But I worry that many evangelicals aren’t clear about why they disagree with Camping. The world hates the mere idea of Jesus returning, and Camping is just one more buffoon who happens to hold this silly idea. Of course, his predicting dates and time makes him all the more of a target, but make no mistake–the world hates Jesus, and that is why this story has been like an early Christmas gift to them.

It should be obvious, then, that Christians can have no part in the world’s mockery.

In fact, if part of me isn’t hoping that Harold Camping is the proverbial broken clock that is right twice a day, so that Jesus does come back without any further delay, then something is wrong.

So, evangelicals are correct to reject the idea that we can predict this, because Jesus himself said that we wouldn’t. But as we reject this idea, do we do this with hearts aching to see our resurrected Savior? Does the world understand that while we cannot agree with Camping’s logic, we would give anything to see Jesus before the end of the day?

The Indelible Grace version of the hymn “Come Then, Lord Jesus” brings me to tears almost every time I sing it:

The Church has waited long
Her absent Lord to see
And still in loneliness she waits
A friendless stranger she
Age after age has gone,
Sun after sun has set
And still, in weeds of widowhood,
She weeps a mourner yet

Chorus: Come then, Lord Jesus, come
Come then, Lord Jesus
Come then, Lord Jesus, come, come, come.

The serpent’s brood increase,
The powers of hell grow bold
The conflicts thickens, faith is low,
And love is waxing cold
How long, O Lord our God,
Holy and true and good
Wilt thou not judge Thy suffering Church,
Her sighs and tears and blood?

We long to hear thy voice,
To see Thee face to face
To share Thy crown and glory then,
As now we share thy grace
Should not the loving bride,
The absent Bridegroom mourn?
Should she not wear the weeds of grief,
Until her Lord return?

The whole creation groans,
And wait to hear that voice
That shall restore her comeliness,
And make her wastes rejoice
Come, Lord, and wipe away,
The curse, the sin, the stain
And make this blighted world of ours,
Thine own fair world again

He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! (Rev. 22:20)

Related posts:

1. The Whole World Lies in the Power of the Evil One
2. John’s warning concerning the world
3. The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers

Certainly, one option for considering the events of Holy Saturday would be simply to use our imaginations. The faithful followers of Jesus must have been devastated all through the day. The bitter herbs of the Passover feast must have overwhelmed these crushed people, who may have echoed Naomi’s deep grief: “Call me Mara [bitter], for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me!” (Ruth 1:20). Their day of rest was undoubtedly a day of anguish–especially for the women who so desperately wanted to anoint their beloved Jesus properly with burial spices.

But instead of relying too much on our imaginations to fill in the gap of this Sabbath, let us learn from what the Bible tells us about God’s purposes in Sabbath. Just as Jesus is the true Passover Lamb, he is also the true Sabbath-keeper.

God instituted the Sabbath at creation: “And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation” (Gen. 2:2-3).

At Mount Sinai, God pointed to his own rest after creation as the reason that Israel would be commanded to rest from all their work on the seventh day: “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (Ex. 20:11).

God’s purposes for instituting the fourth commandment, however, were not merely to establish a rule. Yahweh declared that the Sabbath would testify to the nature of the relationship between him and his people: “Above all you shall keep my Sabbaths, for this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I, the LORD, sanctify you” (Ex. 31:13). This passage is absolutely vital to understanding God’s desire for the Sabbath: when we rest from our work, we live out our belief that God will accomplish what we cannot–specifically, that he will be the one to sanctify us.

God’s chosen means of sanctifying us, then, is by our resting in the work of Jesus Christ. When Christ declared from the cross “It is finished” (John 19:30) and died, he proclaimed the completion of the work necessary for the sanctification of God’s people. We do not work for our salvation, because Jesus Christ worked for it. His work is finished, and so by faith we enter into the rest that he has provided for us.

This is why Jesus railed against the Pharisees and their scrupulous rule-dominated style of Sabbath keeping–because they did not rest. They were blinded to the fact that Sabbath was given in order that we might stop trying to work our way into God’s favor, but instead to rest in the favor that God has provided for us in the person and work of Jesus Christ. On this point, the author of Hebrews insists, “So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his” (Heb. 4:9-10).

