This week I started working through an amazing book in private worship by John Owen titled The Reason of Faith. I’ll spare you from its longer title which, in typical Puritan fashion, is fifty-two words in length! It is a treatise on how you and I come to believe that the Bible is indeed the inspired and authoritative Word of God. Owen’s answer, which he spends 120 dense pages unpacking, is the person of the Holy Spirit, who works supernatural faith in our hearts so that we hear and heed the voice of God speaking in His supernatural revelation.
Following Anselm, Owen holds that we must believe in order to understand. This differs dramatically from much apologetic argumentation today, which speaks as if man simply needs to understand, and then he would be impelled to believe. There is certainly a place for defending the truthfulness of Scripture, refuting the accusations that it is fraught with errors, and setting forth its many amazing qualities that evidence it to be no ordinary book. But at the end of the day, no one believes and receives the Bible as God’s authoritative Word because they have had all their objections soundly refuted. They come to recognize the Bible as the Word of God through the Holy Spirit’s work of illumination. It is only after they receive it as such—through Spirit-worked faith—that they can then go on to pursue a sound and growing understanding of it.
As we come into contact with the Scriptures, and as we share them with others, we are utterly dependent upon the Spirit’s gracious ministry. Without His work, we are like the blind standing before a beautiful sunset. A blind person can have the bright hues of the sunset explained to them. The sunset can even be parsed out to them scientifically. But they can’t truly understand a sunset until they see it. The faith that the Spirit gives makes us see, so that in seeing, we come to understand a beauty that defies words.
Without the Spirit’s illumination, we are like the deaf sitting before a professional orchestra. You can see the various instruments at work. You can have their various sounds described to you. But if you can’t hear, you can’t truly understand the breathtaking auditory pleasure created when these instruments join together in symphonic harmony. You need ears if you are to really understand. The faith that the Spirit works in our hearts enables us to hear God’s Word for what it is—so that the voice of God thunders and echoes in our souls, and we begin to understand what we couldn’t before.
We might be tempted to think that such a view would lead to passivity: “If the Holy Spirit does the work, then we can just sit back, relax, and enjoy the show!” But Owen refutes such a notion thoroughly, demonstrating—as we saw in our sermon last Sunday morning—that the Christian faith calls us to a dependent activity. For the Holy Spirit uses means to bring about the end of illuminating our souls with the truth of His Word. Owen gives three:(1) personal Scripture reading, memorization, and meditation; (2) private instruction in the Scripture from one person to another or from parents to children; (3) the public preaching and teaching of Scripture in the church.
Owen puts the emphasis on the third, and even goes so far as to say, “That church and ministry whereof this [making the mind of God known through expounding and applying the Scriptures] is not the first principal design and work is neither appointed of God nor approved by him.” The first and fundamental duty of the church is to herald God’s Word so that people might come to believe and understand it. And since that belief and understanding is granted sovereignly by the Holy Spirit, the church must be utterly devoted to prayer, looking to God—not to some slick, brilliant, impressive preacher—to do what only He can do. We give ourselves ardently to the Scriptures, and we do it depending upon the Spirit who delights to open our eyes to behold wonderful things therein.
It seems to me that so much of American evangelicalism has lost its appetite for a book like Owen’s The Reason of Faith. Who needs the Spirit when you have cheap gimmicks, celebrity leaders, and a plethora of programs? But when a church makes the proclamation of God’s Word central in its worship and life (which it must if it be appointed and approved by God), suddenly it recognizes that all the machinations of man are vain—and only the might of God Himself will do!
Oh friends, our praying as individuals and as a church evidences what we really believe about the Spirit. Are we seeking Him earnestly because we recognize that without Him we and our children are spiritually blind and deaf? Let us set our faces to cry out for the Spirit to be actively working in us and through us, by and with His Word.
Yours in Christ,
Pastor Nick