the drama of dogma

Easily Overlooked

2011-03-04T14:58:00.000-08:00

Hebrews 1:1-3

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high . . . .

N. T. Wright, Hebrews for Everyone

God had for a long time been sending advance sketches of himself to his people, but now [the writer of Hebrews begins] he’s given us his exact portrait.

With this idea, written as a grand and rather formal opening to the letter, the writer invites us to look at the whole sweep of biblical history and see it coming to a climax in Jesus. . . . Again and again we start with a passage from the Old Testament, and the writer shows us how it points forward to something yet to come. Again and again the “something” it points forwards to turns out to be Jesus—Jesus, as in this passage, as God’s unique son, the one who has dealt with sins fully and finally, the one who now rules at God’s right hand, the one to whom even angels bow in submission (3-4).

Aaron Orendorff

There is an odd, understated, and (at first glance) easily overlooked subtlety to the short, atonement-laden clause nestled unobtrusively in the middle of v. 3: “After making purification for sins . . . .” It appears almost as an afterthought: a simple, chronological transition of no real weight serving only to connect the massive theological structure of Christ’s incarnation (vv. 1-3a) to his exaltation (vv. 3c-4). Were it not for the rest of the book, particularly chapters four through ten, it might be tempting to passover this phrase altogether and to regard it as a sort of perfunctory nod by the author to one group of constituents who (because of their Jewish background) have not yet out grown their taste for what would otherwise be a gospel of glory divorced from the bloody cross. Yet here (as the rest of the book makes plain) is the very center of the gospel; here is not merely a chronological transition connecting the incarnation and the exaltation, here is the very reason, the very logic, the very heart of both.

Reading Log 2010

2010-11-08T21:58:00.000-08:00

My reading goal when 2010 began, inspired in part by Trevin Wax’s average 100 books in a year, was to read one book a week. Given the shape this past year actually took, not surprisingly, I didn’t get anywhere near that goal. Instead, I averaged just about one book every two weeks (excluding teaching preparation, commentaries, and articles of any kind). Here they are, beginning with the most recent and moving backwards:

Generous Justice by Timothy J. Keller

The Doctrine of the Word of God by John M. Frame

The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth edited by John Webster

Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft

Discovering the Mind of a Woman by Ken Nair

What is the Gospel by Greg Gilbert

You Can Change by Tim Chester

A Gospel Primer for Christians by Milton Vincent

The Structure of Biblical Authority by Meredith G. Kline

The Meaning of the Pentateuch by John H. Sailhamer

Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West by Lamin Sanneh

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

After you Believe by N. T. Wright

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

The Law is Not of Faith: Essays on Grace and Works in the Mosaic Covenant by Bryan D. Estelle, J.V. Fesko, and David VanDrunen

Renewal as a Way of Life by Richard F. Lovelace

Eat this Book by Eugene Peterson

The Saving Righteousness of God: Studies on Paul, Justification and the New Perspective by Michael F. Bird

Original Sin: A Cultural History by Alan Jacobs

Jesus’ Blood and Righteousness: Paul’s Theology of Imputation by Brian Vickers

The Jesus Way by Eugene Peterson

The Shaping of Things to Come by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsh

ReJesus by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch

Out of the Saltshaker and into the World by Rebecca Manley Pippet

The Trellis and the Vine by Colin Marshall and Tony Payne

The Gospel and Personal Evangelism by Mark Dever

A Praying Life by Paul E. Miller

Psalm 36 - The Blindness of Sin and the Hope of the Gospel

2010-10-15T11:28:00.000-07:00

Text: Psalm 36:1-2

¹ Transgression speaks to the wicked deep in his heart; there is no fear of God before his eyes.
² For he flatters himself in his own eyes that his iniquity cannot be found out and hated.

Context:

Penned by David, Psalm 36 is, in the words of Derek Kidner “a psalm of powerful contrasts, a glimpse of human wickedness at its most malevolent, and divine goodness in its many-sided fullness. . . . Few psalms cover so great a range in so short a span.” The Psalm opens with a condemning and all-encompassing indictment of the wicked. Vv. 1-4 explain that evil infects not only the deeds and desires of the ungodly, but their heart, their eyes, their self-appraisal, their words, their will, their deeds, and their plans. Not just part but the whole of our being is consumed, given “over” and “up” (as the language of Romans 1 puts it), to willfully embracing the native desires of our fallen hearts. This corruption is so complete that transgression itself speaks “deep in his heart.” The picture here is one of a conscious turned in on itself: warped and mangled.

How very contrary is this to the messages we hear in literature, music, art, and entertainment? Again and again we’re told: “Just listen to your heart. Follow to the still, small voice inside you. And above all, be true to yourself.” Such is the power of sin that even our most inward part, the very center of our being, tells us to abandon God and live for our selves.

Interestingly, the psalm goes on to explain that the reason there is “no fear of God before their eyes” (v. 1) is because they “flatter [themselves] in [their] own eyes” (v. 2a). Pride blinds us, in other words, so that our iniquity literally “cannot be found out or hated” (v. 2b). As long as we oppose humility—defending ourselves and minimizing what we think, feel, and do—not only can we not dislodge and do away with sin, we cannot even see it. What possible hope is there if the entirety of our being, every faculty of mind and body, has been captivated by this self-glorifying addiction to love ourselves first?

Implication (Gospel):

Our hope comes from the gospel. As John Piper put it most recently, “There is no other object of knowledge in the universe that exposes proud, man-exalting thinking like the cross does. Only humble, Christ-exalting thinking can survive in the presence of the cross. The effect of the cross on our thinking is not cut off thinking about God, but to confound boasting in the presence of God.”

The cross exposes us simultaneously to the horrific depths of our sin—this is what it took for God to save us—as well as to the breath-taking depths of God’s love—this is what God was willing to do to save us. The cross humbles us by saying, “You are not loveable; but you are loved.” The gospel proclaims to us, in a single, unbelievable breath, that we are both more warped and sinful than we ever dared think and yet more loved and accepted that we ever dared dream. In this way, the gospel exposes to us how oppressive, disgusting, and ultimately suicidal our self-centeredness really is not by condemning us for it but by confronting us with the absolute and utter selflessness of God in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Application (Life):

Today I will distrust my natural instincts, thoughts, and feelings and instead focus on giving up my life in the pursuit of loving God and others.

“capacitating the incapacitated”

2010-10-13T21:58:00.000-07:00

George Hunsinger, “Karl Barth’s Doctrine of the Holy Spirit” from The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth

Those who are awakened to lifelong conversion by the Spirit never cease to be sinners themselves. Yet despite their continuing sinfulness, the miracle of grace never ceases in the hearts (183).

What the miraculous operation of the Holy Spirit brings about [in conversion] . . . is not essentially restoration or healing but resurrection from the dead (184).

Since to be a sinner means to be incapacitated, grace means capacitating the incapacitated despite their incapacitation. Sinners capacitated by grace remain helpless in themselves. Grace does not perfect and exceed human nature in its sorry plight so much as contradict and overrule it.

In this miraculous and mysterious way, by grace alone—that is, through a continual contradiction of nature by grace that results in a provisional conjunction of opposites (coniunctio oppositorum)—the blind see, the lame walk, and the dead are raised to new life (cf. Matt. 11:4) (185).

Psalm 34 - God’s Hidden Presence and the Righteous vs. the Wicked

2010-10-13T09:50:00.000-07:00

Text: Psalm 34:15-1

¹⁵ The eyes of the LORD are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry.
¹⁶ The face of the LORD is against those who do evil, to cut off the memory of them from the earth.
¹⁷ When the righteous cry for help, the LORD hears and delivers them out of all their troubles.
¹⁸ The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.
¹⁹ Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the LORD delivers him out of them all.
²⁰ He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken.
²¹ Affliction will slay the wicked, and those who hate the righteous will be condemned.
²² The LORD redeems the life of his servants; none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned.

Context:

The title of Psalm 34 begins: “Of David, when he changed his behavior before Abimelech, so that he drove him out, and he went away.” The story of David and king Abimelech (or, Achish) is recorded in 1 Samuel 21:10-15. On the run from Saul, David is captured by a foreign army and taken before the king of Gath with this somewhat anecdotal charge: “Is not this David the king of the land? Did they not sing to one another of him in dances, ‘Saul has struck down his thousands, and David his ten thousands’?” (1 Sam. 21:11). In other words: “Here we have found a foreign trespasser, a royal enemy of the state, and an incredibly dangerous and brutal one at that.” Fearing for his life, v. 13 tells us that David “changed his behavior before the [unsuspecting] king” and began to “pretend to be insane.” Upon seeing David’s condition, Abimelech chastised his soldiers and sent David away.

What’s interesting to me about this Psalm is how absent God appears in 1 Samuel 21, and yet how full of praise to God David is when he reflects back on the incident. Everything about the narrative points not toward a miraculous rescue by some mysterious, divine Presence, but to a much simpler explanation: David saved himself. After all, it was David’s quick thinking and clever actions that fooled the king of Gath and led to his freedom. Nowhere is it mentioned that God was at work. And yet, all through Psalm 34, David gives God the glory for his deliverance.

Another interesting element is the clear delineation (particularly in vv. 15-22) David sees between God’s treatment of the righteous and his treatment of “those who do evil” (i.e., “the wicked”). For example: God’s “face” is toward the righteous, His ears are open to their cry, and He delivers them from “all their troubles.” On the other hand, the Lord’s face is “against those who do evil” to “cut off the memory of them from the earth.” Similarly, while affliction, although besetting the righteous, will never ultimately overtaking them, it will (in the end) destroy and condemn the wicked. In all of this we see that, although God is a God of love, He is also a God of unrelenting justice.

Implication (Gospel):

My problem with God’s justice is this: I’m on the wrong side of it. Contrary to the fears and anxieties that most commonly beset me (fears about money, relationships, and reputation mostly), in reality, the biggest problem in my life is God himself. You see, if God’s orientation toward a person is so deeply effected by their righteousness (or lack thereof) what hope do I have of getting anything other than the worst that Psalm 34 says awaits the wicked?

The gospel answers this question by telling me that real hope lies not in cobbling together some pathetic and self-glorifying righteousness of my own, but instead in admitting my abject spiritual poverty and laying hold of Christ. Take vv. 15 and 16 for instance: the only reason God’s eyes are upon me and his ears “open to my cry” (v. 15) is because (on the cross) He set his face against Jesus to cut him off the memory of “those who do evil” from the earth (v. 16). In other words, Christ, the righteous, became as “those who do evil” so that I, the one who really does “do evil,” might become righteous.

Or, to use vv. 21 and 22: on the cross, Christ took the place of the wicked—being slain by my afflictions and experiencing the condemnation I deserved (v. 21)—so that, through this act of substitution, my life might be redeemed and the promise fulfilled: “none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned” (v. 22).

Application (Life):

Today I will focus on two things: one, recognizing God’s help and aid in the mundane things of life (i.e., in those place where I wouldn’t naturally see Him act work); and, two, giving up my worthless and prideful pursuit of earning righteousness in order to relying more and more on Christ.

Psalm 33 - What Do You Trust In?

2010-10-11T11:18:00.000-07:00

Text: Psalm 33:16-17

The king is not saved by his great army; a warrior is not delivered by his great strength. The war horse is a false hope for salvation, and by its great might it cannot rescue.

Context

Though not attributed to David himself, Psalm 33 serves well as a commentary on the life of a man who great hope and only Deliverer was the Lord. In contrast to the rest of the Psalm’s positive tone, verses 16 and 17 serve first to expose and then to immediately deconstruct the sources in which many of us are tempted to place our trust and hope: namely, human power. We so naturally love what we can see and rest secure in what is (by our estimation) “great.”

The underlying point is this: whatever we hope in most, wherever our ultimate trust lies, there we will find our “god.” It really doesn’t matter whether we pay lip-service to God or not. Whatever finally makes our hearts secure and enables us to sleep peacefully at night, that thing (and not the resurrected Christ) is what we worship.

Of course, the flip-side is also true: whatever we fear most, whatever thing, if we lost it, would make us a miserable, anxious mess, that (again) is our god. The profoundly useful thing about fear is that we often don’t know what we’re trusting in until it’s taken away. As long as our army is great, our bank accounts are full, our families are safe, and our reputation’s intact, it’s easy to say, “I trust in the Lord.” It’s only when those false hopes are demolished that we finally see (and more importantly, feel) what it is we truly hope in.

