editorial, whatever you want tocall it, that I wrote.
uh which was entitled Scandal, Cynicism, and Pure Doctrine.
(02:01):
And in that article, I gave a warning to those who have experienced this common phenomenonuh where they will encounter abuse or negligence or some kind of hypocritical action uh
(02:22):
wielded at them or at other people.
Maybe they notice it.
it's from the hands of those
who wield the sword of pure doctrine.
And these are those who harp on the importance of teaching the right thing, practicing theright thing, and being faithful to the word of God.
(02:46):
And what often happens with such people when they see uh others who, you know,
make themselves out to be good confessional, Lutheran, know, Orthodox, dogmatic people, isthat they then start to conclude that there's something wrong with this strict adherence
(03:10):
to pure doctrine.
And so I gave a warning to those uh who have experienced this scandal.
Let's say, for example, you have a pastor who is preaching the pure word of God, and thenhe cheats on his wife, right?
And uh then he covers it up, and he's able to use his position of power and influence tocover it up in some way and to continue to have a certain amount of
(03:43):
respect and rapport among other people uh and other people who maybe were victims of thisor were affected by this in some way notice this and they get jaded and they get a bad
taste in their mouth about pure doctrine because when they think of the purity of doctrineit reminds them of these people who have abused their power and their authority and
(04:12):
So what I was warning against was don't fall into that ditch of cynicism where you beginto look at the doctrine itself as the problem.
Now with all that said, and you can go ahead and read my article in Christian News if youwould like,
With all that said, I think it's also important to dive a little bit deeper into how doesthis happen?
(04:39):
Because one of the things that is so frustrating for someone who goes through some kind ofabuse, who is mistreated in some way, is that it's difficult to wrap your mind around it.
And this is why a lot of people will do research into psychology and sociology and thingslike that.
(05:04):
And I was a bit negative about that in my article.
But at the same time, I understand why one would look into what psychology and sociologyhas to say when he has encountered such terrible, awful behavior.
(05:25):
uh from those who are supposed to be really conservative and orthodox and faithful.
uh You know, this could happen like if your father is always saying everything right andbasically most of what you believe is from your father and yet your father sadly turns out
(05:48):
to be a bad guy.
You know, maybe he mistreats your mother and then you look back and you find that he wasactually
and you start learning about things like borderline personality disorder and stuff likethat, which of course I am a novice when it comes to that kind of stuff.
I've read a little bit up on that.
(06:08):
uh And I can see how that can be helpful to get some kind of explanation.
And I don't want to poo poo that entirely either, because I think that that is importantto try to wrap your head around why would this
person who otherwise is speaking the truth in every way and defending the truth in everyway.
(06:32):
Why would this person behave this way and throw me under the bus?
So while philosophy, natural law, sociology, psychology, they have their place, you canlook at these things in so far as they conform to, like I said, natural law, uh in so far
(06:58):
as they conform to what is true, they can be helpful in understanding why people behave acertain way.
But as Christians who read scripture,
We know that there is such a thing as sin, and sin is not just breaking a few rules.
(07:19):
God said about mankind before he destroyed them in the flood that the thoughts andimaginations of man's heart are only evil continually.
Jeremiah in his book of prophecy says that the heart of man is wicked beyond anyunderstanding.
(07:44):
It is deceitful and wicked so much that we can't even
know it.
We can barely scratch the surface of how wicked the sinful heart is.
And so it's worth our time and attention to see how the Scriptures
(08:05):
describes sin and how sin causes hearts to be hardened because that's really what's goingon here.
When you have someone who touts the pure doctrine and he's always on the right side of allthe controversies and arguments but then acts in a completely hypocritical and cruel way
(08:28):
and lacks any love toward the lambs of Christ.
It can really shake you.
It can make you question whether the things that he taught are actually true.
And this is why Jesus warns us about scandal.
He says scandals are bound to come.
(08:49):
That is scandals are those things that cause people to stumble, that cause people to fallaway, that cause people to question God's Word and the importance of God's Word.
And Jesus says,
uh woe to that man by whom the scandal comes.
And so hopefully this might be of benefit to anyone who has to encounter that kind ofscandal in the church when those who are otherwise teaching what's true and have been
(09:22):
faithful in many ways uh
will fall into a horrible sin or a horrible error and they will use whatever influence orpower or authority that God has given them to circumvent their blame, circumvent any kind
(09:45):
of accountability and project any kind of blame onto those who are
the victims.
um Now, the first thing that we need to understand about the hardening of hearts is thatGod, in his word, calls on all people everywhere to repent.
(10:15):
So we stand before God, no matter how squeaky clean we are before men, we stand before Godby nature, sinful and unclean.
And one of the, I mentioned this in the article that I wrote, but I remember this sermonthat my victory supervisor uh preached in Waterloo, Ontario, Pastor Krestic.
(10:41):
And I don't remember the entire sermon, but I remember, and I don't even remember what thetext was, but I do remember him talking about sin and how the sin from other people can
affect you.
and how it can actually do more damage to you spiritually than it does to you in themoment in that you are experiencing an injustice.
(11:10):
Because the reason why someone has sinned against you, the reason why someone has takenGod's Word for granted and has used God's Word as a cloak for vice is because his
heart has been hardened.
Now the other thing too to consider about the hardening of hearts is that it doesn'thappen overnight.
(11:35):
It's not just a one-time thing like you wake up and suddenly you're not a Christian.
