A Thumb's Width (Pt 2)
Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.
Well, they didn't drive everybody off, so that's good. All right, we had a good discussion at lunch with what I tried to do this morning. And one of the suggestions was that I not read as much, because the paragraphs are long and complicated. And I try to pick out what he's trying to say and engage you in maybe some thinking about what's being said in the last three chapters. These address science, art, and the future. And these are the last three lectures that are in the book. The one thing to keep in mind, this is 114 years ago. A lot of things happened between that time and now. And a lot of this, if you read the whole things, there are some fascinating things that Kuiper gets into predicting the near future as he saw it.
I think he's absolutely seeing Japan rise as a world power. He saw Germany threatening world peace in the first world war. He saw France failing back because of her French Revolution and her denial of God. And saw that the only cure was for people to think about God's sovereignty, hence Calvinism. And I hope that everybody understands that's a hot word in a lot of churches today, but the issue is that when you read Romans 9 and Romans 1 and those kind of things, you see that God is in charge and He's sovereign. If He isn't sovereign, He's not God. We worship a God that we hope will get things done. And it drivels off into process theology where, oh my goodness, now this person did that.
And if God's not sovereignly in control of that, he has to remake all his plans so that the next thing can work out. And that just becomes ridiculous. So as you think about it, he's given minds to think, and given his word to clearly state it, when you hear those kind of things, you should go, whoa, wait a minute, that can't be right. Is inaccurately and as ineptly as I'm trying to put it, and I think as eply, as Kiper put it, The basic bottom line is that he's in charge and we're not. But he has given us the ability to be agents for him and he's given us things to discover about him through study, through science, through art, through our lives, through the future.
We see him being faithful just in the way that he goes about making the future happen. There's a point that I was going to do at the end I want to start off with it, and it's really one that sticks in everybody's craw when they really think about Calvinism and think about what it means that if God is sovereign. Kuyper liked to take it away in the in the future section. He said he wanted to take the discussion over election and make it about selection, just changing the word. He wanted to make election a discussion about selection. If God elects, then God selects. If God is going to do something, he's going to make the place where it happens. This sticks in our modern-day craw. We don't want somebody telling us what to do. We don't want that to happen.
And when that kind of thing happens, we buck against that. We don't like it. What What do you mean, I can't do that? I'm free, I'm, you know, no man is an island, all that kind of stuff. There is no life without differentiation and no differentiation without inequality. We are equal in salvation kind of things and certain understandings, but there is no way we are all equal. God made us all different, and by blending us together, made something marvelous out of that. And for us to realize and not be jealous and be backbiting about this guy is better at that than I am or I wish I could play the guitar or I wish I could run, you know, like a Hussein Bolt or whatever. All those things are done for a purpose. And sometimes we get all hyped up when we're trying to understand something.
We don't understand it to a certain level. A lot of times God just wants us to understand on the level we understand it, because then we rub off on somebody else and we can bring them along. And through the thing, I think, you know, it's the tapestry thing that's often talked about, that until we get to heaven, and even then we may not get to see the back of the rug, or I mean the front of the rug, right now it's all these little crisscross threads going around to make the design on the other side, and we may not know what's happening. But each one of us has that part. We're not here out of chance. It's not random.
And that whole thing as we think about it, as we think about education, as we think about educating ourselves and trying to understand stuff, some people are more gifted in certain things than others. And that's good. That is what should happen. And the problem becomes when you try to be something that you're not, you know.