Implication (Gospel):

In the gospel, we see the ultimate contradiction in human hope and trust: it is not by might that we saved, but by weakness. The cross signals the end to any hope we might have had in what we consider great (or wise, for that matter). The cross ushers us into the truth that it is only through death that new life comes. And this Christ-shaped pattern now defines our lives. Through the gospel we are enabled to release our trust, as Psalm 22:7 says, in “chariots and horses,” and to instead anchor ourselves on “the name of the Lord our God.”

Application (Gospel):

Today I will confess to God all those things I’m naturally inclined to trust in—whether it’s my job, my reputation, my body, my money, my family, or even my religious efforts. In their place, I will (as Paul put it in 2Corinthians 12:9) “boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

Psalm 31 - Suffering, the King, and the Cross

2010-10-06T09:33:00.001-07:00

Psalm 31:5 & 9-13

⁵ Into your hand I commit my spirit; you have redeemed me, O LORD, faithful God.
⁹ Be gracious to me, O LORD, for I am in distress; my eye is wasted from grief; my soul and my body also.
¹⁰ For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing; my strength fails because of my iniquity, and my bones waste away.
¹¹ Because of all my adversaries I have become a reproach, especially to my neighbors, and an object of dread to my acquaintances; those who see me in the street flee from me.
¹² I have been forgotten like one who is dead; I have become like a broken vessel.
¹³ For I hear the whispering of many—terror on every side!—as they scheme together against me, as they plot to take my life.

Text:

Taken up later by Jeremiah, Jesus, and author of Psalm 71, Psalm 31 is an intense, authentic, and (in the most meaningful sense of the word) raw expression of one man’s suffering and ultimate salvation. Utterly devoid of the usual religious pretenses, platitudes, and banalities, David writes with unflinchingly clarity of the stark emotional realities that living in a fallen, broken world create. And yet, although he is brutally honest, he is not hopeless. Two times in this Psalm, David walks the reader through his pain and in both instances he emerges on the other side clinging to the God who, as the Psalm begins, is a refuge, deliverer, rescuer, rock, and fortress. In this way, Psalm 31 is a powerful model for teaching us how to bring our suffering to God without belittling Him or our suffering itself.

Context:

In the context of the Bible’s overarching story, Psalm 31 bridges the gap between the failed kingship of Saul, the ascension of David himself, and the establishment of the Davidic Covenant/Dynasty (i.e., the “partial kingdom”).

Implication (Gospel):

As was briefly noted above, Jesus himself took up the words of Psalm 31:5 as his final, extinguishing prayer in Luke 23:46. However, even without this direct, cross-borne quotation, the Psalm is virtually teeming with the predictive/prophetic pattern that 1Peter 1:11 defines as “the sufferings of the Messiah and the subsequent glories.” In this way, Psalm 31 functions as a sort of internal monologue or emotional commentary on Jesus’ own physical and spiritual suffering. The only difference being that where David was merely “forgotten like one who is dead” and simply “became like a broken vessel,” Jesus was literally destroyed.

For example, as verses 15 and 20 intimate, despite David’s initial suffering the king himself was ultimately rescued from the hands of his enemies and persecutors, covered by God’s presence from the “plots of men,” and stored in God’s shelter from the “strife of tongues.” Far to the contrary, in the case of Jesus, on the cross we see God’s great and final King delivered into the hands of his enemies and persecutors, victimized by the plots of men, and openly exposed to the strife of tongues. And yet, it is out of that suffering and through the resurrection that the gospel takes shape.

Application (Gospel):

No matter how awful, pathetic, or seemingly hopeless my situation, even if as the Psalm says there is “terror on every side,” I can be secure in my suffering knowing that, because Christ died in my place, I will never ultimately be forgotten like one who is dead or become like a broken vessel. In fact, whatever suffering I face, because of the cross, becomes merely a window into the suffering Christ endured on my behalf. Because of this, suffering (of whatever sort) now serves to draw me closer to God and invite me deeper into his love.

Today I will regard my suffering as a opportunity to understand more deeply (without ever being forced to undergo its fullness myself) the wrath that Christ endured to save me from my sin.

Psalm 30 - Text, Context, Implication, Application

2010-10-04T13:38:00.000-07:00

Psalm 30:1-5, 9 & 11-12

¹ A Psalm of David. . . . I will extol you, O LORD, for you have drawn me up and have not let my foes rejoice over me.
² O LORD my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me.
³ O LORD, you have brought up my soul from Sheol; you restored me to life from among those who go down to the pit.
⁴ Sing praises to the LORD, O you his saints, and give thanks to his holy name.
⁵ For his anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.
⁹ “What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness?
¹¹ You have turned for me my mourning into dancing; you have loosed my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness,
¹² that my glory may sing your praise and not be silent. O LORD my God, I will give thanks to you forever!

Text:

Attributed to David and described by its subscription as a “Song at the Dedication of the House [or, Temple],” this Psalm is a heartfelt celebration of God’s victory in delivering the persecuted king either from one of his many political-military enemies or some sort of physical sickness. Most likely the first of the two (based on the biblical stories of David recorded in 1st and 2nd Samuel), either way David praises God for rescuing him from the very brink of destruction: “you have drawn me up and have not let my foes rejoice over me . . . . you have healed me. . . . you have brought up my soul from Sheol [‘the grave’]; you restored me to life from among those who go down to the pit [to ‘death’]” (vv. 1-3). David’s joy is found not merely in a good outcome or a happy providence, but in God’s great reversal of his circumstances: from the pit to the palace, from dust to dynasty, from mourning to dancing, from sackcloth to gladness, and ultimately from death to life (v. 9).

Context:

In the context of the Bible’s overall story, Psalm 30 is located very near the beginning of Israel’s official geo-political monarchy: what Vaughn Roberts calls the “partial kingdom.” Immediately after the dethroning of Saul and prior to the kingdom’s split, collapse, and ultimate exile, Psalm 30 celebrates God’s victory in establishing David’s kingship while simultaneously looking forward to the perfect kingship of Jesus Christ.

Implication (Gospel):

What David describes in figurative terms, Jesus—Great David’s Greater Son—literally experienced. For those that argue the concept of resurrection is an exclusively New Testament idea, implied only briefly in places like Ezekiel 37 (and there only metaphorically as a symbol for the people of Israel’s return from exile), Psalm 30 functions like a prophetic signpost pointing toward (though, admittedly, not exhausting) the hope of resurrection as a “whole-Bible” doctrine. However, unlike David who was rescued from death, Jesus Christ was rescued through death so that we who justly deserve to “go down to the pit” might be raised up with him. His death becomes our death, so that his resurrection might become ours as well.

Verse 5 is particularly meaningful in this Christ-centered sense: “For his anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” Upon the cross we see God’s infinite anger at sin—his holy, perfect, and consuming wrath leveled squarely the evil and corrosive cancer eating away at his creation—dealt with “in a moment”; while in the resurrection we see his “favor” forevermore. Weeping tarried in the dark night of Gethsemane; but joy arose Easter morning. God’s great reversal of David’s earthly circumstances is only a dim foreshadowing of the cosmic reversal accomplished in the gospel.

Application (Gospel):

As simple and trite as it may sound: there is nothing too hard for God. No matter how dire our circumstance, no matter how hopeless our condition, no matter how powerless our ability, God is in the business of bringing life out of death. As Psalm 30, the life of David, and the gospel itself all illustrate, God loves to get the glory of being the miraculous deliverer when nothing else could possibly help. Focusing on the gospel enables me to face life with profound hope and confidence, regardless of my poverty, pain, or past. Having this stable foundation also enables me to support and encourage those around me who have forgotten the gospel (even momentarily) with the very hope that supports me as well. Today I will focus on the power of God displayed in the gospel instead of the difficulties that confront me.

Psalm 28 - Text, Context, Implication, Application

2010-10-02T11:26:00.000-07:00

Text: Psalm 28:1-3 & 7-9

¹ Of David. To you, O LORD, I call; my rock, be not deaf to me, lest, if you be silent to me, I become like those who go down to the pit.
² Hear the voice of my pleas for mercy, when I cry to you for help, when I lift up my hands toward your most holy sanctuary.
³ Do not drag me off with the wicked, with the workers of evil, who speak peace with their neighbors while evil is in their hearts.
⁷ The LORD is my strength and my shield; in him my heart trusts, and I am helped; my heart exults, and with my song I give thanks to him.
⁸ The LORD is the strength of his people; he is the saving refuge of his anointed.
⁹ Oh, save your people and bless your heritage! Be their shepherd and carry them forever.

Context:

Psalm 28 is, most likely, the third in a triplet of Psalms (Ps. 26-28) designed to be read together and to focus its reader on, first, the need for preservation in times of trouble and persecution and, second, the inevitable (through labored for) joy in the Person and Presence of God. Attributed to David, we may assume these Psalms were either written during or as a reflection on the troubled king’s first hand experience of such persecution as well as God’s ultimate deliverance: “he [the Lord] is the saving refuge of his anointed [i.e., ‘his king’ or ‘his messiah’]” (28:8).

Implication (Gospel):

Though we, as sinners, justly deserve to be “dragged off with the wicked” (v. 3) and to have God “be deaf to us” so that we “become like those who go down to the pit” (v. 1) [i.e., like those abandoned to the grave and to hell], yet in and through His Son, God himself has taken the punishment we deserve. Jesus was, as Luke 22:37 (quoting Isaiah 53:12) says, “Numbered with the transgressors.” In other words, Jesus himself was both literally and spiritually “dragged off with the wicked,” in our place and for our good.

Because of this, God the Father, who was once our judge and enemy, has instead become our “our strength and our shield” (v. 7). God has blessed his people precisely by saving his anointed, that is, not simply by saving David as the Psalm indicates but by saving the ultimate David, God’s true King, Jesus Christ. Jesus has become (not only a “shepherd) but our “Good Shepherd” and he will carry us (that is, love, provide, and transform us) forever.

Application (Gospel):

Because Jesus has taken the wrath that I deserve and “carried me” like a shepherd, I can bear with the sins of those around me, not only putting up with them and forgiving them, but serving them and even “carrying” them when their own mistakes cause them to stumble. Today I will look for ways to care for the people around me, especially when they mess up and don’t deserve it.

Psalm 103 . . . Applied

2010-09-18T21:54:00.000-07:00

Because God forgives all my iniquity . . . I can rest safely in His presence without fear of rejection, condemnation, or judgment (v. 3a).

Because God heals all my diseases . . . I don’t have to heal or fix myself; instead, I can rely on Him to heal and fix me (v. 3b).

Because God redeems my life from the pit [i.e., the grave, death, destruction] . . . I can trust Him to bring me out of any situation, no matter how dire, bleak, or painful it is. (v. 4a)

Because God crowns me with steadfast love and mercy . . . I don’t need to provide glory [i.e., “crowns”] for myself, nor do I need to go about earning God’s love and mercy; instead I can simply accept them and rest in them (v. 4b).

Because God satisfied me with good . . . I can stop incessantly worrying about how to care and provide for myself and, instead, concentrate on meeting the needs of others (v. 5).

Because God works righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed . . . I don’t have to defend myself or prove that I’m right (v. 6).

Because God is merciful, gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love . . . I can fully entrust myself to him without fear of rejection and with full confidence in His perfect, fatherly love (v 8).

Because God does not keep His anger forever . . . I can let go of my anger and resentment (no matter how “righteous” it might feel) (v. 9).

Because God does not deal with me according to my sin nor repay me for my iniquity . . . I can depend unreservedly upon His grace and extend that same grace to people I feel have wronged me (v. 10).

Because God shows compassion to me like a father . . . I can lean upon Him as my ultimate and perfect Father and not demand that my earthly caregivers meet my needs (v. 13).

Because God has established his throne in heaven and because His kingdom rules over all . . . I can be secure in all circumstances knowing that nothing can come into my life apart from His good and sovereign purposes (v. 19).

Grace and Law (Revisited)

2010-06-02T10:22:00.000-07:00

Paul F.M. Zahl, Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life

The law crushes the human spirit; grace lifts it up.

The story of the Bible is the story of this perpetual war between law and grace. Law comes in . . . and human beings become excited by it. They become excited to resist it. The law, which is any form of external command, provokes the opposite reaction from the one it is in intended to provoke. Instead of inciting obedience or submission, it incites rebellion. It provokes revolutionary resentment (1).