All of us uh as even as Christians, all of us Christians in so far as we still live in theflesh experience the hardening of hearts.
Right?
It is the dullness of our own sinful flesh.
(11:59):
We get bored with God's Word or we begin to treat God's Word as if it's just, you know,some kind of principle that we have figured out and we can then move on and uh pursue the
things that really satisfy our own flesh.
And we are always battling against this.
(12:20):
you know, there's a certain hardening that takes place uh in an individual Christian.
Maybe as he gets older he might get tired uh of speaking the truth.
Maybe, you know, his kids continue to rebel and he gets tired of fighting and so he sortof gives up and then he starts to, in his mind, make allowances for their rebellion.
(12:47):
But this might also happen in
in more of a collective community, like of a congregation or of an institution, of aschool, of a synod, of a church body, of a culture where the heart grows dull.
(13:08):
Now, how this happens though to someone who actually uh is a Christian,
is that the way it happens is that you hear the word.
And the word of God, which is what?
The word of God is a two-edged sword.
It pierces through bone and marrow.
It separates soul from the spirit.
(13:30):
And most importantly, it is the Holy Spirit giving you life through Christ.
That's what the word of God is.
It is rest for your souls.
But the hardening happens when the word of God, which is supposed to give rest to yoursouls, becomes something different to you.
(13:50):
and it becomes simply a list of rules or a list of principles that you imagine that youcan easily fulfill, right?
So I could say, so I could treat, for example, uh the teaching that Jesus is both God andman as just simply a rule.
(14:14):
Right?
I could treat it as something that just is just a principle.
So that I say I believe that I confess the Nicene Creed, I confess the Athanasian Creed.
I am a Trinitarian.
I believe Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three distinct persons, one God.
And I believe that Jesus is true God and true man.
(14:37):
And then what I do is I take that doctrine and instead of it being my life,
Instead of it being that which I meditate upon day and night, and I find my strength fromit, instead it becomes simply a marker or signal that I'm on this right orthodox side.
(15:01):
And so it therefore doesn't have any real effect upon how I think and how I...
act toward my neighbor.
And this is what Paul is talking about when he says that I can have all the faith as tomove mountains, but if I have not love, then I am nothing.
(15:25):
And so this would be, in other words, I can confess the faith.
I can know the Christian faith, but
If the gospel, the free forgiveness of sins won for us by the blood and righteousness ofJesus Christ who died for us and rose again, if that's some canned principle that I can
(15:46):
just put up here and know that, okay, I believe that, but then I just move on with my lifeand seek to please my own sinful flesh, well then that...
Gospel, which is the very life that God gives, becomes simply a cold principle.
(16:11):
And the scriptures speak to this very precisely in Isaiah, in fact.
And so Isaiah, who is told to go to this people and tell them that their hearts arehardened, and in fact, as a judgment against them to say, yeah, keep on hardening your
hearts.
This is God's judgment against you.
(16:31):
He also then later on in his book of prophecy in chapter 28 describes how this hardeningtakes place.
If you're like me, you like to read a few different translations of the Bible.
Cross-referencing various passages in the Bible gives me insight into how words andphrases are used and repeated throughout the Scriptures.
(16:55):
And of course, as a pastor and teacher of God's Word, I often consult the Hebrew and theGreek sources as well.
But if you're like me, you also want your children to read and understand the Bible.
While there are many cross-references we can find when we dive deeply into scripture, it'snice for the simple Christian to see the basic connections between the Old and New
(17:18):
Testaments without getting overwhelmed.
An American translation of the Holy Bible, first translated by Rev.
Dr.
William F.
Beck, is specifically translated in the words of American English.
I especially appreciate using Pastor Beck's translation while I'm at home leading mychildren in devotions and daily Bible readings.
(17:41):
It reads almost like a novel, as the biblical accounts are clearly presented from theiroriginal languages into contemporary American English.
The simple references between the Old and New Testaments, found on almost every page, alsoshow the reader
how all the scriptures point to Christ and His fulfillment of God's will.
(18:03):
The maps in the back are also very simple and straightforward and detailed without beingintimidating to the simple student of scripture.
An American translation of the Holy Bible is a perfect gift for confirmation or for anyonewho is looking for an accessible translation of scripture in plain American language.
(18:23):
To order a copy for yourself or for a loved one, visit ChristianNewsMo.com.
You can click on the link at the bottom of this podcast.
Then just scroll down on the home page and you'll find a link on the left side of yourscreen.
An American translation of the Holy Bible.
A Bible for every English speaker who needs to learn of Jesus and His redemption.
(18:50):
And I'd like to read to you from Isaiah chapter 28.
I'm going to begin
with verse seven.
These men also stagger with wine.
Here he's talking about the people of Israel, specifically the leaders who are supposed tobe teaching the flock the true word of God.
(19:11):
He says, they reel with liquor, priests and prophets totter from drink.
They're dazed with wine, they go wrong with liquor.
They stagger when they see visions and stumble when they judge.
Every table is covered with filthy vomit.
there isn't a clean spot left.
Here he's describing the state of their hearts.
(19:32):
That even though they are priests and prophets and they have the word of God, they'relike, as Jesus describes the Pharisees as whitewashed tombs.
They're beautiful on the outside, but it's just dead on the inside.
And he goes on, whom does he think he's teaching?
Whom does he explain his message to?
(19:56):
babies just weaned from milk and taken from the breasts.
So here he's talking uh about how they teach to little children and how do little childrenneed to be taught.
They need to be taught according to just very basic principles, right?
