All Articles For Taking Heed to the Doctrine

The Method of Reformed Evangelism Just as it has its own message of evangelism, the Reformed Faith has its own method of evangelism: the Biblical method of preaching and teaching. The proper, effective method of evangelism is prescribed by Holy Scripture. No more than the Church may invent her own message may she invent her own method. She is bound by the commandment of the Bible.

It is strange that it should be supposed that the relationship between the Reformed Faith and evangelism is uneasy and uncomfortable. It is stranger still that men should charge that the Reformed Faith and evangelism are incompatible. Yet this is the case. Many outside of the Reformed Churches contend that the Reformed Faith makes evangelism (or “soul-winning,” as they like to call it) impossible. Many who profess to be Reformed are now echoing this charge. What is worse, they are busy radically revising the Reformed Faith in the interests (they say) of evangelism.

Rev. Laning is pastor of Hope Protestant Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Previous article in this series: October 15, 2009, p. 44. Especially since the days of World War II, there have been many Jews who have moved to Palestine. This gathering of Jews out of different nations into the new nation of Israel is said by many to be a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. God in Scripture repeatedly made known that the Jews would one day be brought back to the promised land. Citing these promises, many argue that the present-day gathering of unbelieving Jews is a...

How the world hates and would destroy the truth of the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ! Of course! The resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ seals the victory of this Jesus of Nazareth. But it also seals the condemnation of the world. How terrible it is for the world, unspeakably terrible, that the Jesus they hated and sought to destroy by nailing Him to a cross, is raised from the dead, is seated at the right hand of God, and has been given all power to reign also over all the powers of evil and darkness!

We concluded our last article by calling attention to the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between the providence of God and sin, between the holiness and the righteousness of God. That the Lord is absolutely sovereign and that therefore the reality of sin must be understood as having been willed by the alone sovereign God is surely Scriptural. Of this there cannot possibly be any doubt. His counsel, we read in Isaiah 46:10, shall stand and the Lord will do all His good pleasure.

The sin of homosexuality is vile. The punishment of it is severe. The cause is dreadful: God’s giving up of men and women to the sin. Three times does the apostle speak of this “giving up” in Romans 1:18-32 as the cause of homosexual sin in the society of ungodly and unrighteous men who are holding the truth in unrighteousness.

The subject of God’s Providence and Sin places us before an unfathomable mystery. This we readily concede and confess. And we have no intention of comprehending and understanding this mystery. On the one hand, man is a free responsible being. He performs iniquity because he loves it. He is unmolested in his sinning, is never forced or coerced. Besides, he never wills or desires anything else than sin, does not rest until and unless he commits evil, is a slave of iniquity, but always a very willing slave. He is always free, only however in this moral sense of the...

Editor’s Notes. 1. Rev. Engelsma called my attention to a typographical error in his article in the Jan. 1 issue, p. 155, first column, last paragraph. The sentence concerned should read: “His reference was not, primarily, to the heathen, but to the multitudes of fainting, scattered Israelites, the Old Testament people of God, under the care of the priests and scribes.” 2. These articles of Rev. Engelsma are a transcript of a lecture on this subject. The reader will notice there is duplication between this department and Prof. Decker’s. The latter had begun his series, however, before Rev.

Rev. Laning is pastor of Hope Protestant Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Previous article in this series: September 15, 2009, p. 492. “Israel means Israel,” is one of the most common lines uttered by dispensationalists. It is a way of saying that there is no need to search the Scriptures to find an answer to the question as to who Israel is. To a dispensationalist, everyone knows by common sense who Israel is. The Jews in Palestine—and really the other Jews scattered abroad as well—constitute this nation. In the mind of a dispensationalist, the promises to Israel are obviously...

“For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: “And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet.  “And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient.”