Any judgment, any evaluation—even if it approves and speaks a blessing—will be heard as a negation. This is an absolute first principle of this book. Law is an attack. It is heard as a negation by its recipients. All laws are negation. God’s law is the negation (6).

The gospel of Christ has to do with guilt and with the ashamed response of imperfect people to a perfect God. The gospel represents a transaction involving guild and the shame of being caught in the reality of human being and human action, which is powerfully self-deceived. The gospel is about the relation between law, which is crushing, stunning, and wrecking, and grace, which is restoring, repairing, and recreative. . . . The gospel is about force and effect, punishment and rehabilitation. The focus of this book is on the gospel, the leverage of Christianity in relation to human resistance and brokenness . . . . The focus of this theology of everyday life in on how Christianity works (28).

Law, whether biblical and universally stated or contextual and contemporarily phrased, operates in one way. Law reduces its object, the human person, to despair (29).

[T]he law dispossesses love in every place to which it speaks (32).

What is grace? Grace is love that seeks you out when you have nothing to give in return. Grace is love coming at you that has nothing to do with you. Grace is being loved when you are unlovable. It is being loved when you are the opposite of loveable (emphasis added).

Let’s go a little further. Grace is a love that has nothing to do with you, the beloved. It has everything and only to do with the lover. Grace is irrational in the sense that it has nothing to do with weights and measures. It has nothing to do with my intrinsic qualities or so-called “gifts” (whatever they may be). It reflects a decision on the part of the giver, the one who loves, in relation to the receiver, the one who is loved, that negates any qualification the receiver may personally hold.

Grace is one-way love.

The one-way love of grace is the essence of any lasting transformation that takes place in human experience (36).

One-way love lifts up. One-way love cures. One-way love transforms. It is the change agent of life.

Grace depends on the fact that its origin is wholly outside myself. This is the heart of love; it comes to me from outside myself. Moreover, while it almost always elicits a response, which is my love in return, it comes toward me without any reference to my response. One-way love does not deviate on the basis of its goal. It is determined solely by its source.

One-way love is the change agent in everyday life because it speaks in a voice completely different from the voice of the law. It has nothing to do with its receiver’s characteristics. Its logic is hidden within the intention of its source. Theologically speaking, we can say it is the prime directive of God to love the world in no relation to the world’s fitness to be loved.

One-way love is also irrational because it reaches out to the specifically undeserving person. This is the beating heart of it. Grace is directed toward what the Scripture calls “the ungodly” (Romans 5:6). Not just the lonely, not just the sick and disconsolate, but the “perpetrators,” the murders and abusers, the people who cross the line. God has a heart—his one-way love—for sinners (37-38).

The grace of God assumes the worst concerning the human situation. It assumes the lowest possible reading of our anthropology. . . . Grace, which is one-way love, happens only at the point at which hope is lost (42-43).

For grace to be grace, there must be one-way love. For grace to be grace, it is necessary that I play no role whatsoever in that love. . . . The love of God, the true love of anyone, in fact, is a one-way love that travels from the deserving to the undeserving (59).

Grace as one-way love comes out of nowhere into a world determined by two-way love (“I will love you if you will love me”) and half-way love (“I will love you but I need a little sign, just a little one”) (62).

Grace is about life from death, or better, life to the dead (63).

Sin, Lies and Believing the Truth

2010-05-29T19:55:00.000-07:00

Tim Chester, You Can Change

Sinful acts always have their origin in some form of unbelief. Behind every sin is a lie. The root of all our behavior and emotions is the heart—what it trusts and what it treasures. . . . [Our] problem is futile thinking, darkened understanding, and ignorant hearts. This is the cause of indulgence, impurity, and lust. We sin because we believe the lie that we are better off without God, that his rule is oppressive, that we will be free without him, that sin offers more than God (73-74).

This is a radical view of sin. It means many of our negative emotions are sinful because they’re symptoms of unbelief—the greatest sin and the root sin (75).

Milton Vincent, A Gospel Primer for Christians

There is simply no other way to compete with the forebodings of my conscience, the condemnings of my heart, and the lies of the world and the Devil than to overwhelm such things with daily rehearsings of the gospel (14; emphasis added).

Psalm 62:11-12

One thing God has spoken, two things have I heard: that you, O God, are strong, and that you, O Lord, are loving. Surely you will reward each person according to what he has done.

Aaron Orendorff

In the wake of the powerfully redemptive tone of Psalm 62:11-12a, the close of v. 12 appears at first somewhat disconcerting. To begin with, David opens v. 11 by stating, quite straightforwardly, that when it comes to God there are two basic truths that outshine everything else; two fundamental, divine realities that are absolutely foundational to who God is and what He does: (1) God is strong and (2) God is love. Nothing could be more reassuring and worship inducing (particularly to sinful, hurting people) than those two facts. However (even with these two truths firmly in mind), given my own personal history, the last thing I’d want is for God to then move on to “rewarding” me “according to what [I have] done.” These two thoughts—God’s strong love and just recompense—appear (especially when measured against the brokenness and evil of my own life) at definite odds.

In addition to this particular tension, we read throughout the Psalter statements that likewise seem far to the contrary of the seemingly natural interpretation of v. 12’s close. Statements like, “Enter not into judgment with your servant, for no one living is righteous before you” (Ps. 143:2), and even more plainly, “He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities” (103:10). Neither of these texts (nor the numerous others like them) sit well with a God who simply “gives us what we deserve.” The close of v. 12, then, cannot simply mean that God is (though at times strong and loving) at the end of the day a God of pure and strict justice, devoid of grace and mercy.

Instead, when placed in context, David is pleading with God to deliver him from his enemies. He is asking for God to vindicate him because (in this instance) he is truly in the right. Part of that vindication is rooted in the belief that God is a God of justice, just as he is a God of strength and love. David is not asserting his inherent status as a more righteous human being than those standing against him; even less is he pitting his life record against God’s perfect standard. He is simply pleading with God to save him from the false and wicked men “attacking” him and speaking lies (62:3). In the face of dire circumstance, David looks to God. He entrusts himself to “him who judges justly” (1 Pet. 2:23).

Far from undercutting God’s strength and love, his justice supports them. The truths to which vv. 11-12 point (and likewise the “lies” which they confront) are profound.

If we believe God is weak (and, by implication, not strong), then we will be full of fear and doubtful as to whether or not He can help us. If God is weak, then we will be compelled to “take control” of our situation, to fend for ourselves, and to protect what’s ours (whether that be relationships, property, reputations, or even our emotions).

Similarly, if we believe that God is not loving, then we simply will not trust him to take care of us. Not only will we doubt whether or not He can help us; we’ll even doubt whether or not He’s willing to help us. If God is not fundamentally loving, then we will be compelled to either find other sources of love (dark, shallow, ultimately unsatisfying sources) or to prove ourselves to Him and earn his love.

On the other hand, because God is strong, I can trust that nothing that happens to me is outside of His control; nothing is bigger than Him. Because God is strong, I can admit that I am weak and rest in His care, protection, and sovereignty. I don’t need to be in control because God already is.

Similarly, because God is loving, I don’t have to prove myself or earn His affection. He loves me in spite of who I am and has demonstrated His love most powerfully through His Son. Because God is loving, I can trust that He wants to take care of me, will never abandon me, or leave me to fed for myself. I don’t have to search for love or earn it, but can rest in the love that already is.

“Moments of Ministry” Versus “Moments of Anger” or Why you can’t make marriage “personal”!

2010-05-12T11:23:00.000-07:00

Paul David Tripp, What Did You Expect??

God is using the difficulties of the here and now to transform you, that is, to rescue you from you. And because he loves you, he will willingly interrupt or compromise your momentary happiness in order to accomplish one more step in the process of rescue and transformation, which he is unshakably committed to (22).

If you minimize the heart struggle that both of you have carried into your marriage, here’s what will happen: you will tend to turn moments of ministry into moments of anger. . . . Often, in these God-given moments of ministry, rather than serving God’s purpose we get angry because somehow our spouse is in the way of what we want. . . . [T]he reason we turn moments of ministry into moments of anger is that we tend to personalize what is not personal.

[W]hen you personalize what is not personal you tend to be adversarial in your response. When that happens, what motivates you is not the spiritual need in your spouse that God has revealed but your spouse’s offense against you, your schedule, your peace, etc. So your response is not a “for him [or her]” response but an “against him [or her]” response.

[W]e settle for quick situational solutions that do not get to the heart of the matter. Rather than searching for ways to help, we tell the other to get a grip, we attempt to threaten them into silence, or we get angry and turn a moment of weakness into a major confrontation (23-24).

The Gospel According to N. T. Wright

2010-05-08T11:16:00.000-07:00

(See Part One Here)

By way of introduction, John Piper opens The Future of Justification by chronicling a litany of Wright’s statements from a variety of works aimed at defining both what the gospel is as well as what it is not. The first of these statements, as it regards the gospel positively, captures well the basic thrust of Wright’s thought:

The “gospel” itself refers to the proclamation that Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah, is the one, true and only Lord of the world.^[5]

Key to Wright’s understanding (as Piper’s larger catalog makes clear) is the word “proclamation.” The gospel is, after all, news: the public declaration of something that has (first and foremost) happened in space and time. What precisely Wright means by the word “proclamation”—i.e., his formulation of the events themselves (both historically and theologically speaking)—is outlined at length by Wright in his earlier and frequently cited work, What Saint Paul Really Said. There the “gospel” is unfolded as an essentially “fourfold announcement about Jesus”:

In Jesus of Nazareth, specifically in his cross, the decisive victory has been won over all the powers of evil, including sin and death themselves.

In Jesus' resurrection the New Age has dawned, inaugurating the long-awaited time when the prophecies would be fulfilled, when Israel's exile would be over, and the whole world would be addressed by the one creator God.

The crucified and risen Jesus was, all along, Israel’s Messiah, her representative king.

Jesus was therefore also the Lord, the true King of the world, the one at whose name every knee would bow. . . .
The royal proclamation is not simply the conveying of true information about the kingship of Jesus. It is the putting into effect of that kingship, the decision and authoritative summoning to allegiance. Paul discovered . . . that when he announced the lordship of Jesus Christ, the sovereignty of King Jesus, this very announcement was the means by which the living God reached out with his love and changed the hearts and lives of men and women, forming them from the paganism which had held them captive, enabling them to become, for the first time, the truly human beings they were meant to be. The gospel, Paul would have said, is not just about God’s power saving people. It is God’s power at work to save people.^[6]

As Piper’s own comments readily display,^[7] Wright’s focus upon the kerygmatic (or, proclamatory) nature of the gospel as the express declaration of Jesus Christ’s lordship is far from controversial.

It is, however, upon what Wright says the gospel is not where disagreement begins:

My proposal has been that “the gospel” is not, for Paul, a message about “how one gets saved,” in an individual and ahistorical sense.^[8]

“[T]he gospel” is not an account of how people get saved.^[9]

The gospel is not . . . a set of techniques for making people Christians.^[10]

Paul’s gospel to the pagans was not a philosophy of life. Nor was it, even, a doctrine about how to get saved.^[11]

To these statements more could of course be added (not least because of Wright’s prolific body of work). However, rather than simply add “precept upon precept” (quote upon quote), the most useful (and, it ought to be pointed out, the most recent) summary of both Wright and Piper’s position on the gospel appeared last year in a June 2009 Q&A with Christianity Today. There, in the wake their successive books, both writers provided summary statements regarding their understanding of the gospel proper:

Piper: The heart of the gospel is the good news that Christ died for our sins and was raised from the dead. What makes this good news is that Christ’s death accomplished a perfect righteousness before God and suffered a perfect condemnation from God, both of which are counted as ours through faith alone, so that we have eternal life with God in the new heavens and the new earth.

Wright: The gospel is the royal announcement that the crucified and risen Jesus, who died for our sins and rose again according to the Scriptures, has been enthroned as the true Lord of the world. When this gospel is preached, God calls people to salvation, out of sheer grace, leading them to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ as the risen Lord.^[12]

Thankfully, there is much that could be said about the agreement between these statements; nonetheless, for our purposes, it is not so much their agreement that concerns us, but rather their disagreement. As such, the primary difference lies squarely in Piper’s inclusion of the traditionally reformed doctrine termed imputed righteousness (what Piper refers to as being “counted”; see especially note 12) within the gospel message proper—i.e., within what the gospel in and of itself actually declares. Wright, as we will see, not only rejects the concept of “imputed righteousness” (though he is quick to replace it with a robust doctrine of union with Christ), he also draws a sharp distinction between what the gospel is as an historical proclamation of good “news” and what the gospel does as a result of its proclamation. For Wright, the gospel does not save because it is a message about how to be saved—not, in other words, because it is a set of ahistorical instructions (repent and believe) about what a person must do to inherit life in the “age to come.” Rather, the gospel saves but because when it is announced God is active (through his Spirit) to bring its hearers under the saving lordship of Jesus Christ. Repentance and faith come about as a result of God’s grace exercised through such preaching.^[13] They are the covenantal badges by which God’s people are marked out.