Because that's how children are.
(20:16):
So again, it's not as if this, okay, so here's this principle that Jesus is true God, trueman, right?
begotten of the Father from eternity, born of the Virgin Mary, and he's our Lord, and thatyou memorize that, you learn that, and that does become a principle, right?
(20:37):
It's a standard that you live on, and it's something you kind of have to learn that as achild in a rudimentary kind of way.
And so here he describes it.
He says, there's rule upon rule, rule upon rule, line upon line, line upon line.
You're a little, they're a little.
That's how children learn.
(20:59):
They learn their ABCs, they learn some hymns, ah they learn some Bible verses, they learnthe basic principles of Christian doctrine, and that's good.
But the purpose of that is so that these children would what?
What are children supposed to do, Hannah?
Are they supposed to stay children?
(21:19):
No, they're supposed to grow up.
They're supposed to mature into
perfect manhood as Paul describes.
But those who continue to harden their hearts, who hear the word and treat it like it'sjust, you know, it's no more than just this memory work that I learned when I was a kid,
(21:40):
or that I learned at seminary, or that I learned in school, or whatever, they begin toharden their hearts because they don't allow
the word of God to give them what it is meant to give them, that is, rest for their souls.
So Isaiah goes on, and here he describes God's judgment.
(22:01):
uh
So this is Jesus saying, to me, everyone who labors and is heavy laden, and I will giveyou rest.
(22:30):
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.
For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
Here Jesus is teaching us, and Isaiah is saying the same thing, that God's word is, yes,we learn it, we learn the basic principles of it.
(22:51):
We're instructed in it, and so it comes to us as like, okay, so we learn the TenCommandments, we learn the Creed, we learn the Lord's Prayer, we learn about baptism, we
learn about the Office of the Keys, we learn about the Sacrament of the Altar, right?
We learn these Bible verses that teach us about God's law, God's gospel, and these thingsare important to learn, but they're meant to give us rest.
(23:21):
They're meant to free us so that we would think like Christians, think not like slaves,but as free sons of God and have rest for our souls.
But here he says they don't listen.
Now does this mean that they just reject the principles of what God's word says?
(23:41):
No, they don't outright reject it.
So in other words, they're not denying that necessarily that
the Messiah is going to come, right?
They're not denying that God created the universe.
They're not denying that God brought the people out of Egypt.
They're not denying that Israel uh has been called by God.
(24:03):
They're not denying that they should uh perform sacrifices according to the law of Moses.
They're not necessarily denying that.
The problem is that they're not listening to the main
point of God's Word.
And the main point of God's Word is that He has come to give them rest, He has come togive them peace with Him, to give them life in Him.
(24:30):
And instead, they treat His Word like it's just a bunch of rules.
So this is what Isaiah says.
So what the Lord said, what the Lord now says is to them, just rule upon rule,
rule upon rule, line upon line, line upon line, here a little and there a little.
(24:53):
As a result, when they leave, they will fall backwards and be hurt, trapped and captured.
And so this is how the hardening of hearts happens.
You hear the word, but the word simply remains a bunch of rules and principles to you.
(25:14):
And this is something that is, our sinful nature is always trying to turn the Word of Godinto this.
This is why it can be very subtle and it doesn't happen overnight.
And this can help explain how people who are very orthodox or sound very orthodox can thenforget about the true purpose of
(25:40):
the Word, that it is to free your conscience from the dead sinful works ah with the bloodof Jesus to be cleansed and free to serve the living God and know that you can be at peace
with him in what you do.
(26:02):
ah And so that's that freedom that God
promises us in Christ and he does it through the word, he does it through doctrine, right,which is taught in an orderly way.
But when we treat the doctrine like it's just a bunch of rules and principles or some kindof uh status symbol, like we're on the right team, we're not those liberals over there.
(26:35):
ah Then it becomes simply a repeat after me sort of theology where we just say the rightanswers, but the consequences of that, uh how we think, how we live, how we look at one
another as Christians, how we look at God and his word and our lives uh are not affectedby that uh because what is really
(27:03):
driving us is the flesh, is satisfying our own desires.
uh so let's give some examples in scripture of how this hardening takes place.
Now the first example I'm gonna give is from someone who already was not a believer.
Okay, so what we're talking about today is mainly the hardening of the hearts of those whohave God's work.
(27:30):
But we're going to first talk about the hardening of someone's heart who didn't have God'sword, but God's word came to him.
And can you guess who that is in the Bible?
Who's...
Well, no, they had God's word.
Someone who didn't have God's word, who was a pagan.
And yet when God's word came to him, he rejected it.
(27:55):
Pharaoh, right?
The king of Egypt.
Now.
It's not entirely true though that he didn't have God's word.
Because who, so who was, who came down to Egypt?
Who of Jacob's kids came down to Egypt?
Joseph, yeah, Joseph came down to Egypt and then the rest of Jacob's kids are Israel,right?
(28:19):
They came down to Egypt and they lived there.
And Pharaoh knew Joseph at the time.
But then there arose a Pharaoh who did not know Joseph.
So if he knew Joseph, it follows that he would have known what?
He would have known God's word.
So the Pharaohs did know God's word for a while, but now there arose a Pharaoh who did notknow God's word.
(28:46):
And then he ends up dying after Moses leaves and his son takes his place.
And this guy's just a rank heathen.
uh But so here we have a kind of generational hardening that has taken place, where youkind of get used to the Word of God and you start treating it like it's just one of many
(29:09):
other lifestyle choices or something, or hobby horses or whatever, and then it justbecomes sort of, you know, old hat or passe.