And so Holy Saturday was the day in which Jesus Christ rested from his works. The work was finished, and Jesus Christ rested the entire Sabbath day as his body lay dead in the tomb. By doing this, Jesus fulfilled God’s promise for the Sabbath: “Above all you shall keep my Sabbaths, for this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I, the LORD, sanctify you.”

So then, if Jesus Christ rested from his work to accomplish our salvation, shouldn’t we? Why do we continue to try to be “good people” and to justify our actions at every turn? Why can’t we admit just how sinful we are and embrace what Christ has done for us instead? Why can’t we give up our self-improvement projects and throw ourselves wholly on the mercy of God for us in Christ?

This is Holy Saturday, a day of Sabbath rest.

Related posts:

1. Three Glorious Days, Part I: The Day of Preparation
2. Three Glorious Days, Part III: Easter Sunday
3. Ransomed from every language, Part 2

²By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, ³and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. (1 John 4:2-3)

At stake are three major issues. First, John is concerned about the doctrine of the incarnation: “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.” Two major heresies in John’s day denied the incarnation. One, called docetism, believed that Jesus only seemed (the name of this heresy comes from the Greek word for “seem”) to be human, but that, in fact, he was not. The other, called adoptionism, believed that the Divine Christ descended on the human Jesus from Jesus’ baptism to just before the cross, so that the Divine Christ never actually suffered. Both of these heresies stem from the belief that spirit is good, but that matter is bad, and that therefore the Divine Spirit would never willingly unite himself to human matter.

In 1 John 2:18-27, John wrote against those who question the full divinity of Jesus (that is, his status as the only begotten Son of the Father), but here, John turns his attention to those who question the humanity of Jesus, his “having come in the flesh.”

But the incarnation is the foundation on which the entire Christian gospel rests. If Jesus were not fully human, than he could in no way become the Second Adam, because he would not have been able to take upon himself the punishment incurred by the sin of the First Adam. And, if Jesus were not fully God, he would not be able to save, since only God saves.

Any spirit that rejects, distorts, or mocks the doctrine of the incarnation is the spirit of error. The incarnation is not a debatable point on which Christians may agree to disagree–the incarnation is a hinge between heaven and hell.

Second, John has more in mind than our mere rubber-stamping of the doctrine of the incarnation. This isn’t something that we sign off on in order to check off that particular prerequisite for entering the Kingdom. Listen to Donald Burdick, who argues that v. 2 should be translated very literally as “every spirit that confesses Jesus-Christ-come-in-flesh”:

The KJV, NASB, and NIV all translate this confession as follows: “that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.” [Ed. note: the ESV, published in 2001, does the same thing.] The weakness of this rendering is that the Greek text does not have the word hoti “that,” and it is doubtful that it should be supplied in the English translation. Actually, to supply the word hoti is not an incidental matter, for it alters the vary nature of the confession. With hoti the confession is propositional in nature. It is a declaration about what Jesus Christ did; without hoti the text contains a confession of Jesus as a person rather than a confession of a proposition about the Person. Brooke puts it aptly when he declares, “It is a confession not of the fact of the incarnation, but of the Incarnate Christ.” (Donald Burdick, The Letters of John the Apostle: An In-Depth Commentary [Chicago: Moody Press, 1985], p. 295.)

Make no mistake: Truth is a Person. We do not believe in the incarnation as a theory–we believe in the Person of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate God.

Third, John goes one step further to hammer home the reality of Jesus-Christ-come-in-flesh. Donald Burdick is helpful once again concerning the phrase, “every spirit that does not confess Jesus [ton Iesoun] is not from God”:

Many commentators fail to take into consideration the significance of the article ton before the name Iesoun….Although it was common in Greek to use the article before proper names, there is good reason for understanding the article in ton Iesoun as indicating previous reference. John insists that it is “this Jesus” who must be confessed—the Jesus of verse 2 who came in flesh (en sarki eleluthota). (Burdick, The Letters of John the Apostle, p. 298.)