The real crux of the matter, therefore, is not whether the gospel saves from sin via Jesus’ penal substitution (both authors affirm that is does). Nor is it Wright’s preference for Christus Victor as the controlling concept for understanding the atonement. Instead, the dispute lies in whether or not the gospel (to be the gospel) must include justification by faith through the imputed righteousness of Christ.

With this question in mind, our next task will be to begin examining the doctrine of justification itself.

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^[5] N. T. Wright, “Paul in Different Perspectives: Lecture 1: Starting Points and Opening Reflections.” Pastors Conference at the Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church, Monroe, Louisiana (3 January 2005). 28 December 2009. http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Auburn_Paul.htm.

^[6] N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 60-61.

^[7] “Yes. That is an essential announcement of the gospel.” Piper, Justification, 18.

^[8] Wright, Saint Paul, 60.

^[9] Ibid., 133.

^[10] Ibid., 153.

^[11] Ibid., 90.

^[12] Trevin Wax (compiler), “The Justification Debate: A Primer.” Christianity Today. June 2009. 12 April 2010. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/june/29.34.html?start=2. Equally interesting is the follow-up question: “How This Happens.”

“Piper: By faith we are united with Christ Jesus so that in union with him, his perfect righteousness and punishment are counted as ours (imputed to us). In this way, perfection is provided, sin is forgiven, wrath is removed, and God is totally for us. Thus, Christ alone is the basis of our justification, and the faith that unites us to him is the means or instrument of our justification. Trusting in Christ as Savior, Lord, and Supreme Treasure of our lives produces the fruit of love, or it is dead.

“Wright: God himself, in the person of Jesus Christ (the faithful Israelite), has come, allowing the continuation of his plan to rescue human beings, and, through them, the world. The Messiah represents his people, standing in for them, taking upon himself the death that they deserved. God justifies (declares righteous) all those who are ‘in Christ,’ so that the vindication of Jesus upon his resurrection becomes the vindication of all those who trust in him. Justification refers to God's declaration of who is in the covenant (this worldwide family of Abraham through whom God's purposes can now be extended into the wider world) and is made on the basis of faith in Jesus Christ alone, not the ‘works of the Law’ (i.e., badges of ethnic identity that once kept Jews and Gentiles apart).”

^[13] Piper’s otherwise incisive comments in The Future of Justification about the questionable goodness of such a bare declaration—namely that Jesus is the world’s true Lord—are easily assuaged by Wright’s inclusion of the line “who died for our sins” in his definition of the gospel offered in Christianity Today. Cf. Piper, Justification, 18: “But one wonders how the death and resurrection of Jesus could be heard as good news if one had spent his life committing treason against the risen King. It seems as though one would have to be told how the death and resurrection of Christ actually saves sinners, if sinners are to hear them as good news and not as a death sentence.”

The Atonement - Propitiation

2010-05-06T11:21:00.000-07:00

By Michael Blankenship and Aaron Orendorff

As we begin to explore the subject of Jesus’ atonement, it may be helpful to recap what was said by way of introduction a couple of weeks ago. Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears, in the book Doctrine: What Every Christian Should Believe, open by offering the following definition:

Jesus’ work for us on the cross is called atonement (at-one-ment); Jesus our God became a man to restore [the] relationship between God and humanity. . . . Scripture repeatedly and clearly declares that Jesus died as our substitute paying our penalty “for” our sins (253).

Building off this excellent summary, our aim will be to unpack the reality that Jesus Christ—God’s incarnate Son—suffered on the cross in our place and on our behalf as the historical realization of three, interlocking theological truths: (1) the propitiation of God’s wrath, (2) the expiation of humanity’s sin, and (3) the reconciliation of both.

One quick side-note: We use the phrase “historical realization” intentionally in order to stress that the atonement is not an ahistorical abstraction—some sort of disembodied religious or philosophical truth, floating disconnected and unattached to real-life particularities, the dirt, nails, wood, sweat, taunts, blood, and pain, of a first-century Jew condemned to die on hill outside Jerusalem. The gospel is good news of something that has actually happened, a “historical reality” upon which all the beauty, wonder, hope, and theological truth of Christianity rests.^[1] Keeping that thought firmly in mind, let us turn to the first element in the above definition and our subject for this post: propitiation.

Propitiation is a word seldom used today, which means that to understand what “the propitiation of God’s wrath” means we must first understand the concept of propitiation itself. The simplest, English equivalent of propitiation is the word satisfaction. An everyday sort of example might go like this: say I’m thirsty and so, in an effort to quench (that is, satisfy) my thirst, I drink a nice, big bottle of ice-cold water. Now we all know that a person can’t live without water; it’s not something that we choose to thirst for. So, in this case, to talk about satisfaction isn’t so much about a superficial feeling of desire. Rather it’s about something that the biology of being human demands, without compromise and indiscriminately.

In a similar way, God, though not having physical needs, authentically “thirsts” for justice because the need for justice is one of his essential, nonnegotiable attributes. Simply put: God, by his very nature, is just. Justice is part of who he is. Therefore, whenever something violates his sense of justice, satisfaction (that is, propitiation) is demanded.

Exodus 34:6-7 illustrates this point well because it bring together both God’s love and grace with his (equally as real) need for justice:

The LORD passed before [Moses] and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

As difficult as it may be for us to swallow, justice (particularly, God’s justice), cannot exist without punishment. In God’s economy, justice is both restorative (when understood from the viewpoint of the victim) as well as retributive (when understood from the viewpoint of the perpetrator). This means that “righting the wrongs in the world” is good news to those who have been victimized while at the same time bad news to those who have been the victimizers. To this end, the Psalms are literally full of prayers asking God to act “in his righteousness” both to defend and vindicate the oppressed (restorative justice), as well as, to destroy and condemn the oppressors (retributive justice).

Imagine, for example, a person who has committed murder is found guilty but that the judge presiding over the case simply lets him go. Is this just? Of course not. Moreover, it would be impossible for us to respect (much less love and worship) a judge who so terribly violated the rules of justice. This is especially true if we ourselves have been affected by the crime in question. In the same way, when human beings “sin” against God—when they violate His law—the punishment must meet the crime. To avoid punishment is to avoid justice.

Romans 2:1-3 helps us understand this principle by relating our own, everyday acts of judgment with God’s perfect, once-for-all, ultimate act of judgment:

Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things. We know that the judgment of God rightly falls on those who practice such things. Do you suppose, O man—you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself—that you will escape the judgment of God?

Much like Exodus 34:6-7, Romans 2:1-3 stresses not only that God is just but that his justice demands satisfaction; it needs propitiation.

Throughout the Bible, the demand God’s need for justice creates is called his “wrath.” Unlike our wrath, which is often self-serving, ignorant, and hardly ever aligned with what is truly “good,” God’s anger is never out-of-proportion, never out-of-control, and always upholds what is right. In fact, as strange as it may sound, God’s wrath is actually an expression of his love. Becky Pippert, in her book Hope Has Its Reasons, explains it like this:

Think how we feel when we see someone we love ravaged by unwise actions or relationships. De we respond with benign tolerance as we might toward strangers? Far from it . . . . Anger isn’t the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference. . . . God’s wrath is not a cranky explosion, but his settled opposition to the cancer . . . which is eating out the insides of the human race he loves with whole being.

This “cancer” is called sin and Scripture tells us that God’s wrath stands against any and all forms of it in the world (Rom. 1:18).

Sometimes people ask, “Why did Jesus have to die? Couldn’t God just forgive us?” This question not only misunderstands what we’ve said so far about justice, it also misunderstands how forgiveness itself works. For example, imagine that your neighbor accidentally breaks your window in the middle of winter. Basically, you have one of two choices. On one hand, you can go the way of strict justice and demand that your neighbor pay for the broken window to be fixed (after all it’s winter and you can’t just live with a smashed-in window). Or, two, you can go the way of forgiveness and instead of making your neighbor pay for the window you can pay for it yourself. In this scenario, strict justice means that the perpetrator must pay while forgiveness means that you must pay. Either way the window must be fixed and this means that regardless of which way you choose someone has to pay. Through this simple example, it’s easy to see that nobody “just forgives.”

Applying this illustration to the cross, Tim Keller writes:

Forgiveness means bearing the cost instead of making the wrongdoer do it, so you can reach out in love to seek your enemy’s renewal and change. Forgiveness means absorbing the debt of sin yourself. . . . On the Cross we see God doing visibly and cosmically what every human being must do to forgive someone, though on an infinitely greater scale. . . . It is crucial at this point to remember that the Christian faith has always understood that Jesus Christ is God. God did not, then, inflict pain on someone else, but rather on the Cross absorbed the pain, violence, and evil of the world into himself. . . . [T]his is a God who becomes human and offers his own lifeblood in order to honor moral justice and merciful love so that someday he can destroy all evil without destroying us (192).

Think of it like this, when it comes to human sin and divine justice, God has a choice: he can either propitiate his wrath by punishing human beings themselves or he can make propitiation for human beings by absorbing the debt of sin himself. The wonder of the gospel is that God chose the latter and, in the person of Jesus Christ, suffered for the sins of humanity.

People often call attention to the physical suffering involved in Jesus’ crucifixion, but Scripture makes clear that this was not the worst of it. Jesus experienced a pain, which those who choose to believe in him, no longer have to experience. It was the pain of separation from God. Hence Jesus’ words upon the cross: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” This is a powerful statement that allows us to see into the true suffering of our savior. This was God’s wrath, being taken up by Jesus himself, for our iniquities. As Jesus uttered these words, he was experiencing, quite literally, hell.

You see, the tragedy of hell (where God’s wrath is ultimately assuaged) arises not because of physical flames but because it means being disconnected from God for all eternity. When a person goes to hell, they experience all the infinite horrors and spiritual disintegration of not having loved, served, and worshiped God. But now imagine one man experiencing hell, not on account of his own sins (for he himself was sinless), but for the sins of all those who would choose (past, present, and future) to put their faith and trust in him. Jesus Christ truly suffered beyond our imagination or comprehension. The atonement means that God’s just wrath has been satisfied, absorbed by God himself, and that most amazingly, as 1 John 4:10 says: “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

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^[1] Nor should we say that the Jesus-event—i.e., his incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension—is simply an “illustration” of who God is and what he does—that He is loving, gracious, sacrificial, and forgiving. Jesus, and in particular the cross, is more than a mere illustration; it is more than God’s ultimate word-become-flesh-picture. Rather, Jesus is an actual event, both in the life of God and in the life of the world, on the basis of which God is loving, gracious, sacrificial, and forgiving. The argument here is in some sense circular: God loves and so He sent Christ; God sent Christ and so He loves.

Introduction - N. T. Wright and the Doctrine of Justification

2010-05-03T13:19:00.000-07:00

[T]he arguments I have been mounting . . . [are genuinely] fresh readings of Scripture. They are not the superimposition upon Scripture of theories culled from elsewhere.
—N. T. Wright, Justification (22)

My conviction concerning N. T. Wright is not that he is under the curse of Galatians 1:8-9, but that his portrayal of the gospel—and of the doctrine of justification in particular—is so disfigured that it becomes difficult to recognize as biblically faithful.
—John Piper, The Future of Justification (15)

Since the time of the reformation, the doctrine of justification has enjoyed a sort of controversial pride of place within widest circles of confessional Christianity. From Martin Luther’s quintessentially polemic statement on the foundational nature of sola fide—“if this article stands, the Church stands; if it falls, the Church falls”—to the Council of Trent’s “anathema” reply,^[1] few doctrines have garnered such extended scrutiny and fierce debate. In recent years, however, a new voice has entered the fray. Led initially by the scholarly work of Krister Stendahl (Paul Among Jews and Gentiles, 1976) and E. P. Sanders (Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 1977) and now carried on by the writings (both popular and scholarly) of N. T. Wright and James D. G. Dunn, the so-called “new perspective on Paul” has launched a fresh round of debate and (perhaps most interestingly) drawn fresh lines in this once firmly established dispute.