So at any rate, Moses comes to Pharaoh and God tells Pharaoh,
or God tells Moses that he is going to harden Pharaoh's heart.
But the way that Pharaoh's heart is hardened is by hearing the word of God from Moses.
(29:36):
Moses says, thus says the Lord, let my people go so that they may serve me.
And what does Pharaoh say?
Who is the Lord?
Right?
Who is the Lord that I should obey him?
He does not care.
about who God is, even though he's hearing God's Word.
(30:00):
And so the way that that hardening begins to take place is always through the Word.
But it's when the heart is not, in this mysterious way, is not softened and is not givenfaith.
And so instead of faith responding to God's Word,
(30:23):
you have the natural heart responding to God's word.
And so Pharaoh continues to harden his heart even though Moses, God through Moses performsall these great signs and plagues and Moses and Pharaoh would seem to be softening his
heart but then he would double down, right?
So that doubling down again and again and again makes his heart finally totally hardeneduntil it leads to his army being destroyed in the Red Sea, right?
(30:51):
Now there's another example though, someone whose heart was hardened and you mentionedhim.
And who is that?
Saul.
Yeah.
So the people of Israel wanted a king and this was actually a symptom of their heartsbeing hardened because they forgot that actually, no, God is your king.
And yet they also had reason to ask for a king because the physical uh
(31:20):
government that they were living under at the time was a government of judges.
This is the kind of government that Moses established where they had various judges and atthis time Samuel and his sons were serving as the judges.
But Samuel's sons were evil.
Samuel was a faithful preacher of God's Word.
(31:44):
He was Orthodox.
His sons likely were
able to talk the talk when they needed to and be on that right side of Samuel, right, theorthodox side, and yet what they were doing is they were behaving like heathen and they
were being unjust to the people.
And so the people were scandalized and they then became jaded and forgot about the wordand promise of God that he would be their king.
(32:17):
And this is what the whole Bible is about.
is Christ is our King.
He is the one who rules our hearts and minds.
By His Holy Spirit, He came to rescue us from slavery and from sin and condemnation.
And so they forgot that.
Well, then God gives them a king from the tribe of Benjamin and his name is Saul.
(32:40):
And at first, Saul is uh actually following God's word.
He seems to be pious, he's on the right side, he's a good Israelite, seemingly.
But then he disobeys God's word.
So he disobeys God's word uh in a couple different ways.
(33:02):
One is he undertakes for himself to make sacrifices when he is not authorized to do sobecause he won't patiently wait for Samuel to show up as priest.
perform the sacrifices.
But the other one is that he did not kill all of the Amalekites when he was commanded tokill them, and he kept all of their...he was supposed to kill all their livestock too to
(33:30):
show that God's uh judgment was being spent on them and that there was no sacrifice thatcould be made for them.
And so he did not carry out the judgment that God authorized him to carry out, but
presumed to be more compassionate and more equitable than God.
And that was then, you know, really what got him rejected by God.
(33:54):
But the hardening doesn't all happen at once, right?
Because Saul is still weeping after Samuel.
Samuel walks away from him and he tears a piece of Samuel's garment and Samuel says, sowill the kingdom be torn from you.
And it's really a sad story.
And then you have uh Saul being afflicted by this evil spirit.
(34:20):
And it all goes back to him not listening and heeding God's word and really treating God'sword like it's some sort of do-it-yourself sort of manual rather than the lifeblood of the
Christian life.
uh
(34:41):
that which he should depend upon at all times.
But what's really sad then is we see how Saul continues to behave toward David.
So David is anointed king.
And of course, David, experiences his own kind of hardening later on, ah even though Godis able to bring him back to the faith and keep him in the faith.
(35:04):
But he still has that kind of sluggishness that is...
that comes about because of sin.
And again, it happens this...
Again, that's just to say that this hardening, uh even though a full hardening doesn'thappen, this hardening is experienced even in the Christian life because we have our
(35:25):
sinful nature.
Our sinful nature grows dull, and we shouldn't despair when we see that that happens, butwe should take warning and learn that we stay awake
and rest in the light of God's grace only through faith in the Word of the Gospel.
(35:50):
uh But at any rate, so Saul continues to pursue David and he's being afflicted by thisevil spirit and David is the one who's able to drive out the evil spirit by singing hymns
to him.
Right?
He goes there with his harp or with his lute.
He plays songs, plays music for him.
(36:11):
Well, what do you think he's doing also?
Well, he's singing.
He's under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
He's probably singing, Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
Right?
He's probably singing, uh you know, that, you uh know, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at myright hand till I put your enemies under your feet.
(36:31):
You know, he's singing the gospel to Saul.
And the gospel is driving out this wicked spirit.
And yet, what does Saul continue to do?
He continues to take refuge in his own desires and he treats the word of God that Samueltaught him and that David sang to him as just a kind of short-term remedy at best and
(36:57):
really just a bunch of line upon line, rule upon rule, precept upon precept, principlesthat are just sort of there that you can kind of...
take off the shelf and look at when you really need to, but then put back on the shelf andforget about.
That is how the hardening took place.
ah Now you also have this hardening taking place, I mean there are many examples of this,but you have this hardening taking place in the kings, as Isaiah was just describing here,
(37:27):
to the kings of Israel uh and of Judah, where...
