The Real hope for our communities - Abridged
Benjamin Warfield
Every Indigenous community in Australia needs hope and there is only hope in Jesus Christ and his amazing good news. As opposed to a shallow man -centred "fix me up" gospel. The doctrines of grace insists that God's saving work is directed in every case immediately to individuals who are saved. This means God does what he promises to individuals in the processes of salvation so this becomes the mark of the doctrines of grace.
Supernatural is the mark of Christianity at large, and evangelicalism is the mark of the doctrines of grace. The true preacher is one who holds with full consciousness that God the Lord, in his saving work, deals not generally with mankind at large, but particularly with the individuals who are actually saved.
In Indigenous communities individual salvation that is Spirit wrought and based on the true God centered gospel has a profound effect on families. This is how it was in the time of the early church in the book of Acts. Hosue hold salvations where common. Sadly a man-centred shallow decisionism has left many says they have become Christians in a rally or convention only to return after to old ways and bad behaviours.
A bad tree produces bad fruit and many are now committed to seeing a truely God centred and Christ centred gospel that sets forth God's supernatural work in conviction, regeneration and deep repentance.
So the supernaturalism of salvation is the mark of Christianity at large and which ascribes all salvation to God. The immediate operations of saving grace which is the mark of evangelicalism and which ascribes salvation to the direct working of God on the soul, come to its rights and have justice only in the doctrines of grace. The doctrines of grace simply are that God saves not we oursleves. He has choosen before the creation of this world a people from every people group. That Jesus Christ died for this group and that God's Spirit applies the life death and resurrection of Christ to this group.
Hence salvation is unstopable, because God has aplan and because He is all power it will happen. This is our hope for communties. Is land important?
Yes because God has made us to have a sense of place or home. But our untimate home is either heaven or hell. Yes He will redeem this earth. But unless we are redeemed we will not be fit for heaven.
To deny that God saves individuals is to deny in the supernaturalism of salvation and in the immediacy of the operations of the denial logically of this process and therefore a total rejection of Christianity.
What is chiefly of importance for us to bear in mind here, is that God's plan is to save, whether the individual or the world, by process. No doubt the whole salvation of the individual sinner enters into the full enjoyment of this accomplished salvation only by stages and in the course of time.
Redeemed by Christ, regenerated by the Holy Spirit, justified through faith, received into the very household of God as his sons, led by the Spirit into the flowering and fruiting activities of the new life, our salvation is still only in process and not yet complete.
We still are the prey of temptation; we still fall into sin; we still suffer sickness, sorrow, death itself. Our redeemed bodies can hope for nothing but to wear out in weakness and to break down in decay in the grave. Our redeemed souls only slowly enter into their heritage.
Only when the last trump shall sound and we shall rise from our graves, and perfected souls and incorruptible bodies shall together enter into the glory prepared for God's children, is our salvation complete.
The redemption of the world is similarly a process. It, too, has its stages: it, too, advances only gradually to its completion. But it, too, will ultimately he complete; and then we shall see a wholly saved world. Of course it follows, that at any stage of the process, short of completeness, the world, as the individual, must present itself to observation as incompletely saved.
We can no more object the incompleteness of the salvation of the world today to the completeness of the salvation of the world, than we can object the incompleteness of our personal salvation today (the remainders of sin in us, the weakness and death of our bodies) to the completeness of our personal salvation.
Every thing in its own order: first the seed, then the blade, then the full corn in the ear. And as, when Christ comes, we shall each of us be like him, when we shall see him as he is, so also, when Christ comes, it will be to a fully saved world, and there shall be a new heaven and a new earth, in which dwells righteousness.
It does not concern us at the moment to enumerate the stages through which the world must pass to its complete redemption. We do not ask how long the process will be; we make no inquiry into the means by which its complete redemption shall be brought about. These are topics which belong to Eschatology and even the lightest allusion to them here would carry us beyond the scope of our present task.
What concerns us now is only to make sure that the world will be completely saved; and that the accomplishment of this result through a long process, passing through many stages, with the involved incompleteness of the world's salvation through extended ages, introduces no difficulty to thought.
This incompleteness of the world's salvation through numerous generations involves, of course, the loss of many souls in the course of the long process through which the world advances to its salvation. And therefore the Biblical doctrine of the salvation of the world is not "universalism" in the common sense of that term. It does not mean that all men without exception are saved.
Many men are inevitably lost, throughout the whole course of the advance of the world to its complete salvation, just as the salvation of the individual by process means that much service is lost to Christ through all these lean years of incomplete salvation. But as in the one case, so in the other, the end is attained at last: there is a completely saved man and there is a completely saved world. This may possibly be expressed by saying that the Scriptures teach an eschatological universalism, not an each- and-every universalism.
When the Scriptures say that Christ came to save the world, that he does save the world, and that the world shall be saved by him, they do not mean that there is no human being whom he did not come to save, whom he does not save, who is not saved by him. They mean that he came to save and does save the human race; and that the human race is being led by God into a racial salvation: that in the age-long development of the race of men, it will attain at last to a complete salvation, and our eyes will be greeted with the glorious spectacle of a saved world.
Thus the human race attains the goal for which it was created, and sin does not snatch it out of God's hands: the primal purpose of God with it is fulfilled; and through Christ the race of man, though fallen into sin, is recovered to God and fulfills its original destiny.
Now, it cannot be imagined that the development of the race to this, its destined end, is a matter of chance; or is committed to the uncertainties of its own determination. Were that so, no salvation would or could lie before it as its assured goal.
The goal to which Indigenous Australia is advancing is set by God: it is salvation. What hope this gives us. And every stage in the advance to this goal is, of course, determined by God. The progress of indigenous Australia is, in other words, a God-determined progress, to a God-determined end.
That being true, every detail in every moment of the life of Indigenous Australia is God-determined; and is a stage in its God- determined advance to its God-determined end. Christ has been made in very truth Head over all things for his Church: and all that befalls his Church, everything his Church is at every moment of its existence, every "fortune," as we absurdly call it, through which his Indigenous Church passes, is appointed by him.
The rate of the Indigenous Church's progress to its goal of perfection, the nature of its progress, the particular individuals who are brought into it through every stage of its progress: all this is in his divine hands. The Lord adds to theIndigenous Church daily such as are being saved. And it is through the divine government of these things, which is in short the leading onwards of the race to salvation, that the great goal is at last attained.
To say this is, of course, already to say election and reprobation. There is no antinomy, therefore, in saying that Christ died for his people and that Christ died for the world. His people may be few today: the world will be his people tomorrow. But it must be punctually observed that unless it is Christ who, not opens the way of salvation to all, but actually saves his people, there is no ground to believe that there will ever be a saved world.
The salvation of the world is absolutely dependent (as is the salvation of the individual soul) on its salvation being the sole work of the Lord Christ himself, in his irresistible might. It is only the True preacher that has warrant to believe in the salvation whether of the individual or of the world. Both alike rest utterly on the sovereign grace of God." All other ground, is shifting sand.