This Jesus is the one whom the Spirit of God will confess, and This Jesus is the one we must confess. This Jesus is the Redeemer God who came to save his people by becoming one of them–by having-come-in-flesh!–and This Jesus is the Lion of Judah, the Lamb who was slain. This Jesus is worthy of all worship, praise, adoration, glory, and honor.

And any spirit who denies This Jesus (even by suggesting to you another jesus) is a devil who means to drag you to hell by every deceit necessary.

Related posts:

1. The Fellowship: With the Church, with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ
2. 2 John: In Jesus, Truth Wins Too
3. Psalm 114:1-2: Jesus Christ, the Sanctuary and Dominion of God

And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. Whoever says “I know him” but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may be sure that we are in him: whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. (1 John 2:3-6)

We will come back to the first two verses of this chapter (1 John 2:1-2) because it is helpful to figure out which problem underlies what John is writing in 2:1-6 before we come to the solution. And, once again, the problem of sin is not primarily that it causes us undesirable consequences (broken relationships, shame, hell), but that sin is darkness, and therefore sin is in direct opposition to our great God, who is Light himself.

So how do we reform the libertines and antinomians who scarcely desire to change the way they live? One idea is simply by applying more of the Law to their lives: don’t do this, don’t do that, but be sure to do this over here, etc. A recent article published in Christianity Today made a splash in the Reformed world by arguing that Paul’s example demands just this kind of preaching the Law (even if balanced with the gospel) in order to increase holiness in the church.

I like Michael Horton’s response to this idea:

What’s striking is that Paul answers antinomianism not with the law but with more gospel!  In other words, antinomians are not people who believe the gospel too much, but too little!  They restrict the power of the gospel to the problem of sin’s guilt, while Paul tells us that the gospel is the power for sanctification as well as justification….

The ultimate antidote to antinomianism is not more imperatives, but the realization that the gospel swallows the tyranny as well as the guilt of sin. (Original post)

This, it seems, is exactly John’s point in 1 John 2:1-2. John opens chapter 2 of his letter with the solution to the problem of antinomian, libertine “Christians”:

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. (1 John 2:1-2)

Now, the Law is good if one uses it lawfully. God uses the Law to show us our sin and the extent to which we fall short of the glory of God. Furthermore, God uses the Law in the lives of believers to teach us about what he loves and what he hates–we learn the character of God from the Law. But the Law is not a solution to our sinfulness–it merely points to our solution.

To lives rotting away under sin, John counsels us not to look to the Law, but to our Advocate, Jesus Christ the Righteous. He does not minimize the problem of sin–he is writing these things so that we may not sin!–but he points us to the gospel of Jesus Christ as the solution.

Robert Murray M’Cheyne said much the same thing:

Learn much of the Lord Jesus. For every look at yourself take ten looks at Christ. He is altogether lovely . . . . Live much in the smiles of God. Bask in his beams. Feel his all-seeing eye settled on you in love. And repose in his almighty arms. (From John Piper’s biography on M’Cheyne)

We do libertines and antinomians no favors by encouraging them to look increasingly more on themselves–the gospel for such people (among whom I am chief) is to look to Christ. The more we look to ourselves, the more we either despair and/or give up our struggle for holiness. But the more we glory in the beauty of Christ, the more detestable our sin becomes to us, and the more we obey out of desire, not mere duty.

Related posts:

1. Reforming the Speech of Pharisaical Hypocrites (Like Me)
2. God is Light, and in Him is no Darkness Whatsoever
3. John’s warning concerning the Church

This verse took on new importance to me as I first began to study Greek and realized that our English translations have messed with the word order–John is emphasizing God’s faithfulness, while still affirming God’s righteousness, by writing “Faithful he is, and just…” There have been moments in my life when I have despaired over my sin and have drawn great comfort from God’s promise that he would be faithful to forgive me of my sin AND to cleanse me of my unrighteousness.