The word of God again is just like, okay, we'll make the right sacrifices, make sure thatwe have the feasts.
uh But really the word of God is just a bunch of rules that we follow.
It's uh we have to have our 4th of July parade because we're Americans and we're doingthat because we're patriotic and blah, blah.
(37:57):
And it's all just tradition.
uh
The word of God isn't just some tradition that makes you feel like nostalgically at homeor something like that.
No, the word of God is that new wine, that promise of life and salvation, forgiveness ofsins given to us by the Son of God.
(38:21):
And so when you forget that, when that becomes sort of just, when that itself becomes justsort of like,
details in the background, uh then that's when that hardening of hearts is beingaccelerated.
And of course, then fast forward, we see this in the days uh when Christ appears on theearth.
(38:44):
And he calls out the hardening of the hearts of the Pharisees, of the Sadducees, of Herod,and he warns his disciples to stay away from...
the leaven or the yeast of the Pharisees and the Sadducees and of Herod.
(39:04):
And what is he talking about?
He's not talking about bread.
He's talking about their doctrine.
And this is the thing, what Jesus does is he brings it back to doctrine.
The problem with the Pharisees and the Sadducees and of Herod is not that they are takingdoctrine too seriously.
(39:26):
It's that they are treating God's doctrine as just a bunch of rules and then overshadowingGod's commandments with their own traditions.
Because if you treat it like a bunch of rules, well then you can just come up with otherrules that you think work better.
(39:48):
As if the point of God's word is for you to be able to figure out how to fix everythingand make everything run smoothly.
So for them, the word of God became simply rules.
Line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little, there a little.
And they got it all under control.
And Jesus says, beware of that.
(40:10):
He calls that leaven, evil leaven.
And what he really calls it then is false doctrine.
And so you see the point here is that, okay, a guy who is saying all the right doctrinaltalking points, but then...
his entire MO is to serve his own agenda and to persecute those who actually preach thegospel and to uh go after those who can't defend themselves and he's completely lacking in
(40:46):
love.
This isn't merely a moral problem.
This isn't merely an ethical problem.
It certainly is that.
But at the heart of it, it's a doctrinal problem because the highest false doctrine is notwhen you are saying things that are explicitly contrary to what God's word clearly
(41:11):
teaches.
The highest and most disgusting uh false doctrine is when you treat the doctrine as ifit's sort of passe rules.
that can go right hand in hand and share the throne with your own traditions.
And you can set up your own way of doing things and your own authority and use that tosmother and overshadow that pure word of God.
(41:46):
This is what Paul describes as the man of lawlessness and what he's doing.
He sets himself up
in the temple of God above all things that are worshipped, making himself out to be God.
This is the spirit of Antichrist.
When you treat God's word, even if you can articulate it beautifully, but you treat itlike it's just a bunch of principles that you hold to, that you subscribe to, but
(42:21):
It's really just collecting dust on the shelf and it's only taken off the shelf when youneed to be able to win an argument.
And this is something that happens, that happened to Israel.
It doesn't happen overnight, but it happened to Israel.
It happens to the church.
uh This was, you know, when I uh was a kid, well, I was, I guess, an adult.
(42:48):
I was a young adult, just graduated high school.
graduating high school.
My dad was kicked out of his church.
And I'm not gonna go into all the details, but before they removed him, one of my dad'ssupporters made a motion at the voters assembly for everyone to vote on whether he had
(43:13):
faithfully preached the gospel and ministered the sacraments.
So they voted on whether he was like,
faithfully taught what was true.
And they all voted and they voted unanimously that he had.
But the majority of them still voted to remove him because he was out of step with what uhthe synodical officials wanted them to do.
(43:47):
And so here what happened is that the doctrine, they could acknowledge that it was true.
They're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good.
Pastor, you do a good job with all the doctrine stuff.
But we got a problem here.
and we want to get rid of this problem here.
So for them, the doctrine is just simply some line upon line, precept upon precept, here alittle, there a little.
(44:10):
know, it's like, you know, we have this wonderful thing called the Book of Concord, whichis uh our confessions drawn from the clear fountains of Scripture, and they serve as the
standard for what we teach.
that rule our teaching and our lives and our confession, our life together.
(44:33):
And how often does it happen that this Book of Concord just becomes this book on theshelf, like any of these books, and just collects dust?
And that's not to say that everyone needs to be a scholar in this Book of Concord.
But...
This standard of confession that we know in the six chief parts of the small catechism,the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, Baptism, the Office of the Keys, the
(45:03):
Sacrament of the Altar.
When we treat these things like they're just the tidbits that we learned when we were incatechism class, and then we got confirmed and now we don't have to learn them anymore.
That is how our hearts get hardened when we treat God's word like it's just a bunch ofrules and principles.
(45:29):
It seems that people don't like to read as much as they used to.
Newspapers seem old fashioned, they say.
Instead, they just listen to podcasts or they watch videos.
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(45:49):
Reading words on a page allows you to slow down and read at your own pace, not distractedby lights and pop-ups at every turn.
Published weekly with 48 issues a year, Christian News is designed to supply rank and fileChristians with information needed to face the present crisis in Christendom.
(46:10):
With this weekly printed paper, you will find devotions, editorials, and articlesaddressing biblical, theological topics
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The various articles are accessible to any faithful Christian who's interested in God'sWord and how it relates to our time and to our culture.
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(46:56):
Go to ChristianNewsMo.com or just click on the link at the bottom of this podcast.
Christian News, we preach Christ crucified.