Everybody can't be president. Everybody can't be Hussein Bold. Everybody can't be Sean teaching. Everybody can't teach like I can. Everybody can't teach like Jim can. Everybody can't be a mom like whoever and whatever. Each one of you is gifted in a certain way and God wants you to grow that to its biggest explosion possible but it's going to be different for everybody. And that's a joy, not a handicap. We, you know, in our perfect world, we're all not going to be equal.
heaven we're going to be different. We're still going to be recognizable as who we are. I don't think we're stupider than we are here, but I don't think we're all going to be geniuses either. We're all going to be what God wants us to be and fit in that perfectly. And at that point we will see it without sin, so we'll see it gloriously. Now we see it with sin. So that little digression is one of the sticking points that people don't like when they get into election means selection. How come he didn't do that? How come he didn't do that? Those are the, we don't get to answer those questions. He did it because he's God. Alright. So anyway, now talking about science. This is a paragraph that he had, and now I approach the principle itself. For it is not enough to be acquainted with the fact. I must show you why it is that Calvinism cannot but foster love for science and do not think it's strange. When I point out to the Calvinistic dogma, a predestination is the strongest motive in those days for civilization of
science in a higher sense. Because God has predestined the world the way it is, he has made a glorious thing for us to look at, discover, study, find out the secrets that he's given us right in front of our face, be able to create electricity, be able to make the combustion engine, all those things. They're glorious things that he wants us to discover and when we do it with the right heart, what does it do? It makes us realize, oh my goodness, there's so much more here than we know about that we can't even begin to understand it. The whole idea of, you know, the Hubble telescope, I mean they finally get out of the Earth's atmosphere and, you know, we've been peeking through these things looking at, you know, stars and kind of a fuzzy thing and they send the a spaceship out into space where there's no atmosphere to block any images.
And all of a sudden, we start seeing these incredible galaxies and these explosions in these nebula that are made up of each tiny little stars that look like they're just solid masses of light. And you realize, oh my goodness. If you haven't gotten on that website and looked at those pictures or seen those coffee table books, those things, if nothing else, if you can look at that and say there is no God, that it just popped into existence. You just, there's no hope.
But now, if you proceed to the decree of God, what else does God foreordain mean? That the certainty that the existence and course of all things, i.e. the entire cosmos, instead of being a plaything of caprice and chance, obeys law and order. And that there exists a firm will, which carries out its design both in nature and in history. This is not random. It is not spinning out of control. It's in control perfectly, everything. You know, as those of you that have studied the earth and the rotation and the tilt business, and if we were one degree tilting wrong, we'd all be frozen to death, and if we were this way and that way, all those things, if we spin this much faster, we could fly off.
All that kind of stuff is just, Whoa, who did this? How can this be? And like I said this morning, the little children, the child, you don't meet a five-year-old atheist. They know something bigger than them made all this. And that puts them in the proper framework. They're probably good little Calvinists too, knowing that God's in control and he's in charge, right?
So all of those things are to say that it's an obvious statement that any scientist that's really viewing nature and trying to understand what's going on and applying scientific principle is making a Calvinistic study of it. And if you study the history of these things, the great scientists recognized who God was, the people that made these great discoveries, Kepler and all these people. They hushed this stuff back, but they all realized what they were studying was God, what his creation is. And I don't know how you could possibly be a doctor and study, you know, I don't know, your finger. You're just the tip of your finger and start to understand all that and not go, whoa, this is big. Tim did a study in our Sunday school class. He had a movie about cells and he got down into these tiny little things inside of each cell and there's this little propeller thing that's turning like a hundred thousand RPM or something with no contact around this little donut thing that it spins in, in each one of the cells in your body.
This tiny little thing, and we had no idea it existed until God in his grace gave us the ability to study, make microscopes, Van Hook, a Dutchman, and then we move on and make microscopes that we can see teeny tiny little things, and watching, seeing that happen is like, whoa, what else is there to see? Well, that little propeller thing that's spinning, 100,000 RPM without touching the little donut it's spinning in, it's made of something. We don't know what that is yet, but maybe we'll make a microscope to see what that is. It's not the end all to be all. It's just like when you look out big, and you see the whole spaceship, you realize, oh my goodness, it's way bigger.