But I have often read right over the word “just.” The word, dikaios, is a single Greek word that the English language splits up into two words: righteous and just. We typically say that a person is righteous, while a thing (whether a decision, a system, a country, a religion, etc.) is just. The point here is that God not only faithfully forgives us and cleanses us, but that he is just/righteous to do so.

This, however, is impossible. God cannot be just/righteous when he forgives the sins of anyone. If a judge in a court regularly pardoned the guilty for any reason (personal ties, bribery, extortion), we would call that judge corrupt. There is no way for God NOT to be corrupted by forgiving sinful people.

Keep in mind, though, that John feels the weight of this problem himself. If you remember, he opens this section of his letter with the message he heard from Jesus himself: “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” Above all other considerations, God’s perfect, pure holiness and righteousness must never be compromised, because God is light.

So how can God be faithful, but still just? How can God cleanse sinners who walk in darkness so that they might walk with him in the pure light? This is a big dilemma–if God cannot be faithful to forgive, then there is no gospel. If God cannot be just when he forgives, then the gospel is no longer good news–who wants to live eternally with a corrupt God?

The answer to the dilemma is found at the cross, where God’s perfect faithfulness and perfect justice are seen together in a bleeding, dying man. At the cross, God poured out his wrath for our sin–and justice was served. At the cross, Jesus died for us–and God could now be faithful to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

I love this verse from “Let us Love and Sing and Wonder“:

Let us wonder grace and justice
Join and point to mercy’s store
When through grace in Christ our trust is
Justice smiles and asks no more
He Who washed us with His blood
Has secured our way to God

He Who washed us with His blood has secured both God’s faithfulness and justice in his kind dealings toward us. That gospel is good news.

Related posts:

1. God is Light, and in Him is no Darkness Whatsoever
2. If God so loved us, we also ought to love one another
3. Augustine on Sparing the Wicked

Everything, though, that John writes in the passage stems from a simple, yet dense, statement in 1:5: “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” The sentence sounds so self-evident that we are tempted to read over it without further thought in order to get to something a little more thought-provoking.

But ask yourself this: What message would you consider to be the core of the Christian faith? If someone asked you to pass along to them the message of Christ, wouldn’t you say something–anything!–other than this? John, however, sees this message at the heart of real-life Christianity.

As we continue through the passage, we begin to see why. John first confronts those who refuse to acknowledge their own sinfulness, which is the height of blasphemy: “If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us” (1 John 1:10). The idea that we have no less sin than God, who is pure light and in whom there is no darkness whatsoever, is a vile, horrific thought. Such a statement makes God himself out to be a liar, and it puts God in the dock to defend why he has condemned the world because of its “alleged” sin against him.

Second, John confronts those who claim to know God, yet who do not keep his commandments. John gives us a litmus test: “By this we may be sure that we are in him: whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked” (1 John 2:5-6). If God is indeed light, and if God indeed admits into his presence nothing of darkness whatsoever, then what kind of fool would claim to have fellowship with God while yet refusing to obey him?

John’s point concerning God’s being the light is absolutely the center of the gospel message about Jesus: the Father sent the Son into the world precisely because God is light AND because we walk in darkness. Unless we gain an Advocate in Jesus Christ the Righteous, then we have no hope of escaping eternal darkness.

But if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us of all unrighteousness. Only then can we have fellowship with God and with each other in the light.

Related posts:

1. How can God be faithful, but still just?
2. Love as the Litmus Test of Genuine Faith
3. Reforming the Speech of Pharisaical Hypocrites (Like Me)

And he [Jesus] awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceased and there was a great calm. He said to them, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?” And they were filled with great fear and said to one another, “Who is this, that even wind and sea obey him?” (Mark 4:39-41)

The word Jesus uses to accuse his disciples of being “afraid” in v. 40 is deilos, and it means something along the lines of timidity–in fact, the ESV translates the word as “cowardly” in Rev. 21:8 (see more: Thayer’s Lexicon).

But, the word used to describe the reaction to Jesus’ calming the storm is a different word entirely: phobos, from which we get our word “phobia.” This word, on the other hand, means fear, dread, or terror–no mere timidity here (Thayer’s Lexicon). More than that, the word is actually repeated to intensify the meaning: “they feared a great fear.” And this from Jesus’ protection–shudder at the thought of facing Jesus’ wrath!