We talk about the hardening of hearts and what are the effects then of the hardening ofhearts?
Well, I mean, the main effect and the main danger is that you would eventually lose yourfaith altogether and you'd be condemned forever.
(47:25):
But there's also a public effect or there is an effect on other people.
And this is often the effect that scandal has.
that this scandal leads to this kind of cynicism.
(47:47):
So again, to recap, you are going to church, you learn the word of God, you learn aboutthe law and the gospel, you learn about what your baptism does and that we live in daily
repentance and faith.
(48:08):
You learn the Ten Commandments, you learn about the new obedience, living in the Christianlife, uh not following what the world says or does, loving your neighbor, and taking
refuge in the forgiveness of sins, which you know that you need.
You learn this and you're hearing this.
(48:31):
And then uh you have some people come along and kind of...
you know, downplay it and you think, no, no, those guys are downplaying the word of Godand they're trying to make it about other things.
But this guy over here, he's teaching the true word of God.
He's really good, he's solid.
And then that guy turns out to be not who you thought he was.
(48:56):
And that's what a scandal is.
That's what really shakes you.
And so it can lead then to that cynicism.
in thinking that, there must be something wrong then with the word of God itself.
There must be something wrong with the, and maybe you wouldn't say with the word of Goditself, but maybe you'd say with taking doctrine seriously.
(49:22):
There must be something wrong with that.
And a strict adherence to pure doctrine must be the problem.
And.
What I'm telling you is that that's not the problem.
The problem is not a strict adherence to pure doctrine.
The problem is rather how people treat the pure doctrine.
(49:48):
If they treat the pure doctrine legalistically, that is as if, not to say that the puredoctrine doesn't teach us the law and how to live.
No, that's not a problem to acknowledge that.
But to treat the pure doctrine legalistically is to treat it like it's just a bunch ofrules that you can somehow control if you just know them enough.
(50:13):
And you can use them to optimize your situation, ah whether you're standing in the socialstanding of your church or of your family or whatever.
uh
That is a misuse of God's Word.
It's a misuse of the pure doctrine and it inevitably is setting up beside the puredoctrine your own traditions that ah your sinful flesh and the devil is gonna spur you on
(50:46):
to do, uh your sinful flesh is going to use to overthrow the pure doctrine and toobfuscate it and obscure it.
And so what often happens to those who experience the abuse of authority, uh who hearpeople use the pure doctrine and orthodoxy as a way to silence anyone who would uh ask any
(51:17):
questions about whether people are being treated fairly or unfairly.
The effect then is that they feel like they're being gaslit.
So you might feel like you must be a liberal or something.
(51:41):
That maybe you must not be orthodox.
Maybe you are not a confessional Lutheran because you have experienced
injustice or unfair treatment from those who champion the confessional Lutheran cause.
And so you think, man, they must be, so you know what gaslighting is?
(52:05):
It's from a movie and it's become kind of a popular term being used in recent years, thatgaslighting is when people are doing things to you.
but they're convincing you that you are actually the problem.
they're doing things to you and uh when you are convinced that they're doing things toyou, they try to convince you that no, no, you're just crazy.
(52:32):
um And this is used in a lot of political and cultural uh discussions these days.
So, you know, if you're convinced that, you know, COVID, for example, is overblown or someof the claims about COVID are overblown and you've done like your research
(52:52):
or whatever, then other people say, no, no, no, no, you're just being a conspiracytheorist or whatever.
So that's one example of where people say that they're being gaslit.
They're being treated as if they're the crazy conspiracy theorists.
Another example that I've heard of being gaslit is like, and this is actually more, uh
(53:18):
closer to how it was used in the movie is like a woman is being abused by her husband andthen she's convinced that she's just being overbearing or she's just being difficult when
she tries to point out that uh her husband's being abusive.
(53:40):
So everyone just.
puts it back down on her and says, no, no, no, you're the one who is in the wrong.
uh So there are all sorts of ways in which this word, gaslit, is used.
And it can be used in the church where, OK, uh these people who claim to be the Orthodoxchampions are treating me like I am a problem, like I am being schismatic, like I am not
(54:09):
following the word of God.
And what I'm saying is, you, okay, first of all, we should always examine ourselves beforeGod.
if you think that you're being gaslit in that way, don't stop there.
(54:29):
You might very well be being, that may very well be the case.
But we gotta go back to the beginning.
go back to what God has called us to do, and that is to hear His word.
(54:49):
And remember that just because people are touting and championing orthodoxy and puredoctrine does not mean that the pure doctrine belongs exclusively to them.
they don't have the only right to the pure doctrine.
The pure doctrine has been given to you as a child of God.
(55:13):
So listen to the word of God and examine yourself before the word of God.
And I think this is often the hardest thing to do because when people accuse you of allsorts of things,
often what they're accusing you of might ring true and that's why it is so frustrating.
(55:35):
That's one of the reasons why it's so frustrating.
Other times it might be complete lies, right?
And that's frustrating too because then you think like, I taking crazy pills?
ah I didn't do this, why are people accusing me of this?
But it's important to be still and know that the Lord is God and no one else, not you.
(55:57):
not the people who are going after you, but the Lord, he is God.
Jesus Christ is the one true Lord.
And his word reigns supreme.
So examine yourself before his word.
So for example, uh it's possible that you, let's say that you have sinned in some way.
(56:25):
And then,
people are gonna use that sin to then discredit you for every other thing that you eversay or do.
And they're then going to use that as leverage to promote evil.