This is big. So fascinating, I think. And it's just so obvious that it frustrates me, but the more you study it, the more it does reduce you. I believe, to worshiping God. So during all these discussions that he has in the science chapter, he really goes after the naturalist. And what the naturalist in 114 years ago basically are the Darwinians, okay? It all came out of chance. These things are just, you know, they get this and they evolve to that and they do this and they do that and it's just a natural thing.
And he goes against that. And as he does that, he picks apart, I think, geniously all kinds of different ways that those people are doing what? They're worshipping the creation instead of the creator. They are the perfect example of Romans 1, as I said this morning. When you examine that and you start worshipping this creation that is evolving into this, you're worshipping the wrong thing. Who created the creation? duh, original source. And they don't do that. And by studying it that way, they end up developing their own thing. I'm the dude. I'm the guy that's figured this out. And on and on it goes. And you end up with all the stuff we see, and all the debates, and all the rest of it that we've seen.
But bottom line, it's a denial of God. And I think that expelled the movie that Ben Stein made. When he had Dawkins at the inn sitting there face to face, the foremost spokesman for Darwinism, and he said, well then you think it could be a creature from outer space that came in and did this. And Dawkins go, oh yeah, that could be. And you just go, ah, you know, yeah, it's somebody from outside our sphere of reference. God made it, duh. But they just can't say God. They got to have another created civilization comes down and makes you. It's amazing, which gets back to the old question. Who made them? Who made them if you wanted to play that game?
All those things are fascinating, I think, and good for us to think about. But the bottom line is a Calvinistic worldview, a Paulism worldview, that God's in charge of this. He created it. It's marvelous. We should study it. We should appreciate it. and build on that is precisely what good scientists are doing. And if you think about it, the people that make the things we have and make the processes and do all the things, make a thesis, they have to create a thesis, then they have to prove that the thesis works. They're just building on what God has given us. It's no accident we have iron ore and we have coal and all of a sudden, oh look at that, we can make steel, or we can melt this rock and make copper and on it goes, You know?
And we just don't even know what we have. I mean, just look at right now in America, the energy companies are saying we have 200 to 300 years of energy in America on our soil in natural gas right now. If we converted to making natural gas, we could run for the next 200 to 300 years just on the natural gas that we have in our thing. 50 years ago, people would have told you, you're nuts. We have no idea what's going on or what God has in store for us. So it isn't all, whoa, what was us? So anyway, the Calvinistic confessions speak by two means whereby we know God by the Scriptures and by nature. God reveals himself through his written word and he reveals himself through nature.
Salvifically, we don't see him in nature, but we do see there's something bigger. The scriptures give us the road to salvation. So he reveals that to us. If he's revealing to us himself through nature, if we study nature with the proper thing, what are we doing? We're doing science. We're looking at it and we're actually doing what God, what honors him as long as we're giving honor to the person that made those things.
The interesting thing, and he hammers on this for, my goodness, about two pages, is that he wants us to think horizontally, and the idea that the separation of the sacred and the secular is fiction. That's not what's going on. All of this is sacred. All of it. There is no sacred and secular, all right? There is gifted people that run the church, but it's not the church and the world. We are in the world, but we're not part of the world. And so the whole division that we make, that, oh, I don't study that stuff because that couldn't build me up. I need to only read my Bible. I can't be a good mechanic, or I can't be a good employee at Boeing or something because that really isn't sacred, only if I'm witnessing three hours a day.
If you're that model employee to that master, Peter teaches us that that is what you should be doing. And that honors God. And in his divine setup, that's the way we should be behaving. So that's another thing that we get confused. And that gets into what Sean has called dualism. And we do it all the time. We think dualistically. Well, I do this, but over here, I'm not going to do that because that would really screw it up if I really applied that principle over here. Then maybe my business wouldn't be as good as it is. so I'm not gonna do that. So all of us have these things. I'm not saying I have it together, nobody's got it together, but we need to keep stripping these things away.
