Posted by
ValiantForTruth on Monday, August 31, 2009 1:30:21 PM
For Reformation Man the Scripture is his authority; he knows better than to trust the opinions of men or the traditions of any church. We like to think that any opinions we have are derived from the Bible. On purpose there is no original thinking on our part where the Bible speaks because of our view of man…
’the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it?’
We hold that history is going somewhere; there is a beginning and there is a purposeful progression toward a goal. The singular event that marks all history is the coming of Jesus Christ. All of history before His coming looked forward to the promised Messiah and His kingdom and the New Covenant. All of history since His coming is influenced by His plan of redemption…
”I will build My church and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it” And again, “the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever!”
Now, on the face of it, a secular view of history misses the significance of Christ’s coming, misses the significance of the New Covenant Church in the world and denies the influence of these things. History is Jesus Christ, and His Revelation is a philosophy of history. To borrow from the medical, secular history treats the symptoms while ignoring the cause.
An undeniable fact of life given to us by the wise man of Proverbs is that ‘as a man thinks, so is he’. There is nothing that affects a man’s thinking more than his view of reality. On the surface, the events of history are shaped by men. How can we understand a man and his actions if he is removed from his world view? This is what secular history tends to do; it robs us of who the men of history really are. A good example of this from recent history is Robert E. Lee.