Don’t kid yourself–the timidity you experience in the face of even the most life-threatening storms in life are nothing compared to the terror that Jesus will inspire on the last day when he judges the wicked. The great news of the gospel is that Jesus has pledged in his own blood that he will not turn away any who plead to him for mercy.

So, let me plead with you: kiss the Son, lest he be angry and you perish in the way.

Related posts:

1. Fear of the Lord and Being Scared
2. But perfect love casts out fear
3. Augustine on Coercing People into the Kingdom

On the one hand, I think that the early Church fathers could have done a better job connecting the dots; on the other hand, I think that modern exegetes sometimes forget Jesus’ insistence that the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms were written about him (Luke 24:44).

I was thankful, then, to find two stunning expositions on Ezekiel 37 that sees the connection, yet that does the work of connecting the dots. I quote them here for your edification:

[This text] functions as a very important link in a theological chain to which the full biblical hope of resurrection is anchored. At one end is the connection we have already noted between Ezekiel’s vision of God breathing life into the lifeless bodies of Israel’s defunct army and the Genesis tradition of God breathing the breath of life into the human-shaped pile of dust that then became a living human being. God’s renewal of Israel was like a rerun of creation. Or, to put it the other way round, what God was about to do for Israel would be like the first act in the renewal of humanity as a whole. Here again, as in so many ways, the links between Israel and humanity are apparent. Israel had been called in the first place, through Abraham, to be a blessing to all the nations of the earth. Their election and redemption were for the sake of the rest of humanity. Likewise, therefore, just as their sin and punishment mirrored the fallenness of the whole race, so too their restoration would prefigure God’s gracious purpose of redemption for humanity. Resurrection for Israel anticipated resurrection for all.

And at the centre of the chain stands Jesus himself….The most significant echo of Ezekiel 37 [in the life of Jesus] comes in a locked room on the very evening of his resurrection, when, we read, “he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” The Lord of life himself, freshly risen to his feet from where he had lain among the bones of the dead, adopts simultaneously the posture of Ezekiel in summoning the breath of God, and the posture of God himself in commanding the breath of the Spirit to come upon the disciples. (Christopher J. H. Wright, The Message of Ezekiel: A New Heart and a New Spirit [Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2001], 310.)

And here is a biblical commentator from the 19th century:

The true restoration of Israel as the people of the Lord commenced with the founding of the new kingdom of God, the ‘kingdom of heaven,’ through the appearing of Christ upon the earth. But inasmuch as the Jewish nation as such, or in its entirety, did not acknowledge Jesus Christ as the Messiah foretold by the prophets and sent by God, but rejected its Saviour, there burst afresh upon Jerusalem and the Jewish nation the judgment of dispersion among the heathen; whereas the kingdom of God founded by Christ spread over the earth, through the entrance of believers from among the Gentiles. This judgment upon the Jewish people, which is hardened in unbelief, still continues, and will continue until the time when the full number of the Gentiles has entered into the kingdom of God, and Israel as a people shall also be converted to Christ, acknowledge the crucified One as its Saviour, and bow the knee before Him (Rom. xi. 25, 26). Then will ‘all Israel’ be raised up out of its graves, the graves of its political and spiritual death, and brought back into its own land, which will extend as far as the Israel of God inhabits the earth. Then also will the hour come in which all the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and come forth out of their graves to the resurrection (Dan. xii. 2; John v. 25-29); when the Lord shall appear in His glory, and descend from heaven with the trump of God (1 Thess. iv. 13), to call all the dead to life, and through the judgment upon all the nations to perfect His kingdom in glory, and bring the righteous into the Canaan of the new earth, into the heavenly Jerusalem, to the imperishable life of everlasting blessedness. (C. F. Keil, Biblical Commentary on the Prophecies of Ezekiel, trans. James Martin [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960], 127-28)

And that, brothers and sisters, will preach.