And as we do that, I think God will give us all kinds of interesting opportunity as we go about those kind of things. The other things is that our wise God restrains evil, and it is he who brings forth good out of evil. And meanwhile, we Calvinists never remiss in accusing our sinful nature, yet praise and thank God for making it possible for men to dwell together in a well-ordered society, and for restraining us personally from horrible sins. Moreover, we thank Him for bringing to the light all the talents hidden in our race. And that includes people that are not saved. There are many good, quote, people who are not sinning to the nth degree, okay, common grace.
They're not as evil as they could be, but they may be excellent bosses. They may know lots of good stuff. And we can take that through common grace and use it and learn from it and apply it. We don't have to dualistically say, that guy's an absolute sinner, you know, I'm not going to do it. It reminds me of the old cartoon that used to go around in the 60s. The king is sitting there and he's with his advisors. There's this guy outside the tent and the guy has a machine gun mounted on the pedestal. The servant is in talking to the king and the servant asks the king. He says, we have a salesman out here that needs to show us this new thing he's got.
The king is saying to the servant, I don't have time for him. I've got a battle to fight. So he's so busy doing it the same old way that he can't look to the guy that's got the machine gun. He's going to go out and fight with a sword. Anybody saw Indiana Jones bring the gun to the night fight, you'll win. So it's amazing how many times we don't pay attention to bright people. The saddest thing for me over the past couple of years in the business empire and things that happen is Steve Jobs. Here's a guy that God blessed with a lot of creativity, a real insight to make very useful things, to be cool, to see it as a design feature, and an integrated really good thing, and yet absolutely denied God.
And it wasn't because people didn't tell him about it. He knew about it. He just blew it off. I don't need that. That's sad. That's really sad. And there's lots of examples of that. So the only remaining question in the realm of science is whether this new power, this is 1898 now, also was to create a hierarchical center in order to unveil itself as the third great potentate at the side of the pope and the emperor. So we have the rulers of government, we have the rulers of the church, and then we have the rulers of science, the next cathedral that we worship at. He pretty much was a prophet in that. I think most of the time, for those of you that have argued in school or in universities or even with some of these scientists, they worship the science.
And sad, because they're close, they're examining this marvelous creation and they reject who created it and build an empire out of their little, you know, information. And that can be said of us too. We can build an empire out of our little theology books and forget the practical application of what we learn. I started off this morning by giving you a hint about the art. And I said, I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. That's a quote from T.S. Eliot's poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. And it's a fascinating thing to read Eliot's poetry. He built on Blake and a lot of different things, a lot of different poetic lines in it.
It's been carried on through poets of this day and age and through the last century. Eliot was the early 1900s. And I came across a thing that he wrote a book in 1948. He died in, I think it was, 65. He was an American that went to Britain, became a British citizen because he liked the culture over there. And he became a Christian later in his life. He became an Anglican. And he described himself as a Calvinistic Anglican. Now for those of you that have studied theology, that probably makes your head hurt. But I think it's interesting that here this intellect is thinking he joined the church of the country that he got in.
Remember, we've talked about state churches. But then he realized that God is sovereign, and some of the teachings of that church didn't quite align because basically the Anglican Church is the British Catholic Church. So anyway, he saw that. But he did write this quote, it's two paragraphs, and I think it's amazing to hear a guy that most of the secular world would tell you is totally an atheist and worships the good times and the 20s and all that kind of stuff. And he says, there Here it is an aspect in which we can see a religion as the whole way of life of a people. From birth to the grave, from the morning to night, even in sleep, and that the way of life is also its culture.
The dominant force in creating a common culture between peoples, each one of which has its distinct culture, is religion. I am not so much concerned with the communion of Christian believers today. I am talking about the common tradition of Christianity which has made Europe what it is, and about the common cultural elements which this common Christianity has brought with it. It is in Christianity that our arts have developed. It is in Christianity that the laws of Europe have, until recently, 1948, until recently, have been rooted. It is against the background of Christianity that all our thought has significance.