Well, what you should do is turn to the word of God and repent of that sin.
(56:49):
uh Now, it might depend, so then how do you approach this?
in your life, well, if it is a sin, if the sin that you have repented of, right, you'verepented of, but you did commit, if that is a sin that has caused scandal ah in the
(57:10):
church, that you actually have contributed to public scandal in the church, ah and thatpeople know about, if that's the case, it's gonna be a little bit different.
than if you're just, you kind of slipped up on something in a way that most people slip upin, but it wasn't something that really caused a scandal, but it was still something that
(57:36):
kind of discredits you to an extent.
ah If you yourself participated in an affair with someone, but then you also notice thatthere's a lot of other injustice going on, you...
you also, the fact that you were involved in the affair kind of limits how much, itdefinitely limits how much you're able to say.
(58:03):
So you still should take uh comfort in the forgiveness of sins.
one of the hardest things to do is to recognize your own limitations.
That you are not necessarily the herald.
uh to call and the watchmen to call people to account.
(58:28):
But what is a better thing to do is to entrust your burdens to God and to find and takerefuge in faithful friends who can speak to this.
And uh so, you know, but now let's say that you, you you weren't involved in a publicscandal, but you are, you you maybe spoke foolishly or did some foolish things that people
(58:52):
are holding over you.
Well, that's where you, again, you repent before God, you examine yourself before God, andyou also take refuge in faithful friends who can speak on your behalf.
And perhaps you even, you know, you also got to recognize your limitations, and you're notgoing
be able to be the herald, you know, voice in the wilderness that's going to uh fix all theproblems.
(59:18):
Not even John the Baptist could do that, right?
Recognize that God's Word is going to take care of itself and convict and convince on itsown, but you might be able to be more in a public uh position, right?
So you take, for example, like uh
take a pastor who's been removed from his congregation and along the way he perhaps saidsome things that were
(59:48):
that were driven by pride and driven by anger and not driven by love and concern for theweaker brethren.
Okay, well, you know, he can, you know, he should take refuge in the forgiveness of sins,repent before God and take refuge in the forgiveness of sins and the word and maybe kind
(01:00:08):
of...
lay back for a while, but he hasn't scandalized the flock.
know, there's obviously a difference between a guy who just, you know, speaks...
uh
in an overzealous manner in which he offends the weak uh and someone who has completelydisgraced the ministry.
(01:00:29):
uh So in that case, that guy can actually be in pretty good position to speak up againstabuses of God's Word, uh speak up against abuses of the pure doctrine.
But this is the...
uh
(01:00:51):
The takeaway though that we have to, that we can't forget is that at the end of it all,your conclusion should be that God's word, his pure teaching is that pure spiritual milk.
(01:01:13):
It is the answer.
Now with that then, I want to then discuss three other examples of those who respond toscandal, but then their response to scandal ends up leading to a downplaying of doctrine
and a hardening of hearts.
(01:01:33):
uh so there are three examples of this.
One is a group uh from like the fourth, fifth century,
known as the uh Donatists.
So the Donatists were a group that were responding to these bishops and ministers who haduh caved under pressure and left the faith during Great Persecution.
(01:02:08):
But then they came back to the faith.
And the Donatists are responding to a kind laxadaisical attitude, but they overreact tothe point where they say that if a priest is an evil priest, therefore is, everything he
therefore does is illegitimate.
(01:02:31):
Right?
So if you receive ordination or baptism or the Lord's Supper from a priest who even isstill evil,
um or used to be evil, ah then it doesn't really count and you're not really in thechurch.
And guys like St.
Augustine responded to that and basically...
(01:02:54):
put it to rest, they kind of died out eventually, that no, no, as we say in our OxfordConfession, those, the sacraments that are administered even by those who are evil are
still in themselves effective, right?
They're efficacious.
They still have the power because the Word of God is powerful in and of itself.
(01:03:16):
uh And so the problem with the docetists though is that they overreacted and they made itabout the person uh of the priest or of the pastor instead of about the doctrine.
Another example would be the mystics, which became pretty prominent in the Middle Ages,and they were getting sick and tired of this scholastic theology where God's word was
(01:03:47):
being arranged in these, know, but the scholastics were just the school men, so God's wordwas being arranged in these kind of doctrinal categories and explained in kind of orderly
way, which that's good to do.
that, right?
But what ended up happening was they would mix in it philosophical principles and try toexplain things from a philosophical standpoint.
(01:04:14):
And it turned Christian instruction into a very wooden thing.
And so, you you have these highfalutin school men who are, you know, waxing eloquentlyabout all sorts of
doctrinal uh issues, but from a very, you know, egg-headed sort of way.
(01:04:37):
And people were then not, they were losing sight of the true spiritual life that God'sWord is supposed to give you.
But again, the problem with these mystics though is that their solution was to try to findsome kind of uh inner life uh through deep meditation that ultimately was not
(01:05:01):
grounded in the Word of God.
And so you'd get people claiming that they see visions or that they have been called to dothis or that, but they don't do it with the external command and promise of God in the
scripture.
So again, that's an example of those who see people misusing God's word, but they react insuch a way where they themselves lose sight of God's word.
(01:05:26):
They lose sight of the pure doctrine and they don't realize that no, the problem was not
the strict adherence to the pure doctrine, the problem was rather the way they treated thepure doctrine.
Like it was just a bunch of talking points and nerd notes and you know a way to to showthat you're smarter and more intelligent than other people.