Related posts:

1. Word, Spirit, and Dry Bones
2. Christian exegesis at its best
3. The Provisions of the Prince

• So that Isaac does not marry one of “the daughters of the Canaanites, (Gen. 24:3), Abraham sends out his servant to find Isaac a wife, and the servant prays that he would recognize the right woman by her offering to water not only him, but his camels as well. Rebekah does just that, and so she becomes Isaac’s wife.
• So that Jacob will not marry one of the Hittite women, over whom Rebekah “loathes her life” (Gen. 27:46), Rebekah pleads with Isaac to send Jacob to her own family for a wife, instead of marrying one of the pagan women in the land. (This is convenient, since Esau is seeking to kill Jacob at this time.) Jacob, then, upon learning that Rachel is the daughter of his mother’s brother (his cousin), voluntarily waters Rachel’s animals. Only fourteen short years later, Rachel becomes Jacob’s wife.
• When Moses is fleeing Egypt after killing an Egyptian (Ex. 2), he saves the seven daughters of a Midianite priest from shepherds who try to drive them from a well. Jethro, the priest, gives Zipporah to Moses as a wife. Based on Ex. 19, it seems that Jethro is a priest of Yahweh, not a pagan priest.

In all of these cases, God ordained that these great men should meet their wives (none of whom were foreigners, or at least not pagan foreigners) at a well.

Imagine, then, that Jesus meets a foreigner, apostate Samaritan at the well. Moreover, she is not a candidate for marriage, since “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband” (John 4:17-18).

While the brides of the patriarchs were necessarily pure, in order to establish a holy nation through their offspring, the bride of Jesus is a whore whom he makes pure by the washing of water with the word. Jesus does go to the well to seek a bride, but goes to the well also to offer his bride better waters: the living waters of which he himself is the fount.

Related posts:

1. Jesus Is Wisdom
2. Confessing This Jesus-Christ-Come-In-Flesh Jesus
3. A vow to “my people”

Louis Berkhof’s explanation sheds more light on the differences for me:

…the Reformers maintained that the Word alone is not sufficient to work faith and conversion; that the Holy Spirit can, but does not ordinarily, work without the Word; and that therefore in the work of redemption the Word and the Spirit work together. Though there was little difference on this point at first between the Lutherans and the Reformed, the former from the beginning stressed the fact that the Holy Spirit works through the Word as His instrument (per verbum), while the latter preferred to say that the operation of the Holy Spirit accompanies the Word (cum verbo). Later on Lutheran theologians developed the real Lutheran doctrine, that the Word of God contains the converting power of the Holy Spirit as a divine deposit, which is now so inseparably connected with it that it is present even when the Word is not used, or is not used legitimately. But in order to explain the different results of the preaching of the Word in the case of different persons, they had to resort, even though it be in a mild form, to the doctrine of the free will of man. The Reformed indeed regarded the Word of God as always powerful, either as a savour of life unto life or as a savour of death unto death, but maintained that it becomes efficacious in leading to faith and conversion only by an accompanying operation of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of sinners. They refused to consider this efficaciousness as an impersonal power resident in the Word. (Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 4th ed., 611-12)

From this, I think that I have been pretty close, but nevertheless off, on my understanding of the issues here. I would restate the two positions thusly:

• Both Lutherans and the Reformed see both the Word/Sacraments and the Spirit as powerful.
• Lutherans see the power of the Holy Spirit inseparably annexed to the Word and the Sacraments so that, when you have the Word/Sacraments, you have the Holy Spirit, and vice versa. (To me, this helps to understand the thrust of the Luther quotations my brother Anthony provided.)
• The Reformed see the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit as necessary in order for the Word/Sacraments to become powerful unto salvation.

In my mind, this clarifies the potential objection to the Reformed view that I suggested in my post on Ezekiel’s dry bones–the prophecy of Ezekiel is indeed powerful, being the Word of God; however, because powerful working of the Spirit of God to grant life and salvation is not inseparably annexed to the Word of God, the Spirit of God must bring the Word of God to life if someone is to be saved.

Related posts:

1. Word, Spirit, and Dry Bones
2. On the Efficacy of the Sacraments
3. Hodge on Sacraments