An individual European may not believe that the Christian faith is true. And yet, what he says and makes and does will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. So even though he doesn't recognize it, he depends on the meaning of what he's doing from that culture, which is Christian. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes.
That's 1948. So now he's 50 years to that year from when Kuyper's talking to Princeton and Kuyper's warning the same things. You'll hear some of that as we talk about the future, but he also had a bright light to it. So it's fascinating that here we have a guy that most of us, I know myself until last week, I didn't think he was a Christian. I didn't know that part about him. And I knew a lot of his poems. I can say a lot of the lines from them because they're recited in all kinds of different things. So anyway, in the chapter, there is a little footnote that defines art and I think it's really a good definition of art.
It says, art has been defined, this is not Kuyper, this is another philosopher that came up with this. Art has been defined as the embodiment of beautiful thought and sensuous form as, for example, in marble or speech. So beautiful thought and sensuous form put into something different than itself. That's a definition of art. This is a classic question I've spent many nights in the 60s talking with people about what is art. I worked in galleries on Madison Avenue and all kinds of different shows and stuff and did framing for the major museums in the world. and it always was a discussion I'd have with people. You know, well what makes that art?
I think that this is a great definition that that is what it does. So, an unable, this is a quote now from Kuiper, an unable to grasp the holier benefits of religion, the mysticism of the heart reacts in an art intoxication. People that become way overboard into art are making art their religion. And they mystically look at what it does for them. Oh, man, this music is speaking to me. This picture is really telling it. This novel said exactly what I want to say. This is really it. And they're always searching for it. And they, oh, if I can just paint my masterpiece, that kind of thing. That intoxication is missing the mark.
Because now, we are worshiping a creation by God's creation, that's good. And he walks the fine line by saying, that is to be admired, that we create things. We are made in his image to do that. But the issue is, sometimes when we do that, we fall into the trap, now I am creating something, I am the ultimate source of truth, that kind of thing. That's where the intoxication gets dangerous. He even goes in another one and the last line of it is, it ends up in an unholy prostration before the shrines of Bacchus and Venus.
So what people do is end up swallowed right down into the pit of the artistic thing and they're gone. They've lost sight of what it is. And yet, Kuyper says we are to admire their fanaticism to create something. That's a good thing. That's something to build on because they are mimicking God. He is a creator God and he's put us in that image. So it's a constructive thing to talk to those people. And when you get them guided in the right direction, they can do their art for all kinds of things that can be good. Scarcely a single art style, this is a quote, can be mentioned which did not arise from the center of divine worship and which did not seek the realization of its ideals in sumptuous structure for that worship.
This was the thriving of an impulse which in itself was noble. Most of art, most of what we see as art, if you get the textbook on art, you're gonna open it up and what do you see? You see little Babylonian statues. What do they are? Of their gods. You keep turning the pages, you see the Grecian ruins. You see all these capitals on the top of columns. What are those columns supporting? Temples.
These things are done, created to worship. Now, they're worshiping the wrong thing, but that's what they're doing, and they're creating beautiful things because they're made in God's image. And they're looking, the right ones, as you examine them and study them, They're looking to nature to see those designs. It's no accident the columns are fluted or have flowers or whatever these things. They're all, they knew the divine principles in geometry to make the Parthenon. It is not square, they made it out of square. So when you stood at your level and looked at it, it looked like it was square. They knew those kind of things.
That's like, whoa, they really understood that. And yet they denied the God who made them. as Paul clearly demonstrated to him in Acts 17. But it still is a noble thing for them to pursue that kind of thing. That's the thing where we sometimes, we can get so bent out of shape against them that you wanna build that bridge to be able to talk to that person if you have somebody like that. It's not wrong that they love that. They're loving something probably that's imitating what God made. So it's interesting when you think these things through differently maybe than you thought of them before.
