The wisdom of men says that death is the natural order leading to advancement of life. Death and suffering deny the existence of a good and loving God.

The wisdom of God says that death is our great enemy; the result of the rebellion of man and his fall into sin. Death and suffering are the constant reminder of our need of redemption for body and soul.

Herein are the foolish and the wise made evident…

‘We do not grieve as those who have no hope’ for our hope is in Jesus Christ as revealed in the Scriptures; conqueror of sin and death and the source of eternal life who has released us from the bondage of the fear of death [Hebrews 2:14-16].

It has perplexed many throughout the centuries why if there is one truth, it is so difficult to determine. Protestants believe in an infallible Bible, but who interprets it with final authority? Roman Catholics believe in an infallible church that is the infallible interpreter of the Scripture.

How do we determine who is right? Why does God allow errors in His Church? Do we accept the opinions of learned men as if their learning makes them right? Are we to believe that the number of people who hold to a doctrine correlates to its truthfulness?

Bolton gives us six special operations that truth has upon the soul. By these we may be able to evidence whether the opinions we have entertained are truth or error.

http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/Asteroids3.html

By Martin Roberts

http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSL256586320080625?feedType=RSS&feedName=scienceNews&rpc=22&sp=true

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's parliament voiced its support on Wednesday for the rights of great apes to life and freedom in what will apparently be the first time any national legislature has called for such rights for non-humans.

Parliament's environmental committee approved resolutions urging Spain to comply with the Great Apes Project, devised by scientists and philosophers who say our closest genetic relatives deserve rights hitherto limited to humans.

[Yes, a historic day in the struggle to lower man to the level of apes.]

The pre-Reformation structure of ecclesiastical authority would not withstand the Protestant idea of sola scriptura; the doctrine that the Bible alone is the authority for faith and practice in the churches. A Christian man with a Bible was superior to any pope or council or tradition without it. The Bible was translated into the common tongues so the people could read it in their own language and not be subject to the ecclesiastical ruling class and freeing the people from ecclesiastical totalitarianism.

The Bible was the written constitution of the church. It limited the power and authority of church leadership and made them accountable to the people. The people could now read for themselves the proper role of the clergy and the church.

Consider the origin of constitutionalism; a written covenant founded in revealed truth and agreed upon for the mutual good of lawful men. Did the idea of a written constitution exist before the Reformation? Consider that there is a direct connection between the Reformation cry of sola scriptura and the American idea of the Constitution. The rule of law is a Biblical idea applied to the state in the outworking of Reformed Theology.

Yes, and neither will we acknowledge the origin of conservative principles. That would take us back to those colonial Americans who derived and implemented what we now call conservatism based on their Biblical Theology...

Autonomy of the Local Church

The local church is an independent body accountable to the Lord Jesus Christ, the head of His Church. All human authority for governing the local church resides within the local church itself. Thus the church is autonomous, or self-governing. No religious hierarchy outside the local church may dictate a church's beliefs or practices. Autonomy does not mean isolation. A church may fellowship with other churches around mutual interests.

They must advance themselves by invoking the aid of the secular power to condemn and punish those who dissent. Their ideology is assumed because they pride themselves as the advocates and defenders of truth. Their way must be forced on the culture because it’s for our good, whether we like it or not.

Now think who it was that gave us the first amendment. It was those radical Christians who suffered as the advocates of freedom of conscience in the matter of religion.

Though they believed that the Gospel of Christ was the infallible truth of God, the Scriptures taught them to abandon the use of carnal weapons for its propagation; the Bible also admonished them not to condemn those who differ. Based on Christ’s doctrine of God’s sovereignty over the conscience, the apostle reminds us who causes men to differ…

‘For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive? now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?’ [1 Corinthians 4:7 KJ]

The knowledge of truth is a matter of sovereign grace, not the coercion of men.

Yet, in the parable of the sower He says that many who come to hear the gospel are as barren soil; the word will produce no fruit in them. These are mysteries of the kingdom of God. In one aspect the kingdom comes gradually as the sowing and growth of seed and the seed is not everywhere fruitful, but dependent on the condition of the soil.

The defect is in men, not the word. Men dead in sin cannot hear and understand the words of life. The word must be accompanied by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the heart by the Spirit or there will be no life from which springs the fruits of the Spirit.

The apostle gives us good instruction on Christ’s doctrine...

‘And I, brethren, when I came to you, did not come with excellence of speech or of wisdom declaring to you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I was with you in weakness, in fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God’ [1 Corinthians 2:1-5].

The moral philosophy of colonial America was a consensus based on Biblical Theology. A culture founded on a free state and a free church yielded the fruit of individual liberty among a self governing people unknown in the world until that time.

The truth of man’s fallen state before God was assumed. Policies were implemented with the purpose of restraining lawless men, knowing that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. The gospel of grace was recognized as the greatest principle for the reformation of all men.

The Gospel of Christ not only differs from all other systems of religion in the superior excellence of the truths it reveals, but also in the directions it gives for the propagation of its doctrines. Other systems seek to advance themselves by invoking the aid of the secular power, and by forcing men, against their convictions, to accept a theory repugnant to their views.

