Dear Family,

With Terry’s permission, I forward my recent correspondence with him about a sermon of Andy Lanning to all of you. I especially want all of you to read my response to Terry Dykstra. But you cannot make sense of my reply to him without knowledge of the sermon that Terry asked about. I have read the complete transcript of the sermon. I know therefore what I am critiquing.

I should have added in my reply to Terry, what I add to you, that in the interests of his novel interpretation of Malachi, Andy deliberately changed the figure of the text. This is both wrong and significant. He changed Judah’s spiritual condition from a straying to a falling. The text has God’s call as “return,” not as “stop falling.” This change serves the interest of Andy which was to make the call a “do not be active.” Obviously, one who is falling cannot be called to reverse the fall. He cannot stop falling, as he can be called by God to stop wandering, even by the grace of God.

But we may not change the word of God to serve our peculiar theological interests.

The text has a departing church or believer turning their back on and straying from God. The call is “return.” And by the powerful call the church or believer returns, not stop falling and begin ascending.

Be faithful to the text, also in the figure it uses!

I might have added in my response to Terry also that the novel, and erroneous, explanation of the Malachi passage brought back a memory to me. In South Holland there was a member whose theology not only had no place for the work of God within the elect and therefore no place for exhortations, but also objected to admonitions and the activity of the believer. I preached once on James 4:8: “Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you.” I explained the exhortation as God’s will to draw nigh to us in our experience in the way of causing us to draw nigh to him, that is, in the way of our believing. This is the explanation that Andy rejects. At this sermon, the member I have referred to objected, with apoplexy. There is no drawing nigh to God on our part, only His drawing nigh to us. If there is a drawing nigh on our part, in no sense is our drawing nigh first. He tried to have me condemned as a heretic. He failed because the consistory viewed the text as it stands, as even an idiot can understand it. We do draw nigh to God; God calls us seriously to do so; and there is a sense, a certain, specific sense, in which our drawing nigh precedes God’s drawing nigh to us. To deny this is to contradict the inspired Word of God. One may deny it for good reasons in his own thinking. But he is denying the Word of God as really as one does who denies the truth of Genesis 1. One may exalt his unique explanation, that does away with the text, as the highest orthodoxy. But he denies the Word of God. And he gets in the way of the congregation’s obeying the command of God in the text. That is, he interferes with God’s drawing nigh to the church and its members. I dare not do this, even in the interests of “orthodoxy.”

Blessings.

Love,

Dad