He goes into a long discussion about how people slip into this intoxication with art, and he ends it with this sentence. The man who fears God and whose facilities, faculties remain clear and unimpaired does not on the brink of age return to the playthings of his infancy. And what he's saying there after all these paragraphs is that the mature Christian looking at these things will not return to like crayon drawings or something. He will see the beauty, even if the beauty has been created by the pagan, which is what I'm trying to talk about. He's saying we in our proper living in this world should appreciate the beautiful things that have been made.
I mean, if you see some of the things that are, you know, for instance, all right, The Catholic Church and the Renaissance made some of the most beautiful things ever. They commissioned it, they paid for it. They paid Michelangelo to make those statues. They paid them to build those cathedrals. You walk in those places, you know something's going on here. They made a structure to something way bigger than they were, and that's to be appreciated. Now, the problem is they get it screwed up, And the church becomes the thing that dictates that, which he is totally against, and we Calvinists would be against. But that is something that is good.
Look what we have. We got a little building here. There are some church-like things in this kind of structure, but one of the things that Calvinism did not supply to us was an architecture. And the reason was it came out of a period that was iconoclastic, that as they rebelled against the Catholic Church and saw that they were not going to reform, then they said all of those signs and symbols they made were bad. In Germany, there was a whole group of Lutherans that went around churches and destroyed all kinds of stuff that were great art. But the problem was they had taken the thing of the truth, swung it all the way to the thing, and decided anything that was made by the Catholic Church or paid for needs to be destroyed.
And so they destroyed it. And those movements have been made throughout history where people, you know, they burn the library in Alexandria, you know, that kind of thing. It's crazy how we react as humans. If we understand who God is, that knowledge is a good thing and we need to be wise to sort through it and cast off the bad stuff. But that's why, you know, for instance, in this week in the omnibus thing, we're supposed to read the Gilgamesh epic. Now why are we reading that? Because it's a great piece of literature. Well, the problem is we only have parts to the poem and most of the books are filling in the other verses by different translators that figure, oh, well, this must have gone in there, so he gets his flavor in it.
So we got this partial relic that we're reading, but it is interesting to see how a society creates a flood myth and tells the story of something we know the biblical story is there. The Navajos have a story about the flood, all this kind of stuff, it's all over the place like that. And that's not bad to know about those things. In fact, it can be used to demonstrate to them, oh, yeah, that's kind of close, but here's the real God. So there are those opportunities and those kind of artistic things, stories, myths, all that kind of thing. Remember too, and this is a quote, a last sentence in a paragraph, the master builder will one day renew and enhance even the beauty of his original creation.
We have not seen what it's going to be like until we get to the end, and he makes the new heavens and the new earth like they should be. That's gonna be amazing. I mean, because we get off and see things we're seeing as sin tainted world over all these years that have come. And even if we're in the reform camp and think it's getting better, we still see it with sin tainted on it until he comes back and makes it right. So we talked about the high Renaissance. Sin can even make art. We talked about the third grade. Well, no, we talked about the third grade thing in science. Let's see here. The idea, too, is in the Renaissance, at the point when Calvin and the Reformed thinkers started happening, they put an end to the unjustified, this is a quote, tutelage of the church over all human life, art included.
At the point they divorced themselves away from that, they decided that art needed to be separate from the church. I mentioned this in our discussion of omnibus, but we were looking at the statue of Moses that Michelangelo carved. And the statue of Moses has horns on it. And one of the questions in the book, why the horns there? And it's because of a bad translation. The Latin Vulgate says that Moses came down from the mountain and had horns. But it came up that Lila Massey asked me, well, why is his sandal off? And why is he in this peculiar position? And there's a great bunch of scholars who are not believers, by the way.
And they've even made a special that was broadcast on PBS a couple of years ago. feel that Michelangelo was actually in a secret Protestant set in Rome, made up of a lot of different artists. And when he made the tomb for Pope Julius, which is why the statue was made, the angels and the things that are over that statue are making obvious Protestant views and looking not at the Pope, not putting the Pope in the center, they're putting Christ in the center. And all these poses, there's like a secret language they think is being said through these things. Now this is not beyond the Renaissance artists. All the paintings have all kinds of interesting things and a lot of times the artist puts himself in the picture.