They have thus succeeded in thronging their temples with hypocritical worshippers, bound to their altars through fear and slavish dread. They pride themselves in that members of their church are the true worshippers of God. They have a security based on a false authority or a hope based on false promises, not realizing that they are on the broad way that leads to destruction.

These systems, in order to maintain themselves, find it necessary to condemn all who differ from them, either in their articles of belief or mode of worship. But the Gospel of Christ, though it is the infallible truth of God, expressly prohibits a resort to any such measures for its advancement. It not only teaches its adherents to utterly abandon the use of carnal weapons for its propagation, but it also charges them not to condemn those who differ, based on the teaching of the apostle who expounds Christ’s doctrine of sovereignty…

‘For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive? now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?’ [1 Corinthians 4:7 KJ]

The teaching of the Savior has been violated, however, even by his professed followers. In the name of the meek and lowly Jesus, men have gone forth with oppression and persecution to advance their own opinions and crush out the liberty of thought and those rights of conscience given to man by His Maker.

Even the Pilgrim Fathers of colonial American, who fled Europe and its religious persecutions under the name of conformity, had to be taught this lesson. From whom did they learn religious liberty and the rights of conscience? Who was it that gave us the doctrine of religious freedom expressed in the First Amendment?

God says to His Anointed that the nations belong to Him. He is King over the Church [Hebrews 12:22-24], having purchased her with His own blood.

‘Ask of Me, and I will give You
            The nations for Your inheritance,
            And the ends of the earth for Your possession.’

The purpose of the Gospel is not to make America a righteous nation, but to call the redeemed to faith. The redeemed must come to the Redeemer from all the nations and from every generation.

            ‘Blessed are all those who put their trust in Him.’

We have enjoyed the good Providence of God as the fruits of the work of our faithful forefathers. The system they put in place and blessed of God was a product of Gospel preaching where the revealed wisdom of God had its sanctifying influence over the whole culture. We as a culture have exchanged revealed truth for a hodgepodge of secularism and false religions that demean the name of Christ.

Apart from revealed truth we should not expect the system to be sustained. The truth of which I speak was laid out in the first systematic theology of the Christian religion in Calvin’s Institutes. That great work that broke the back of the apostate church in that day and influenced our founding is now disparaged or ignored by the culture and is an embarrassment to the churches. Now the Protestants are the apostate church of this day.

Much can be learned from contraries. Just as something of heaven is to be known from the consideration of hell, so something of the excellency of spiritual freedom may be known from the consideration of man’s natural bondage; the bondage to sin, to Satan, and to the law of God. All which is a universal bondage of the soul, a cruel bondage, a willing bondage, a bondage out of which we are not able to redeem ourselves by ransom, or to deliver ourselves by our own power. But Christ here tells us that there is a true and real freedom that He has purchased, and into which He has brought all those who are true believers.

The nature of this freedom is a spiritual and heavenly freedom revealed in the Gospel and conveyed to the saints of God as the great dowry of Christ to His Church and Spouse. Two great things Christ has entrusted to His Church are faith and liberty. Just as we are to contend earnestly for the maintenance of the faith [Jude 3], so also for the maintenance of Christian liberty, and that against all who would oppose and undermine it: ‘Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free’ [Galatians 5:1]. And again, ‘Ye are bought with a price, be not ye the servants of men’ [1 Corinthians 7:23].

The freedom into which Christ brings believers is a spiritual freedom contrasted with their former bondage. Wherever the Lord’s jubilee is proclaimed and pronounced in a man’s soul, he will never hear again of a return to bondage. He will never again come under bondage to Satan, the law or anything else. This is implied by Christ in the words, ‘The servant abides not in the house for ever; but the Son abides ever’ [John 8:35].

The cavilers say that the term is not in the Bible, but this verse and the apostolic interpretation is in the Bible…

‘Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him for righteousness’ [Genesis 15:6 quoted in Romans 4:3].

Is there any other verse in the Bible which demonstrates the unity of the revelation of the everlasting gospel? In his letter to the Romans the apostle expounds the doctrine of justification and he uses the example of Abraham…

‘Now it was not written for his sake alone that it was imputed to him, but also for us. It shall be imputed to us who believe in Him who raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered up because of our offenses, and was raised because of our justification’ [Romans 4:23-25].

What is the source of righteousness and how is it obtained by men? These are the great questions that the apostle answers.

The apostle first demonstrates the need for the doctrine in his declaration that all men are under sin, therefore no man can be justified by the works of the law. Then he reveals to us the wisdom of God…

‘Therefore it is of faith that it might be according to grace’ [Romans 4:16].

Now this is the heart of the Gospel. Sinners do not earn entrance into the kingdom of heaven, but God has provided a way for grace to be shown in order to magnify His glory. The promise of salvation comes by faith in that it might be a matter of grace. This is the opposite of works.

What is common among all man made religions is that this doctrine is denied to some extent. They say we must work to merit righteousness. We say that the justified man will work the works of righteousness for this is God’s purpose in the justification of sinners, but he knows that this adds nothing to the imputed righteousness wherein he stands before God clothed in the righteousness of Christ; a righteousness obtained by faith alone.

The distinction is huge because it separates the wisdom of God from the wisdom of man. Lost men profess to be wise, but they have become fools. The eternal wisdom of God revealed in the Gospel is the only way of salvation.