(01:05:51):
That's evil but that doesn't mean that the doctrine itself and the and even thearrangement of the doctrine and the rigorous teaching of the doctrine is bad.
No, that's good as long
as the center of it is Christ crucified for sinners and giving himself for the life of theworld.
(01:06:13):
And then you have another group that are kind of like the mystics.
um And they are, they rose up in the 19th, late 18th and no, no, 17th and early 18thcenturies.
And they were responding and they still even to this day, have, you know, these allmanifest themselves throughout history, but they were responding to these church leaders.
(01:06:42):
ah and these kind of rationalist thinkers who were treating
orthodoxy as a way to, as kind of a ticket for them to be able to just push their weightaround.
And whether for political causes or what have you.
And so you would have, you would have, for example, the, you know, a prince of a territorywho would be fornicating and acting and behaving like a heathen.
(01:07:14):
And yet he would hold to the doctrine.
He would hold to the book of Concord.
protect the Orthodox pastors in his region.
And so he sort of was given a pass.
And so you had a guy named Philip Jacob Spaner uh and his successors who understandablyrose up against this stuff.
(01:07:35):
And that from there you had the movement that's known as pietism.
And there were a lot of good things in pietism of these three examples of Donatism,mysticism, and pietism.
I would say that pietism, at least at its, at its beginning,
was certainly the best because these guys were still basically Orthodox.
(01:07:57):
The problem though is that again, they distrusted the clergymen so much and understandablyso in many cases, because the clergymen were often just sort of like, they just kind of
give the right doctrinal talking points but not call to account those who were uh
(01:08:19):
who were in high stations.
Again, this wasn't universal.
They weren't all like this.
But unfortunately, what ended up happening was that the pietism ended up framing the puredoctrine, like those who wanted to teach the pure doctrine and hold to the Book of Concord
(01:08:40):
strictly, that they were then painted as these kind of cold, rationalistic type of peoplewho
really just cared about holding on to their power.
And were there examples of that?
Yes.
But it's a very dangerous thing when we then just...
(01:09:02):
write them all off.
Because then what we're left with, which ended up being the case with Piatus, was simplyrelying on our own kind of emotional sense of connection to God, and you get a very
shallow and vapid uh form of Christianity.
And so what we should remember about scandal,
(01:09:29):
is a scandal is simply the devil's way to try to convince us that the doctrine of our Lordis simply a bunch of cold rules.
And his goal is always then to take our hearts away from that external word of God.
(01:09:52):
and to rely on philosophies or psychological trends or sociological talking points orwhatever is the kind of, promises a more sensitive or loving or equitable uh program that
(01:10:13):
he wants us to trust in those things rather than.
in the pure teaching of the Word of God.
And so, I'm speaking to those who have actually experienced this kind of scandal and haveperhaps felt that, I always consider myself to be conservative, to be orthodox, to care
(01:10:37):
about the true Word of God, but I feel like I'm a liberal for calling out bad behavior.
ah from the hands of those who are, you know, wielding that pure doctrine.
I'm speaking specifically to you to not lose heart.
(01:10:59):
Don't become jaded.
Don't allow the hardening of hearts that you are experiencing and others be transmitted toyou.
Hold on to the doctrine.
Stay away from the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees and of Herod.
Recognize that your own sinful flesh is bound to grow dull and that's why it needs to becrucified every day um as you live in daily repentance.
(01:11:30):
And don't grow bored with the pure doctrine that you have learned from Scripture as you'velearned it through the small catechism.
um
you have read the book of concord and I would encourage you to do so read the largecatechism if you have if you've if you've gone through the small catechism read the large
(01:11:52):
catechism let the word of Christ dwell in you richly and think theologically thinkdoctrinally think even dogmatically don't let
Those who use orthodoxy as a way to promote their own agendas, don't let them spoil thetaste of pure doctrine for you.
(01:12:20):
And don't look down on those who...
take seriously the pure doctrine, assuming that they're somehow just gonna slip into thesame kind of legalistic, cold behavior that you perhaps have noticed in others.
And pray for those who have slipped into that.
(01:12:41):
uh But if you just put down the pure doctrine as if that is the problem,
then you're no better than those who treat God's Word like it's just a bunch of rules.
You're basically seeding their ground, right?
You're allowing them to define how God's Word should be treated and should be understood.
(01:13:10):
Instead, remember that the Word of God is, as Jesus says, Spirit and Life.
Doctrine, as Solomon says,
is life.
It is what holds us together.
That doesn't necessarily mean that we all have the same intellectual capacities to talkabout all of the history of it and all the distinctions and understand them at the same
(01:13:41):
level.
But even a child knows that the church is the dear lambs who hear the voice of their goodshepherd.
So don't stop listening to his voice.
And yes, you're going to find weaknesses in everyone who wields the pure doctrine.
You're going to find people being overzealous.
(01:14:04):
You're going to find people being cowardly.
You're going to find all sorts of weaknesses in these jars of clay, which we all are.
But don't lose sight of that great treasure that we are holding.
Don't despise those who are, ah don't despise people for their weakness because Christdoesn't despise you for your weakness.
(01:14:29):
And he promises that if you share a cup of cold water with a disciple because he is Jesus'disciple, then you will by no means lose your reward.
So listen to Jesus who teaches you, who lays his yoke upon you.
who ensures you that though it may seem hard for this momentary time, that it is easy andit is light and that you will find rest for your souls.
(01:15:01):
You've been listening to Christendom and the World.
Join us next time for another episode.
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