As the already immense bibliographies attest, this new exchange has not lacked for ink (whether digital or print).^[2] In light, therefore, of such a sizeable pool of resources, rather than engaging the new perspective head-on in an attempt (at the very least) to summarize the various positions and counter-positions, the purpose of this series will be to examine the doctrine of justification as it appears in the work of N. T. Wright. As such, this analysis will draw primarily upon John Piper’s initial “response” to Wright’s earlier formulations in The Future of Justification^[3] as well as Wright’s own most recent reaffirmation of his position in Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision.^[4]

However, before delving into the specific (and far more contentious) issue of justification, it would be best to begin by briefly sketching Wright’s understanding of the gospel itself. We will explore this foundational topic in the next post.

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^[1] “If any one saith, that by faith alone the impious is justified; in such wise as to mean, that nothing else is required to co-operate in order to the obtaining the grace of Justification, and that it is not in any way necessary, that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will; let him be anathema.” The Council of Trent: Canons on Justification (Canon 9).

^[2] See especially Michael F. Bird’s nearly eighteen page un-annotated “Biography on the New Perspective on Paul” from The Saving Righteousness of God: Studies on Paul, Justification, and the New Perspective (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2007), 194-211.

^[3] John Piper, The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright (Wheaton: Crossway, 2007).

^[4] N. T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2009).

Change and the Superior Joy of the Gospel

2010-04-23T14:19:00.000-07:00

Last night I began reading Tim Chester’s new book You Can Change: God’s Transforming Power for Our Sinful Behavior and Negative Emotions. Some you may recognize the name Chester from his previous book, Total Church (co-authored with fellow pastor, theologian, and missiologist Steve Timmis). Timmis and Chester are part of a church-planting network in England known as The Crowded House (hence the quintessentially British names). In the last few years, both men have contributed a great deal to the fresh emphasis in reformed circles (i.e., Tim Keller, Mark Driscoll, and Jeff Vanderstelt) on community, mission and the gospel. You Can Change (as the title so unadornedly foreshadows) is essentially a guidebook on the aims, motivations, and means of biblical change. It is, to put the matter succinctly, a book on sanctification.

To that end, Chester begins his argument by making an important claim about the nature of biblical change, a claim which closely resembles John Piper’s now well-known sanctification-model, “Christian Hedonism.” Chester asserts:

One of our problems [with change] is that we think of holiness as giving up things we enjoy out of vague sense of obligation. But I’m convinced that holiness is always good news. God calls us to the good life. He’s always bigger and better than anything sin offers. The key is to realize why change is good news in your struggles with sin (10).

The secret of gospel change is being convinced that Jesus is the good life and the fountain of all joy. Any alternative we might choose would be a letdown (15).

Chester’s point (as the first three chapters go on to explain) is that real change both begins with and is pursued through two deeply-related and predominately internal acts of faith.

First, we must go about the often very slippery work of exposing sin (partcularly our own personal private sin) for what it really is. We must start, in other words, by concentrating on and creating in our hearts a real and tangible sense of both sin’s ugliness as well as its corrosive and destructive nature. At an emotional level, the pain that sin has caused in our lives previously is perhaps our best and most useful ally. Taking hold of that pain and in a very real sense reliving it (especially in the face of temptation) is one of the most practical tools we can deploy in our struggle with sin.

At an intellectual, conscious level, this means unmasking the false promises upon which sin operates. The attractiveness of sin (i.e., its “power”) is rooted in the false belief that sin will provide for us more joy and pleasure than will righteousness. This is especially true of the idols in our lives that hold us captive to their allure and deceptive beauty either through sheer, raw magnetism or through years of ingrained practice.

Bringing together the emotional and intellectual levels of this task, Chester describes sin as an “adulterous lover,” which in reality is “no love at all”:

Sin doesn’t love us. It tries to use us, abuse us, enslave us, control us, and ultimately destroy us. Sin takes from us and gives nothing in return. It may use enticing and seductive lies. Sin never brings true and lasting satisfaction (33).

This, then, lead us immediately into the second act of faith the change process demands: we must replace sin’s deceptive and inauthentic beauty with the thoroughly authentic and transformative beauty of the gospel. Our aim (as the Psalmist says) is to “taste and see that the Lord is good.” In other words, we must sense in our hearts (that is, at the very core of who we are) that there is more joy to be found in God’s ways then there is to be found in ours. It is not as though sanctification robs us of joy (though this claim, normally unspoken, certainly lies at the very heart of sin’s deceptive dogma). Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, it is sanctification that provides us with both a foundation for as well as a means of experiencing substantial, life-establishing happiness.

Again, Tim Chester:

[G]rowing in holiness is not sad, dutiful drudgery. It’s about joy. It’s discovering true joy—the joy of knowing and serving God. . . . Our job is to stop wallowing around in the dirt and instead to enjoy knowing God, to give up our cheap imitations and enjoy the real thing. All too often we think of holiness as giving up the pleasures of sin for some worthy but drab life. But holiness means recognizing that the pleasures of sin are empty and temporary, while God is inviting us to magnificent, true, full, and rich pleasures that last forever (35-36).

In the end, the only way we will actually begin to choose righteousness over sin consistently, the only way we will begin to really live a life marked by holiness and maturity, is by convincing ourselves (at the level of our hearts) that the former is more to be desired, more to be longed for, more to be enjoyed than the latter. Only when we see and experience the superior joy offered to us in the gospel will change become a reality.

The Atonement - Introduction

2010-04-14T12:49:00.001-07:00

I began “the drama of dogma” a little over two years ago as a simple way to organize and chronicle my life as a student, reader, pastor and amateur theologian. With that purpose still in mind, I’m very excited to announce that over the next nine weeks or so, I’m going to be sharing this platform with my nephew and fellow blogger, Michael Blankenship. A few months ago, Mike started blogging at “Our Simple Faith” and I’ve really enjoyed reading his posts on everything from hope, to good works, to the problem of evil.

What makes me so excited about this particular endeavor is the coming together of two very different life-stages around a central tenet of the Christian faith. Mike is a sixteen-year-old-high school student from rural Oregon considering a future in Christian ministry. I’m a twenty-seven-year-old seminary graduate in Portland entering my second year of full-time, pastoral ministry. While these worlds could certainly be further apart than they are (after all, we’re both white-American males) bridging them—both conceptually as well as stylistically—should be a lot of fun and (I hope) both challenging and encouraging to those of you following along.

Our plan for this series is to focus on the contested and often misunderstood doctrine of “limited atonement” (also referred to as “definite atonement” or “particular redemption”). In the simplest terms possible, the doctrine of limited atonement claims that Jesus’ death secured (in the past) and applies (in the present) all the redemptive blessings necessary to save God’s people. The atonement, in other words, does not simply make salvation possible; it actually and effectually saves.

In an effort, however, to make “first things first,” as well as to make sure that we don’t get ahead of ourselves, our first goal will be to explore what the atonement in and of itself is all about. (A quick side-note: Whenever debating the “finer” points of a doctrine, which is what limited atonement is, it’s important to keep in mind the “broader” points of agreement that orthodox Christianity has, more or less, maintained throughout its history. This helps us not only to concentrate on the “essentials” but to also approach the “finer” points, as we’ve called them, with humility, love, and a real sense of unity.)

Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears offer the following definition in their book Doctrine: What Every Christian Should Believe:

Jesus’ work for us on the cross is called atonement (at-one-ment); Jesus our God became a man to restore [the] relationship between God and humanity. . . . Scripture repeatedly and clearly declares that Jesus died as our substitute paying our penalty “for” our sins (253).

Using that relatively simple summary as our starting point, it is possible to further define the atonement as the historical realization of three interlocking theological concepts: (1) propitiation, (2) expiation, and (3) reconciliation.

Because these words are new to most people, our aim in the next three posts will be to unpack each one in turn, examining them, defining them and rooting them in Scripture.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in doing some further reading on the subject, here are a few recommendations:

Death by Love by Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears
Redemption Accomplished and Applied by John Murray
Fifty Reasons Jesus Came to Die by John Piper
The Cross of Christ by John Stott

Lastly, you can read Mike’s introduction here.

The “Replaceable” Leader - Introduction

2010-04-06T19:03:00.000-07:00

Milton Vincent, A Gospel Primer for Christians

According to Scripture, God deliberately designed the gospel in such a way so as to strip me of pride and leave me without any grounds for boasting in myself whatsoever. . . . Preaching the gospel to myself each day mounts a powerful assault against my pride and serves to establish humility in its place (27).

About a week ago I wrote a brief reflection about the humbling effects these last two months have had on my heart and life (particularly as a “leader”). If you’re interested, you can read that original post here. To make a long story short, for various personal/family reasons, I’ve had to take a giant step back from my pastoral work at New Life Church (particularly from “up-front” ministries like preaching and teaching). To make (heart-) matters worse, this change came about just two weeks before the launch of our new young adults ministry—re:Generātion—in which I was heavily invested.

As a result of stepping back, one point of particular frustration has been dealing with the stark realization that I am (despite my former and sadly persistent thoughts to the contrary) thoroughly replaceable. As I mentioned in my last post, I don’t mean replaceable in my relationships (as in being a husband, friend or family-member). I mean replaceable as a tool of the kingdom. To put it bluntly: God is about doing His work, and He’ll do it with just as much glory, power, and beauty with me as without me.

At the level of day-to-day life, what this means—if I’m really being honest—is that it’s been incredibly difficult to watch re:Generātion succeed without me. As shallow as that sounds (and, yes, not only does it sound shallow, it actually is shallow), it’s the truth. I want so badly to be a part of re:Generātion’s success (and not just any part but the chief part); not because of what I’ll add to it, but because of what it will add to me.

Reflecting on this frustration, a friend pointed me toward Philippians 1:18 where Paul, writing from prison about two divergent groups of traveling evangelists—those who “preach Christ from envy and rival . . . thinking to afflict my imprisonment” and those who preach Christ “from good will”—ended his report by telling his readers: “What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice.” In other words, what mattered most to Paul was the spread of the gospel: “that in every way . . . Christ is proclaimed.” His heart actually resonated with that report. His emotional investment lay in the glory of God through Christ, and not in his own reputation or advantage.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to commit six posts over the next week or so to reflecting on the oddly titled subject “How to Make Yourself a ‘Replaceable’ Leader.” Here’s a brief overview of what’s to come:

Do your “best” work behind-the-scenes.
Don’t just share the limelight; intentionally push others into it.
Keep your heart in-check by being rigorously honest with other leaders about what’s really motivating you.
Do ministry as worship, not as work.
Concentrate on “duplicating yourself” not making yourself “unique.” (Realize, however, that really duplicating yourself will make you “unnecessary”.)
Lead others by following Jesus. In other words, make Jesus irreplaceable, not yourself!

The Purpose of the Pentateuch: Law and Gospel

2010-04-03T20:58:00.000-07:00

John Sailhamer, The Meaning of the Pentateuch

The purpose of the Pentateuch is not to teach a life of obedience to the law given to Moses at Sinai, but to be a narrative admonition to be like Abraham, who did not live under the law and yet fulfilled the law through a life of faith. The Pentateuch is a lesson drawn from the lives of its two leading men, Abraham and Moses. The Pentateuch lays out two fundamentally dissimilar ways of “walking with God” (Deut. 29:1): one is to be like Moses under the Sinai law, and is called the “Sinai covenant”; the other, like that of Abraham (Gen. 15:6), is by faith and apart from the law, and is called the “new covenant.” These two central themes (law and faith) are played out in the Pentateuch and into the prophetic literature as a contrast of two covenants, Mosaic and Abrahamic, or law and gospel (14).

Irreplaceable

2010-03-29T21:41:00.000-07:00

Beyoncé, “Irreplaceable”

So don’t you ever for a second get to thinking you’re irreplaceable.

Caedmon’s Call, “The Truth”

[M]aybe all that I’ve to do was done a long time ago.

‘Cause there was life before my life,
There was provision before my need,
There was redemption before my sin,
For the sake of the world I thank the Lord,
That the truth’s not contingent on me.

Psalm 103:15-17

As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. But the steadfast love of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting . . .

This last month and a half has been (in many ways) an extended exercise in forced humility. There is little virtue is having one’s weaknesses exposed, particular those banal, petty weaknesses that I’d hoped were a thing of the past. Cultivated humility for the sake of spiritual growth is one thing. Being pushed down under the weight of one’s own failures is another. As Jesus told his disciples in Matthew 12, there’s nothing more pitiable than exorcising one demon and “putting your house in order” just to have the same unclean spirit show back up with seven fresh companions in tow. “The last state of that person is worse than the first” (Matt. 12:45). It takes real spiritual sanity to live proactively within that truth.

All metaphors aside, by far the hardest thing to deal with has been the stark realization that I am (despite my previous thoughts to the contrary) thoroughly replaceable. I don’t mean replaceable as a person (like with my wife, friends or family). I mean replaceable as a tool of the kingdom. It’s been tough (unbelievably tough) to realize that I’m not indispensable, not foundational, not one-off. In the end, God’s about doing His will, building His church, glorifying His Son and he’ll do it with just as much glory, power, and beauty with me as without me. Jesus is irreplaceable, Aaron isn’t.

I don’t say this to evoke sympathy. A sort of “There, there. You’re special.” is the last thing I need (not that I’ve given up hoping for it; pride dies hard after all). In the end, however, what it has to come down to (what I need most) is grace. Grace that comes from the outside in. Grace that has nothing to do with me, the receiver, and everything to do with God, the Giver. Grace to be forgiven. Grace to be renewed. Grace to be made clean. Grace to grow-up. “For the sake of the world [am myself] I thank the Lord / That the truth’s not contingent on me.”

Easter and the Goal of the Gospel

2010-03-26T19:38:00.000-07:00

N. T. Wright’s most recent book—After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters—begins with a simple question, “What am I here for?” The question is posed not as abstract philosophy but rather as the concrete concern of a genuine disciple: Given that, as follower of Jesus Christ, I’ve been saved by grace through faith . . . what now? What’s am I to do with my time this side of the second coming—the ‘in-between’ time, so to speak? Where’s it all going? And, most importantly, how do I become a part of what God is doing in the every day realities of life?

For most evangelicals, the goal of the gospel—what it’s really all about—can be summarized in a single word: heaven. We may (at our more humble moments) say, “It’s all about God,” and we may (at times) even mean it. But when it comes to our own personal happy ending, when we really get down to what it’s all about for us, heaven is the goal.

The trouble with this goal isn’t so much that it’s not true; only that it’s half true. Heaven—in the sense of a spiritual, disembodied, escape-from-the-world-down-here sort of place—is certainly a part of the story (part of each of our own personal in-between time), but it’s not where the story ends.

The problem is that ending with heaven leaves out the most significant event in the New Testament: Easter. As Wright has elsewhere put it, “Heaven’s important, but it’s not the end of the world.” No, the goal of the Christian story—from Genesis to Revelation—is not going-to-heaven-when-you-die. The goal is resurrection—God’s cosmic, kingdom-enacting re-creation of all things “in heaven and on earth.”

Where does Easter fit into this story? In 1 Corinthians 15:20 and 23 Paul tells us that Jesus’ resurrection was the “first-fruits” of God’s new creation, the down-payment in the present guaranteeing and even providing the foundation for what will one day flood creation.

The point in all of this is that knowing the end of the story drastically changes how we answer the question: “What am I here for now?” Wright sketches out the following answer through what he calls “moral thrust of the New Testament”:

The goal is the new heavens and new earth, with human beings raised from the dead to be the renewed world’s rulers and priest.
This goal is achieved through the kingdom-establishing work of Jesus as the Spirit, which we grasp by faith, participate in by baptism, and live out in love.
Christian living in the present consists of anticipating this ultimate reality through the Spirit-led, habit-forming, truly human practice of faith, hope and love, sustaining Christians in their calling to worship God and reflect his glory into the world (67).

Failure and Success in Acts 5

2010-03-04T13:52:00.000-08:00

I’ve spent the last two Wednesday nights teaching at our church’s high school group—Ignite. It’s been a great experience. There’s such an atmosphere of authenticity there, as though the group’s leadership (especially the student leaders) is after really building disciples and not just putting on a show.

Last night we were in Acts 5:17-42 which records the second conflict between the “church” (i.e., the apostles and the emerging group of Spirit-empowered, Jesus-followers) and the Jewish high council (i.e., the religious powers-that-be). Two passages in particular stood out:

Acts 5:18-21

[The council] arrested the apostles and put them in the public prison. But during the night an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors and brought them out, and said, “Go and stand in the temple and speak to the people all the words of this Life.” And when they heard this, they entered the temple at daybreak and began to teach.

Acts 5:40-42

[A]nd when they had called in the apostles, they beat them and charged them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go. Then they left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name. And every day, in the temple and from house to house, they did not cease teaching and preaching Jesus as the Christ.

In the first passage, the angel’s revelation must have been a bit confusing to the apostles and (in a way) even disturbing. In essence, they’re arrested, miraculously rescued and immediately told to go right back to the very same place and activity that got them in trouble to begin with. What’s more, all that their impromptu (and incredibly brief) release does is embarrass and further enrage the very people who’re already taking issue with them.

What this passage teaches us is that (despite our personal expectations), God (at least in this story) isn’t all that interested in our physical safety or our social well-being. Instead, God’s all consuming priority is that the “words of this Life”—the gospel—be declared.

This run contrary to the way we naturally respond to trouble. Normally, our goal when things get hard or scary is to simply put our heads down, take a deep breath and just get through it as quickly possible. Our aim is simple: “Get out.”

The problem with this is that all through the book of Acts, God is much more interested in getting his people into trouble than he is in getting them out of it. Now, it’s important to understand what this trouble is. The trouble in question isn’t brought about by laziness, short-fuses or sinful mistakes. What I’m talking about are situations in which our reputations, our names, our futures, our emotions and even our bodies are threatened for the sake of the gospel.

At an even larger scale, we usually go through life as if the point were to basically be as safe and as comfortable as possible. Now, there’s nothing wrong with getting good grades, playing sports, going to a good school, getting a good job, buying a nice house and raising a family in a safe neighborhood. All I’m saying is that that’s not what God’s people, under the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit, were after. Nor was that what Jesus was after either.

The second passage is equally disturbing. We’re used to thinking of persecution as a very physical thing. Here, while it’s certainly partly physical—after all, the apostles are beaten and have their lives threatened—what they ultimately rejoice in is being “counted worth to suffer dishonor for the name.” The Greek word behind “dishonor” could just as easily be translated as “degradation,” or “mockery” or even “abuse.” The point is that the apostles weren’t just physically hurt, they were socially rejected. They were looked down upon, belittled, by the very people who their culture most admired and looked up to.

What this part of the story’s trying to tell us is that so-called “personal success” is just as much an enemy of the gospel as other more overt and stigmatized sins. In fact, it’s probably even more of an enemy because of how deceptive, acceptable and even trumpeted it is. The problem is, if what motivates us is success—personal recognition, looking good, being beautiful, liked and looked up to—then we simply will not be willing suffer public dishonor for the sake of Christ. It’ll just be too hard. Your heart won’t allow it.

The bottom line is this: following Jesus means following in the footstep of a man who (in the eyes and estimation of the world) was a colossal failure. This means that following him will inevitable lead us into the same sort of apparent failure. It’s simply impossible to look good and follow Jesus. At times, the two become mutually exclusive. In the end (as hard as it may be to accept), it’s better to be a “failure” who loves Jesus than a success who left him behind long ago.

Participating in the Sin-Suffering Way of Jesus

2010-02-20T13:39:00.000-08:00

Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way

The servant [in Isaiah 52:13—53:12] serves God. That goes without saying. But the distinctive thing that comes into focus . . . is that the servant serves God by serving the sinner, by taking the sinner’s place, taking the consequences of sin, doing for the sinner what he or she is helpless to do for himself, herself.

This is the gospel way to deal with what is wrong with the world, deal with this multifaceted sin-cancer that is mutilating and disabling us. . . . [W]hether the wrong is intentional or inadvertent, the servant neither avoids it in revulsion nor attacks it by force of words or arms. Instead, the servant embraces, accepts, suffers in the sense of submitting to the conditions and accepting the consequences (177).

[W]hile the suffering and death of Jesus is definitive and complete, there is more—and the more has to do with our participation in what Jesus accomplishes in his suffering and death. . . . The overall pervading concern of the text is that every follower of the gospel shall embrace the identity of servant in the very terms in which the Prophet of Exile presents it . . . . Much as we try to get out of it or find a way around it, there is simply no following Jesus that does not involve suffering and rejection and death. No exceptions (178).

The uniqueness that is Jesus does not exclude us from participation in his servant ways. We can—we must—participate in Jesus’ work the way Jesus did it and does it and only in the way Jesus did and does it, obedient and joyful servants as we follow our servant Savior who “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45) (179).

Sin is not redeemed by scrubbing it out of existence but by taking it in as a sacrifice that makes “many to be accounted righteous.” This is obviously what Jesus did. We, of course, are not Jesus; we cannot do this in and of ourselves. But we can participate in what Jesus does with the sins of the world, the sins in the church, the sins in our family, as he takes and suffers them. We can enter the way of Jesus’ cross and becomes participants in Jesus’ reconciliation of the world. Salvation is not escape from what is wrong but a deep, reconciling embrace of all that is wrong.

This is a radical shift from condemning sin and sinners—an ugly business at best. We no longer stand around as amused or disapproving spectators of the sins or troubles of others but become fellow sufferers and participants in the sacrificial life of Jesus (184).

Aaron Orendorff

Dealing with the sins of others is messy work. The points of contact where another person’s sin overlaps with our own disheveled lives often feel like war-zones. It makes little difference whether we’re the one’s actually being sinned against or if we’re simply “collateral damage.” Pain is still pain. Dealing with sin—in whatever form—defiles and deconstructs. The wages of sin is death (inescapably).

In those moments, what we want (or rather I should say: what I want, what I desperately want) is to simply do away with it, to condemn it—sin and sinner alike—to escape it, to “scrub it out” and wash my hands of the whole affair. It’s always easier to just avoid the business of other people’s sin, to check-out, to distance ourselves from the mess, create a fortress and hunker down.

The way of the gospel, however, will not allow this. The way of the gospel calls us not to condemn sin but to bear it. To enter in, with eyes wide-open to the pain and dirt of their trouble. The gospel calls us to give our lives away—our emotions, financial security, reputations, health—as an act of saying, “I believe in Jesus. I believe in his way. I will suffer your sin, not reject it; I will suffer it with you as he suffered for me.”

The degree to which we suffer the sins of others is the degree to which we have understood how Jesus suffered for ours.

Sin, Forgiveness and Confession

2010-02-12T12:00:00.000-08:00

Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way

Praying with David, who knew a good deal about sin, we soon learn that the remedy for sin is not the extermination of sin, not long training in not-sinning, not a rigorous program conditioning us in a pavlovian revulsion to sin. The only effective remedy for sin is the forgiveness of sin—and only God can forgive sin. If we refuse to deal with God, we are left dealing with sin by means of punishment or moral education or concocting some strategy of denial. None seem to make much of dent in the sin business. No. The way, the only way, is to get in on God’s forgiveness. And we do that by confession (91).

Confession is a way out of the puny, self-deceiving, mulish contrivances we attempt in order to manage sin on our own. Confession is entrance into the vast world of forgiveness, encompassed with God’s deliverance and steadfast love (92).

An Immersion in [Imperfect] Humanity

2010-02-11T16:45:00.000-08:00

Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way

There is not the slightest effort given in the biblical story to make David admirable in any moral or spiritual sense. And yet there is the assumption in all of this that flawed and faithless and failed as he is, he is representative—not a warning against be behavior but a witness, inadvertent as it was, to the normalcy, yes, the inevitability of imperfection (82).

The life of David is a labyrinth of ambiguities, not unlike our own. What we admire about David does not cancel out what we abhor, and what we abhor does not cancel out what we admire. David is not a model for imitation; David is not a candidate for a pedestal. The David story is an immersion in humanity, no different from the humanity conditioned by our culture and flawed by our sins. The story of David is a not a story of what God wants us to be but a story of God working with the raw material of our lives as he finds us. David’s story is told with so much detail so that we will have spread out before us exactly what goes on in a thoroughly lived human life in which God is shaping a life of salvation (88).

