Joel Beeke is the main speaker this year. His theme is Contagious Christian Living and he began Tuesday morning with an intro talking about the need to be a Christian, to make use of the means of grace and to have an evangelistic heart. He took Jephthah's daughter as his first example - the contagion being expressed in the tradition of remembering her in Israel (see Judges). Perplexingly, Joel went against the view of Matthew Henry and Dale Ralph Davies, etc, that Jephthah actually killed his daughter. Anyway his points about the difficult call to submission and the wonderful exercise of it in the case of the daughter still stand more or less. He called powerfully for us in every situation to acknowledge, justify, approve, cling to and honour the Lord. In the afternoon Dr Beeke also gave a seminar on Calvin. I missed the beginning where he defended Calvin against charge of being doctrinally unevangelistic. By the time I had arrived he had moved on to Calvin's practical evangelistic efforts in the congregation, throughout Geneva, into Europe especially France and even as far as Brazil, though this latter mission proved unsuccessful. Perhaps Calvin was not as active in world mission as one might have hoped but he was very busy with many things, the need at home being his priority. There were also many government restrictions. However, he sought God's glory and was compelled by his belief in election to seek to win souls.
He closed with a call to humble passion, holy patience, heartfelt prayer and happy perseverance in evangelism. We must stay on task; we must see that discouragement is often followed by revival; we must rely on God; we must take heart.
*
The Tuesday evening speaker was Richard Bewes, former rector at All Souls. Some how I've never heard him before. A short interview from chairman Stuart Olyott established the roots of this pucker Englishman with the Andrew Neil comb over (grandfather converted under Moody, parents missionaries in Kenya, the books, etc). He seemed a strange choice for this conference to me but he gave what I thought was a fine talk on penal substitution. He used words like redemption, wrath, propitiation, etc, which were good to hear. It was all on the blood. I thought some of his illustrations and his explanation of eating Christ's flesh was excellent. Lots of people I spoke to, however, found it difficult to follow (because they wanted to take notes I guess). Anyway he's on again Wednesday night.
