Reggie Weems’ Blog

Text:  Genesis 3:1-20
Title of Christ:  Seed of Eve 

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice!  Rejoice!  Emmanuel,
Shall come to thee, O Israel
-          12 century (Author unknown)

Seldom is the Seed of Eve (“offspring” in the ESV/3:15) considered a name for the promised Messiah whose birth is celebrated at Christmas but it is, perhaps, the very first name given to the long-awaited Savior.  After the fall yet still in the garden Adam and Eve suffered a foreshadowing of Israel’s repetitive bondage to various heathen nations.  Adam and Eve became subservient to the same creation over which they previously held dominion (vs 16-19) in the similar way God intended for Israel to rule over the seven heathen nations of the Promised Land.  Disobedience always brings a curse.

Yet, in the midst of that initial tragedy, God offered a triumphal promise; a Seed to Eve in what is commonly known as the protoevangelium (the first gospel).  The “seed” is singular because, even though Eve would have many children, God’s promise looked forward to a single Person, Adam and Eve’s ultimate Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, the 2^nd Gardner, who reclaimed what was lost in the garden.  As such, and reminiscent of that Garden encounter, Christ is the Seed (Gal. 3:19), who came to destroy the works of the Devil (Heb. 2:14); to reverse all that Satan had accomplished in mankind’s fall.   Throughout the Old Testament God’s people looked forward to the fulfillment of that first promise, in the midst of many difficult circumstances, lost opportunities and even disappointments.  Thus, the birth of Christ once again attests to the faithfulness of God Who both promised and provided the Seed of Eve as mankind’s Redeemer.  The whole Bible is nothing less, nothing more, nothing else than a revelation of God’s redemptive success, the fulfillment of His Word, His cause and His victory.  Hence, there is reason to rejoice.  The Seed of Eve has come!

I have reviewed Dr. David Wells’ excellent book, God in the Wasteland at “Read With Me”.

Dr. Bruce Ware has graced the Heritage pulpit in past years.  At this site you can hear Dr. Ware deliver four very important lectures on the theology of God.

Dr. Mohler, the President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is in New England attending the Evangelical Theological Society meeting . . .  

 Just a few hours ago I stood at the very spot where one of the most significant addresses in American history was delivered — and where the settled understandings of the Christian ministry and the church’s theology were thrown into revolution.

The date was July 15, 1838, the place was the chapel of Divinity Hall at Harvard, and the speaker was Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Emerson had been asked to deliver an address to the Senior Class of the Divinity College, and he accepted the challenge.  Emerson was then a part-time Unitarian preacher, but his intellectual stature in the movement known as Transcendentalism attracted the attention of the students training for ministry.

More to the point, Emerson had ignited an intellectual explosion the year before, when he was asked to deliver the annual lecture to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard.  That address, “The American Scholar,” was widely understood to represent a declaration of independence for American intellectuals.  No longer should American thinkers be slavishly dependent upon European patterns, Emerson declared.  This was the time for the emergence of the American Scholar, a new and advanced form of the human thinker; a scholar who would “plant himself indomitably on his instincts” and refuse to be “timid, imitative, tame.”

A year later, Emerson rose to deliver his address to the Divinity School.  Speaking to young men studying for the ministry, Emerson repudiated Christianity and called the young ministers to trust their own spiritual instincts and to free themselves from the Bible, from belief in a divine Christ, and from any remnant of orthodox Christianity.

“Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion,” he declared.  “As it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual.  It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus.”  This singular focus on Christ has turned Christianity into an uninspiring religion, he argued.  All the “official titles” ascribed to Jesus just serve to make him into a “demigod,” Emerson insisted.

Preaching that centers on Jesus Christ as the divine Savior is “vulgar,” Emerson asserted.   Miracles were eliminated as a possibility.  Men and women do not come to be “converted,” he insisted, by a “profanation of the soul” that centers on necessary beliefs.  Instead, they should be converted “by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”

Emerson also attacked the ministers of his day by accusing them of preaching the Bible.  So far as Emerson was concerned, the Bible was a dead and lifeless book in itself.  Preaching from the Bible will not produce greatness, Emerson explained.  To limit the voice of God to the Bible is to shut the voice of God up into a dead book.

“Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead.  The injury to faith throttles the preacher; and the goodliest of institutions becomes an uncertain and inarticulate voice,” he argued.

In other words, the young ministers were challenged to give up preaching the Bible and instead to preach their own religious sentiments:

“To this holy office you propose to devote yourselves.  I wish you may feel your call in throbs of desire and hope.  The office is the first in the world.  It is of that reality that it cannot suffer the deduction of any falsehood.  And it is my duty to say to you that the need was never greater of new revelation than now.”

Emerson’s bold and confrontational call for “new” revelation was translated into his most memorable lines from this historic address – ”Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.”

In other words, he commanded the young ministers to abandon the Scriptures and to trust their own instincts, religious sentiments, and intuitions as all the divine revelation they will need.  “Preaching,” he explained, is nothing more than “the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life.”

With his address, Emerson ignited a firestorm.  He had boldly and thoroughly repudiated biblical Christianity.  His proposal was to replace the Christian faith with a religion of individualistic sentimentality, iced with a coating of moralism.

Nevertheless, even as Emerson ignited a firestorm, the Harvard faculty were themselves mostly Unitarian in outlook. Theological liberalism had already become a fixture by the 1830s.  The professors scandalized by Emerson’s address might protest his candor, but they had little theological ammunition with which to refute him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1838 “Divinity School Address” was a call to radical theological revisionism, and thousands of ministers have answered his call.  It is no accident that evangelical Christianity was so soon set on its heels in Emerson’s New England.