God is Christlike

2010-02-09T11:36:00.001-08:00

Michael Frost and Alan Hirsh, The Shaping of Things to Come

[I]n light of the New Testament, the remarkable truth is not so much that Jesus is Godlike, but that God is actually Christlike. (God is Christlike and in him is no un-Christlikeness at all). In the light of the New Testament revelation all who would wish to know who God is and what he is like, need look no further than the person of Jesus (John 1:18, 14:9). From now on, all true perspectives of God must pass through the very particular lens of the man called Jesus of Nazareth. To say this more technically, all theology must now be understood through Christology. . . . From our perspective as human beings Jesus becomes the reference point for all genuine knowing, all true loving, and all authentic following of God (37).

“he prefers partnership to mere accomplishment”

2010-02-05T00:09:00.000-08:00

Michael Frost and Alan Hirsh, The Shaping of Things to Come

There’s a riddle in the Talmud that goes like this, “If God intended man to live by bread, why didn’t he create a bread tree?” And the answer is that, in fact, God could have created a tree that produced crusty loaves of bread, but he prefers to offer us a grain and invite us to buy a field and plant the seed. He prefers that we till the soil while he sends the rain. He prefers that we harvest the crop while he sends sunshine. He prefers that we grind the grain and knead it and bake it while he gives us air in our lungs and strength in our arms. Why? Because he would rather we become partners with him in creation.

Of course, God could simply supply our every need and solve our every problem. But our God invites us into a creative partnership with him. . . . We suppose he could have converted the whole world by now, but he prefers partnership to mere accomplishment (159).

Aaron Orendorff

It is striking and admittedly a bit jarring to entertain the thought that God “prefers partnership to mere accomplishment.” My basic orientation towards the two is exactly the opposite. I see partnership as the means and accomplishment and the ends. In other words, I regard accomplishment as the point and operate as if the real business of life was about “getting something done.” God, on the other hand, appears to think quite differently about the matter. The real business of life is partnership itself. Relationships are ends (not means) and “getting something done” is in many ways little more than a clever and handy excuse to partner.

Why?

Because God is interested in people, not projects. Real people demand real relationships. By inviting humanity into the process of creation and recreation—by making us agents of his kingdom’s coming—God is deliberately forfeiting productivity for the sake of process. He is saying (on purpose), “Yes, I’ll get less done and it’ll get done slower and there’ll be a lot more pain in the getting, but that’s the way I want to go. I want to go the way of people.”

In a similar way, we must begin to see our own relationships as ends in and of themselves. We love because we’ve been loved and because loving is good (morally and existentially), not because loving gets us somewhere. How would our approach to work, school, family, ministry and life all change if we adopted the same attitude as God? How would our approach to people be different if they themselves were what we were after and not what they might do for us?

Sin and Why We Lie

2010-01-27T22:22:00.000-08:00

This afternoon I spent some time with a friend looking at Isaiah 14:11-15, a passage that, although addressed (historically speaking) to the king of Babylon, has been found by many to be indirectly aimed at Satan as a paradigm for sin. The passage reads:

Your pomp is brought down to Sheol [the grave], the sound of your harps; maggots are laid as a bed beneath you, and worms are your covers. How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You said in your heart, “I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of the north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.” But you are brought down to Sheol, to the far reaches of the pit.

The point being made (regardless of who the passage is ultimately about) is this: sin (in its essence) is elevating something that isn’t God (in this case, ourselves) to the place of God. Tim Keller, using idolatry as an organizing principle, puts it like this: “Sin is taking a good thing and making it ultimate.” Like the king of Babylon in Isaiah 14, our great sin is trying to be god for ourselves—trying to be the sovereign king or queen of our own private kingdoms.

So, if that’s what sin is, then why do we sin?

The basic answer is simple: we sin because we’ve stopped trusting and relying on God to be God and have started to play the role ourselves. As an example, let’s take something as seemingly mundane as lying.

Why do we lie?

All lying is done as an attempt to protect ourselves from other people knowing the truth about who we really are. In other words, we lie to keep people from discovering—from actually seeing—the “real” us. We do this in one of two ways. Either we lie to hid something about us that really is true (something that if other people knew would cause them to think less of us) or we lie to create something about us that’s false (something that if other people believed would cause them to think more highly of us). On the one side, we lie to keep our reputation afloat; on the other, we lie to elevate it. In both instances what we’re doing is trying to control the way other people see us, think about us and regard us.

This means that every external, mouth-lie grows out of an internal, heart-choice that says: “What other people think of me is more important than what God thinks of me. I like them more than I like God. I need their approval more than I need God. I depend on their love and security more than I depend on God’s.”

The antidote for lying then (as with all sin) isn’t to simply buckle-down and just tell the truth. No. The real antidote for lying is to believe that God is God, to trust that what the Creator and King of the universe says about us is what really matters. And to believe that, in union with Christ, what he says about us isn’t rooted in who we are but in who Jesus is.

Two Sides to Pride

2010-01-26T00:29:00.000-08:00

The Valley of Vision, “Shortcomings”

My sin is to look on my faults and be discouraged,
or to look on my good and be puffed up (85).

Aaron Orendorff

There are two sides to the sin called pride. On the one hand, there is blatant and overt pride: the belief that we are fundamentally “better than.” This sort of pride is easily identified; it is pride as we know it; pride in its most recognizable form; scarlet letter pride with an emblazoned, capital “P” painted across its chest.

But there is another form of pride that is much more subtle, much more insidious. While overt pride flourishes in the light, its underside hides in the dark. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous tellingly calls this sin “pride in reverse.” Not that it is the opposite of pride (i.e., un-pride), but rather that it is pride run off in another direction. The motive and power are still the same, but its shape is different.

Reverse-pride wallows. It revels in self-pity. It moans of embarrassment and shame. Reverse-pride often feels like justice—particularly if we’re in the wrong or if we’ve legitimately messed-up—but it does nothing to bring us closer to God or other people. Reverse-pride is built on the assumption that I am the center of the world, that if I fail, the world will fail (or at least the small part of the world I’m desperately trying to rule and control).

Humility (that which is legitimately “un-pride”) begins not by degrading or devaluing ourselves, but by recognizing who we actually are: we are not God. God is God and the world (even our petty corner of it) is His, not ours. Humility aims to forget itself by refocusing its attention on God as God. It delights to see God made much of (whether through us or not). Humility brings freedom from the crushing self-centered weight of both success (“better than”) and failure.

Evangelism and Being Authentically Human

2010-01-18T14:29:00.000-08:00

Rebecca Manley Pippert, Out of the Saltshaker & into the World

Our problem with evangelism is not that we don’t have enough information—it is that we don’t know how to be ourselves. We forget we are called to be witnesses to what we have seen and know, not to what we don’t know. The key on our part is authenticity and obedience, not a doctorate in theology. We haven’t grasped that it really is OK for us to be who we are when we are with seekers, even if we don’t have all the answers to their questions or if our knowledge of Scripture is limited.

But there is a deeper problem here. Our uneasiness with non-Christians reflects our uneasiness with our own humanity. Because we are not certain about what it means to be human (or spiritual, for that matter), we struggle in relating naturally, humanly to the world (22-23).

[T]o share the gospel we must share out life, our very selves. If we don’t grasp that Christ has freed us to be authentic, we will see evangelism as a project instead of a lifestyle. And we will tend to see non-Christians more as objects of our evangelistic efforts than as authentic persons. . . . Evangelism involves taking people seriously, getting across to their island of concerns and needs, and then sharing Christ as Lord in the context of our natural living situations (28).

In Jesus . . . we have our model for how to relate to the world, and it is a model of openness and identification. Jesus was a remarkably open man. . . . We must learn, then, to relate transparently and genuinely to other because that is God’s style of relating to us. . . . We must open our lives enough to let people see that we too laugh and hurt and cry (30).

First Things First - Disciple-Making Disciples

2010-01-15T23:22:00.000-08:00

Aaron Orendorff

With the launch of re:Generātion quickly approaching—February 28th is just 47 days away—and with the launch team ready to begin training and preparation, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what’s often called “first things.” Why are we launching a new young-adults ministry? There’s probably a hundred different ways to put it, but every answer worth anything has to boil down to one thing: the glory of God in the lordship of Christ by the power of the Spirit. My greatest hope for re:Generātion is that God would use us to make disciple-making disciples. Everything else—attendance, websites, Life Groups, music, and even in one sense the teaching itself—are worthless if they do not fuel and directly contribute to this one, consuming end.

The great joy of making discipleship the central aim of re:Generātion is that it means doing ministry after the pattern of Christ and in the presence of Christ. The first—imitation—is utterly impossible and existentially crushing without the second—indwelling.

In the spirit of keeping first things first, I’ve pulled out a number of excerpts on the topic of authentic gospel-ministry from a recent book by Colin Marshall and Tony Payne entitled The Trellis and the Vine.

Colin Marshall and Tony Payne, The Trellis and the Vine

The basic work of any Christian ministry is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ in the power of God’s Spirit, and to see people converted, changed and grow to maturity in that gospel (8).

The [Great C]ommisison is not fundamentally about mission out there somewhere else in another country. It’s a commission that makes disciple-making the normal agenda and priority of every church and every Christian disciple. . . . [W]e must . . . see disciple-making as our central task in our homes and neighborhoods and churches (13).

To be a disciple is to be called to make new disciples. . . . Thus the goal of Christian ministry is quite simple, and in a sense measureable: are we making and nurturing genuine disciples of Christ? . . . The mandate of disciple-making provides the touchstone for whether our church is engaging in Christ’s mission. Are we making genuine disciples of Jesus Christ? Our goal is not to make church members or members of our institution, but genuine disciples of Jesus (14).

[S]tructures don’t grow ministry any more than trellises [lattices] grow vines, and . . . most churches need to make a conscious shift—away from erecting and maintain structures, and towards growing people who are disciple-making disciples of Christ (17).

[T]he real work of God is people work—the prayful speaking of his word by one person to another (27).

[I]t’s interesting how little the New Testament talks about church growth, and how often it talks about “gospel growth” or the increase of the “word.” The focus is on the progress of the Spirit-backed word of God as it makes its way in the world, according to God’s plan. . . . [T]he emphasis is not on the growth of the congregation as a structure—in numbers, finances and success—but on the growth of the gospel, as it is spoken and re-spoken under the power of the Spirit (37).

[I]f this is really what God is doing in our world then it is time to say goodbye to our small and self-oriented ambitions, and to abandon ourselves to the cause of Christ as his gospel. . . . [Gospel growth happens as] a Christian brings a truth form God’s word to someone else, praying that God would make that word bear fruit through the inward working of his Spirit (38-39).

[T]his means that the two fundamental activities of Christian ministry are proclaiming (speaking the word) and praying (calling upon God to pour out his Spirit to make the word effective in people’s hearts) (41).

To be a disciple is to be a disciple-maker. The radicalism of this demand often feels a world away from the ordinariness of our normal Christian habits and customs (43).

Praying Our Way Out of the Gospel

2010-01-10T22:48:00.000-08:00

Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life

In the gospel, Jesus took my sin, and I got his righteousness. That is how gospel stories work. . . . Whenever you love, you reenact Jesus’ death.

Consequently, gospel stories always have suffering in them. American Christianity has an allergic reaction to this part of the gospel. We’d love to hear about God’s love for us, but suffering doesn’t mesh with our right to “the pursuit of happiness.” So we pray to escape a gospel story, when that is the best gift the Father can give us. . . .

The Father wants to draw us into the story of his Son. He doesn’t have a better story to tell, so he keeps retelling it in our lives. As we reenact the gospel, we are drawn into a strange kind of fellowship (214).

When I begin praying Christ into someone’s life, God often permits suffering in that person’s life. If Satan’s basic game plan is pride, seeking to draw us into his life of arrogance, then God’s basic game plan is humility, drawing us into the life of his Son. The Father can’t think of anything better to give us than his Son. Suffering invites us to join his Son’s life, death, and resurrection (236).

Prayer and a Larger Story

2010-01-06T22:53:00.000-08:00

Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life

I often find that when God doesn’t answer a prayer, he wants to expose something in me. Our prayers don’t exist in a world of their own. We are in dialogue with a personal, divine Spirit who wants to shape us as much as he wants to hear us. For God to act unthinkingly with our prayers would be paganism, which says the gods do our will in response to our prayers.

When someone’s prayers aren’t answered, I want to know the back-story. . . . Most of us isolate prayer from the rest of what God is doing in our lives, but God doesn’t work that way. Prayer doesn’t exist in some rarified spiritual world; it is part of the warp and woof of our lives. Praying itself becomes a story (168).