Michelangelo's in the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling. He's up there being flayed alive. And Raphael is in the, oh shoot, I can't remember the title of it, but the Grecian scene, he puts himself in that. So there's all kinds of messages and signs and symbols in Christian art that are there. So it's not beyond them that they would do this kind of thing. And I think it's fascinating. And I was into Michelangelo's poetry back in the 60s. And I reviewed it, I guess it was probably 10, 15 years ago now, after I got saved. And at the end of his life, the poems are to God and to Jesus and to what God has done through his son for him for his sins.
That's the main focus of his poetry late in his life. So I think that's a possibility, but it's interesting, you know, little thing. There's one thing that was mentioned about music. This is where Calvinistic people actually had a big influence. A man, I'm not sure of the pronunciation here, Lors Bois Burgoys in the 1500s, published a Psalter and he was a Calvinistic composer and he's the one that gave us the doxology. He made his Psalter and the 100th Psalm and that last verse, praise God, from whom all blessings flow. He's the man that wrote that and we sing that like that today. He also adopted rhythm and exchanged the eight Gregorian modes for the two major and minor from popular music.
He brought in major and minor chords, threw away the Gregorian chant type of music, and made the music that way. In that way, making the hymns, the arrangements of those hymns were tunes which all modern music had its rise from. So he took it out of the Gregorian chant and put it into modern day music. Now it's progressed from there, you know, a little bit. And the next guy I'm going to talk about, a man named Gogamil, Claude Gogamil, he discovered, Gogamil was another Calvinistic composer. He was in Geneva with Calvin, wrote a bunch of stuff there, then moved to France. As he traveled around, he saw that the higher voices of the boys in choirs actually dominated the tenor.
And it used to be that the tenor kind of set the tone for the choir. Godemelle said no, the higher voice should be the driving force. He then wrote music that way and to this day it has been put into music that way. And you noticed when we had our choir singing thing we had a higher point, a lower point, all those kind of things. So we blended that in this day and age. But he was the first one to give sopranos their just due. The interesting thing was, he was murdered on the St. Bartholomew's Days, massacred by Catholics.
There's been great criticisms of, obviously, that massacre. And the Catholics killed the great artists of the Calvinistic era. And Kuyper has this little quote in there about how can they be critical of our music when they killed our songbird in their own attack against the Protestants.
So now we get to the future. We've got five minutes to go to the future. He's very depressing reading about the future in 1898. He is clearly describing the rise of Japan, the rise of Germany, the rise of the humanistic forces in Europe. He says lots of things that are really kind of tough to hear, but he says like here's a quote about money, pleasure, and social power. Those alone are the objects of pursuit and people are constantly growing less fastidious regarding the means employed to secure them. So he sees even in 1898 that the general rule of culture is just moving to getting more stuff. As we can produce more stuff through the industrial age, we get more stuff. And the idea is we become fanatical about getting the stuff. We live in that kind of age. We've seen the ultimate progression of that.
We also, most of us have lived through the thing, okay now I got six of these I can only use one at a time. What do I need another one for? You know so there is that point that you need to look at it Not again not against those things We don't want to live in a hut and not have that but we do need to understand the the Vice that there is to worship that kind of stuff He also says and in the end only be that once more the sound principles of democracy democracy will be banished to make room this time, not for a new aristocracy of nobler birth and higher ideals, but for the coarse and overbearing krat-tis-ah-krat-tis-tocracy of brutal money power.
He saw that governments were shifting from the principles of democracy to sheer power, crushing other empires by their sheer money. And it is fascinating to watch the money markets of today, all the things that are going on, and how when you worship money is the thing, that all of a sudden it can get screwed over. So it seems to me is somewhat of a profit in that. Speaking to us as Christians, he says, it is self-deception therefore, and only self-deception when these practical and mystical Christians believe that they can do without Christian life. and their worldview of their own. No one can do that.