Standing in the chapel in Divinity Hall last evening, I was struck by how contemporary Emerson’s argument sounds.  The call he issued 170 years ago is the very message we now hear from others — Christianity must change or die.  We cannot simply preach a book that is two thousand years old.  God still speaks, and a slavish dependence on the Bible is both offensive and ineffectual.  Doctrines must go — intuition and sentiment will be enough.

The issues and arguments are the same.  Nevertheless, we have all the evidence we need to show us where Emerson’s argument leads.  It leads to the death of churches, denominations, institutions, and ministries.  It leaves sinners dead in their sins and robs them of hearing the Gospel.

The church has never needed “newborn bards of the Holy Ghost.”  Instead, the need of the church is for preachers who are skilled in the art of preaching the Word of God — rightly dividing the Word of Truth, while holding without apology to the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

I am glad I visited that historic room in Divinity Hall last night.  It served to remind me of what is at stake in our generation — and for eternity.  There are no new heresies, only echoes of the old ones.  And yet, the old ones come back again and again.

Thank God for those who minister in the cities.  During his tenure in the quaint and quiet village of Olney, England, John Newton gained world-wide fame through the publication of his “Narrative” autobiography.  But in 1779 Newton moved to England’s capitol city and began ministry as one of the city’s only two nonconformist ministers.  As such, he served as the spiritual predecessor to such famous American ministers as men as David Wilkerson and Tim Keller, both of New York City fame but in fundamentally different eras.

Ministry in the cities is certainly different from ministry in the country-side or smaller cities such as Johnson City.  John Knox once prayed, “Oh God, give me Scotland or I die.”  Ministers and missionaries in London or in any metropolitan city must carry the same undying burden.  There are so many people; and so many people who are so busy about so many things that whatever is of a spiritual nature is quickly trod under memory’s foot along the bustling streets of making a living but never really living.  For many years both Christians and Americans fled major cities for the suburbs.  But in the last decade there has been a mega-return to the metropolitan cities of the world.  In that regard, Christians must also move into the cities where masses of people from all around the world can be easily touched within a few square miles; almost a foreign mission field in itself.  In the Scripture, God commanded Israel to seek the welfare of the pagan cities in which He had sovereignly sent them as refugees.  Unwilling to be a witness to the seven heathen nations in which God had planted Israel after the Exodus, He sent them into captivity in order to minister in the major world cities of their day and set the stage for His son’s birth (Remember Daniel and the Persian wise men).

Indeed, Christians are expected to engage the societies in which they live, building ethical communities of faith inside the cities and serving as benefactors to the cities as corporate entities and the plethora of individuals who live there.  In that way, Christians serve God’s ethical and eschatological ends.  Seeking the welfare of the cities, Christians offer daily witness to the sovereignty of God over creation. They daily witness to His goodness no matter the circumstance which placed them in the city or the circumstance that may occur while they demonstrate their faith as living epistles amongst people who are looking for life’s answers.

Historically, it may be said that, as the cities go, the country goes.  In the modern era, just think of fashion as one small indication of a city’s powerful influence over a nation.  It’s for this reason that we must thank God for those who minister in the cities.  Whatever they face today, will confront the rest of us tomorrow.  Perhaps intercessors could begin praying for the ministries that minister in American and the world’s largest cities.

Today, Teana and I enjoyed a Day One tour of the British Museum.  Brian Edwards, an author whom I have enjoyed for many years, was our guide.   Much to my surprise, Brian is a friend of David Temple, a Heritage member and his father, Dr. John Temple, who lives here in London.   After the tour, Brian, Teana and I finished the evening with a warm visit to the Temple home and a deeply spiritual supper with John, his wife, Yvonne and Brian. 

There is too much to say about the British Museum so I will just say that Brian Edwards has agreed, as the Lord allows, to come to Heritage in ’10.  It is my hope that he will preach on the Bible’s authenticity, teach on the evidences of Christianity from the British Museum and lecture at ETSU (with a Q&A) on the archaeological (and more) proofs of the Bible’s authenticity.

Again, there is too much to say about the Day One Tour of the British Museum.  One of my favorite parts was a single, simple line that Brian quoted from the Amarna letters.  Basically, the Amarna letters were correspondence from Canaanite kings to Amenhotep III, the Pharaoh of Egypt, asking for military and financial help.  Evidently a ‘new’ people known as the “Habiru” (can you say “Hebrews) were terrorizing their lands and the Canaanite kings were telling Amenhotep that they needed help defending the outer regions of the Egyptian empire. 

The point of personal interest to me was that in one particular letter a Canaanite king commented that Egypt’s “gold was like sand.”  Brian noted that it was that ‘gold’ that Moses turned his back on to serve God and His people, approximately a hundred years earlier than the writing of that letter.  As Brian spoke, my mind reflected on the comment made by the writer of Hebrews as he reasoned that Moses made his decision because “He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt…” (Hebrews 11:26).  Evidently, Moses knew the difference between treasure and trash and he considered Egypt’s gold as plenty as sand, to be trash.  I also reflected on Psalm 16:11 which reads, “…in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”  Now, that’s treasure. 

Oh, to be like Moses; or the man in Matthew 13:44 who, upon finding real treasure, joyfully sold all that he had (trash) to buy the field in which he had unearthed that treasure; or David, who, reflecting on all that his kingdom offered him, preferred the presence of God.  Oh, to know the difference between treasure and trash and then to choose the treasure, God’s “holiday by the sea” over any “mud puddle” on this earth.  By God’s grace, today was most certainly a treasure.