We cannot do without our Christian worldview. But what happens is because of the dualism we live in, you get swallowed into these things and you can lose sight of where you're going. It's a constant thing we have to guard against. I think it's fascinating that he goes on and on about Calvinism for three or four pages as Calvinistic thinking is the way out of this, that we properly understand who God is, we properly understand our gifts, we properly interrelate with each other. And he says, first of all, not one Reformed standard, not even the purest, is infallible, as was the word of Paul. I think that was a great quote out of that book, because it always gets back to that.
Yes, Calvin, systematize those theologies and we can talk about theology all we can, but it always gets back to the source. And Kuyper, even in his reformed and very catechetical with the Westminster Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism and the Apostles Creed and all the things that they look at, he saw the only thing that's infallible was the word of Paul, reducing it back down. So for the future, he saw four things Four things that we need to pay attention to, and this is what I'll close with.
That Calvinism shall no longer be ignored where it still exists, but be strengthened where its influence continues. When you have that influence, build on it. Strengthen yourself on God's sovereignty. How can you go wrong worshiping the God who made us all and controls us all and controls the universe? So strengthen those things. that Calvinism shall again be made the subject of study in order that the outside world may come to know it. In other words, as we study that theology, it will focus back in on God. That's the way I interpret that. So the study reduces itself back to God, not necessarily Calvinism, but keep in mind the lectures are what Calvinism does.
Three, that its principles shall again be developed in accordance with the needs of our time. this is a timeless truth. Whether you live in a hut, God is sovereign, or whether you're a steel magnet or Bill Gates, all of it applies, okay? So study in order that the outside world may come to know it. So the Calvinism shall be made in the subject of study in order that the outside world may come to know it. That its principles, third, that its principles shall again be developed in accordance with the needs of our time and consistently applied to the various domains of life.
I mixed the two up there. So the third one is, we've developed an accordance with the needs of our time and consistently applied to the various domains of our life. Every inch, every thumb width is God's, every cell. Jesus is holding together the cells in our body, okay? If he turns loose, poof, not good. Then the last one, that the churches which still lay claim to confessing it shall cease being ashamed of their own confession." It's fascinating how many times in my Christian life I've been told not to say Calvinism. I can talk about God's sovereignty. I could talk about Romans 9, but to say the word Calvinism just really made it go off the charts.
Sean has some interesting stories to tell you about universities where He was the spawn of Satan because he taught Calvinistically and people came after him. But it's fascinating how angry it makes people to talk about God's sovereignty. And I think it's a wonderful thing and it really is, bottom line, the only thing that can save us, our sovereign God. And if we worship him correctly, who knows? With his grace, he may give us many generations and a whole new renaissance of Calvinistic thinking and influence in our world that'll make it a wonderful demonstration and bring many people to him. Because you know what?
Bottom line, it is each individual soul that God wants. He wants worshipers. He wants us in spirit and truth to worship him. And if we can create an environment that does that and does it even better, that's great. And if we can pass that on to the next generation and the next generation's really exciting. So with that I close, let's pray, and we can go out into the world and do this, all right? Father, we thank you for people like Kuyper. We thank you for people like Calvin, for Anselm, and for Augustine, for Paul, for the people in the temple waiting for you to come, the people for Eve, when you made the promise that you would wound him, you would crush him, and that you would deliver somebody.
All those people in that long line, thank you that you put us in that line. Help us to understand that, help us to really grasp that. Help us to see the incredible things that we've been delivered and just the amazing amount of information we can just get by the internet even, seeing all the things you've been involved with, and yet how blind the people can be. Open their eyes, help us to be people that can help open their eyes. Help us to be those lights. We thank you for all of those things. And of course, without your son, we couldn't even come to you and ask you for these things. So it's in his name, Jesus Christ, that we pray, amen.