If the [answer] comes too quickly, there is no room for discovery, for relationship. . . . The waiting that is the essence of faith provides the context for relationship. Faith and relationship are interwoven in dance. Everyone talks now about how prayer is relationship, but often what people mean is having warm fuzzies with God. Nothing wrong with warm fuzzies, but relationships are far richer and more complex (190-191).

Do you see the difference between making an isolated prayer request and praying in context of the story that God is weaving? . . . Most of our prayers are answered in the context of the larger story that God is weaving.

To live in our Father’s story, remember these three things:
Don’t demand that the story go your way. . . .
Look for the Storyteller. Look for his hand, and then pray in light of what you are seeing. . . .
Stay in the story. Don’t shut down when it goes the wrong way (201).

Aaron Orendorff

If I’m being honest (and good books have a tendency to make a person honest), when it comes to prayer, my gauge as to whether God is listening and responding almost always boils down to little more than whether or not life is going the way I want it. And of course, this feeling is as fickle as it is petty. For example, from 9am-noon, life goes well, I feel good about how “things” (usually meaning my own worth and reputation) are progressing and so (naturally) I feel “close” to God, assured that the Father hears and answers. Then, I have a bad lunch, someone treats me poorly, life goes sideways (and not even crazy sideways, mind you, it just doesn’t go the way I want), I look bad or I feel bad or I just feel awkward and suddenly, “Where’s God? This is just want I expected.” Fear comes crashing in and all of my “warm fuzzies,” as Miller calls them, go tumbling here and there.

But to live within a story larger than my own, one in which God is both the author and hero (which means, of course, by uncomfortable but refreshing consequence, that I myself am not) is an invitation to pray not that my kingdom come, nor that my will be done, but to instead ask for His. It is to pray as an agent of the coming kingdom. To pray with and for kingdom ends: ends that are better though not always in line with my own. Though such prayer is often more mysterious and far less like the spiritual, lottery ticket I oh-so-desperately want, it is prayer that matters, prayer that invites relationship, prayer that reaches beyond life on my terms and begins (slowly and with faltering success) to grow larger than good feelings about how I look.

Asking, Power and “Learned Desperation”

2010-01-02T23:52:00.000-08:00

Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life

The issue of power—the ability to make a difference, to change something—is at the heart of asking (113).

[P]ower in prayer comes from being in touch with your weakness. To teach us to pray, Jesus told stories of weak people who knew they couldn’t do life on their own. The persistent widow and the friend at midnight get access, not because they are strong [nor because their requests are “spiritual” or even all that altruistic] but because they are desperate. Learned desperation is at the heart of a praying life (114).

All of Jesus’ teaching on prayer in the Gospels can be summarized with one word: ask. His greatest concern is that our failure or reluctance to ask keeps us distant from God. But that is not the only reason he tells us to ask anything. God wants to give us good gifts. He love to give. . . . Deep down, we just don’t believe God is as generous as he keeps saying he is (154-155).

Luke 11:9-13

“And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

The Cross, Cynicism and God’s Love

2010-01-01T22:55:00.000-08:00

Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life

Audacious faith is one of the hallmarks of Jesus’ followers. . . . Jesus isn’t just offering practical wisdom. His wisdom works because in his death he himself acted boldly, trusting his Father to help him. While Jesus is hanging on the cross, the religious leaders cynically mock him for his childlike trust. “He saved others; he cannot save himself. . . . He trusts in God; let God deliver him” (Matthew 27:42-43). In effect they are saying, “Look what happens when you act like a child and trust your Father. He abandons you.” They accuse Jesus of naïveté, of acting foolishly because he believes in God’s goodness.

Jesus’ childlike faith delighted in his Father, and on Easter morning his Father acted on Jesus dead body, bringing him back to life. He trusted in God; God delivered him. Evil did not have the last word. Hope was born (84-85).

Cynicism looks reality in the face, calls it phony, and prides itself on its insight as it pulls back. Thanksgiving looks reality in the face and rejoices at God’s care. It replaces a bitter spirit with a generous one.

In the face of Adam and Eve’s evil, God takes up needle and thread and patiently sews fine leather clothing for them (see Genesis 3:21). He covers their divided, hiding selves with love. The same God permits his Son to be stripped naked so we could be clothed. God is not cynical in the face of evil. He loves (90-91).

Prayer and Jealousy; or Getting What You Ask For

2009-12-31T11:27:00.000-08:00

This morning I began reading A Praying Life by Paul E. Miller (I picked the book up a couple of weeks ago when, after an initial blast of great recommendations from guys like Tim Keller and David Powlison, it ended up on most of the top-ten book lists from 2009). Toward the end of chapter two, Miller tells the following story:

I was walking to the train station after work, and without realizing it, I began comparing the mission I worked for with another mission. It dawned on me that I was jealous, trying to make a name for myself at the expense of someone else. My jealousy surprised me. It was not the first time I’d been jealous about this, just the first time I’d named it.

As I continued to walk, I thought, This is ridiculous, being jealous, competing in my heart with other Christians when we are all involved in the same task. So before I got to the train I prayed, quietly giving my work to Jesus. I remember thinking he might actually take it.

A few pages later, I finished chapter two and began praying. One of my requests was that God would begin exposing in my own heart how pride—the desire to make a name for myself—was driving my desire for ministry and to replace that wrong, self-centered motivation with real, gospel-motivation.

I hadn’t finished praying when my phone rang. It was my wife, so rather than let it go to voicemail I answered. She shared briefly about a difficult situation she’d walked into that morning at work and then brought up a new church she’d just heard about in Charlotte, NC.

Someone had posted a quote on her work’s online message-board, something about how real joy isn’t dependent on what happens to you but what Christ is doing through you for others. She liked the quote so much that she tracked down its author online. His name was Steve Furtick.

The story of Furtick’s church—elevationchurch.org—is an amazing one. Their web-site describes it like this:

Elevation was founded on the faith of 8 families who risked everything - sold houses, quit jobs and moved to Charlotte believing that God would turn this city upside down for his glory through the local church. That risk has resulted in a remarkable return.

At the three-year mark, we've grown to more than 5,000 in weekly attendance among our three locations. Since our launch we've seen more than 6,200 people receive Christ. For the past three years, our church was named one of the “10 fastest growing churches in America” by Outreach Magazine.

My wife’s thinking went something like this: Furtick’s under 30. I’m under 30. Furtick recently launched an exciting new ministry aimed at young adults and families. I’m involved in launching a new ministry—re:Generātion—aimed at reaching young adults and families. Furtick’s project was wildly successful for the kingdom. I should be encouraged to expect wildly successful things for the kingdom as well.

My thinking, on the other hand, went more like this: Furtick’s under 30. I’m under 30. Furtick recently launched an exciting new ministry aimed at young adults and families. I’m involved in launching a new ministry—re:Generātion—aimed at reaching young adults and families. Furtick’s project was wildly successful for the kingdom. My project will not be wildly successful because I’m not Furtick. Far from being encouraged, I was intimidated. I was jealous. I felt inadequate, unprepared, ill-equipped. I feared failure.

I knew my wife meant well, so I tried my best to hide how I really felt. A minute after I hung up the phone the irony of it hit me—by “irony,” of course, I mean the kind, exposing, humbling providence of a wise, loving, sovereign God. Here I was praying that God would expose my heart for what it is and that’s exactly, not a moment later, what he does. Prayer is a dangerous, uncomfortable and sometimes an embarrassing thing. As Eugene Peterson warns:

Be slow to pray. Praying most often doesn’t get us what we want but what God wants, something quite at variance with what we conceive to be in our best interests. And when we realize what is going on, it is often too late to go back.

Mercy Sweetens

2009-12-29T10:00:00.000-08:00

Dave Harvey, When Sinners Say “I Do”

Mercy is a unique, marvelous, exceptional word. God’s mercy means his kindness, patience, and forgiveness toward us. It is his compassionate willingness to suffer for and with sinners for their ultimate good (79).

Do you know God as a God of mercy? Do you see your spouse as God sees him or her—through the eyes of mercy?

If your answer to either question is no, it is unlikely that your marriage is sweet. Mercy sweetens marriage. Where it is absent, two people flog one another over everything from failure to fix the faucet to phone bills. But where it is present, marriage grows sweeter and more delightful, even in the face of challenges, setbacks, and the persistent effects of our remaining sin (80).

Aaron Orendorff

Father, as you are merciful, so I pray that I too would be merciful.
Give me, I ask, a profound and heartfelt sense of your own tender, redeeming mercy that by experiencing mercy I may become merciful.
Sweeten my marriage with mercy, make me merciful toward my wife: soft, forgiving, patient, willing to “bear with” whatever petty grievances and personal offenses I might face (to bear with them in silence without bitterness or record-keeping) for her good and ultimately for her beauty.

re:Generātion/5(hundred) Hours - Gospel

2009-12-28T11:24:00.000-08:00

5(hundred) Hours - Gospel from New Life Church on Vimeo.

“. . . in his end is our beginning.”

2009-12-28T09:47:00.000-08:00

Acts 28:23, 30-31

When they had appointed a day for him, they came to him at his lodging in greater numbers. From morning till evening he expounded to them, testifying to the kingdom of God and trying to convince them about Jesus both from the Law of Moses and from the Prophets. . . . He lived there two whole years at his own expense, and welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

[T]he real hero of the whole book is of course the Jesus who was enthroned as the world’s Lord at the beginning, and is now proclaimed, at the end, “openly and unhindered,” that is with all “boldness” . . . and with nobody stopping him. And here, for once, Luke gives a full “Pauline” title to Jesus: “the Lord Jesus, the Messiah.” King of the Jews; Lord of the World: Jesus of Nazareth, continuing to do and to teach, continuing to announce the kingdom of God which has been decisively inaugurated on earth as it is in heaven. . . . [T]his is a drama in which we ourselves have been called to belong to the cast. The journey is ours, the trials and vindications are ours, the sovereign presence of Jesus is ours, the story is ours to pick up and carry on. Luke’s writing, like Paul’s journey, has reached its end, but in his end is our beginning (248-249).

Meeting Outside of Rome

2009-12-25T18:36:00.000-08:00

Acts 28:14-15

There we found brothers and were invited to stay with them for seven days. And so we came to Rome. And the brothers there, when they heard about us, came as far as the Forum of Appius and Three Taverns to meet us. On seeing them, Paul thanked God and took courage.

Aaron Orendorff

The book of Acts, as chapter 1 tells us, is about all the things that Jesus—resurrected and ascended—continued to do and teach. For Luke, how Jesus continues his work, now that (physically speaking) he’s off the scene, is through two players: the Spirit and the church. Much of Acts, therefore, is comprised of “meeting scenes”—scenes of greeting, fellowship and farewell.

Finally at his destination (one to which Luke has been building for several chapters now), Paul is enveloped into just such a scene. The church at Rome—to the surprise Paul’s captors—“hear of Paul’s arrival and come to see him, doing with him what citizens of a great city would do for a visiting emperor or a returning [king]: they come out some distance to meet him, to escort him with them into their city” (Wright, 239).

With this something striking happens: for all his visions and special revelations, for all the works of the Spirit done through, for and around him—the healings, the tongues, the miraculous escapes and amazing preservations of life—for all the certainty of knowing (from the lips of Jesus himself) “Take courage, for as you have testified to the facts about me in Jerusalem, so you must testify also in Rome” (Acts 23:11), for all of this and more, what finally grips Paul’s heart and erupts in praise and courage is the plain and ordinary sight of other weary Christians—God’s unimpressive though much-loved family—coming out to meet him on the road and walk the last few miles together.

No “Sidelines”

2009-12-23T09:36:00.000-08:00

Acts 28:3-6

When Paul had gathered a bundle of sticks and put them on the fire, a viper came out because of the heat and fastened on his hand. When the native people saw the creature hanging from his hand, they said to one another, “No doubt this man is a murderer. Though he has escaped from the sea, Justice has not allowed him to live.” He, however, shook off the creature into the fire and suffered no harm. They were waiting for him to swell up or suddenly fall down dead. But when they had waited a long time and saw no misfortune come to him, they changed their minds and said that he was a god.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

Luke simply cannot help, now, allowing the pattern of accusation-and-vindication to run through story after story. “This man could have been set free,” declares Agrippa. The storm does its worst but Paul and his companions are “saved.” The snake and “Justice” do their worst and Paul is hailed as a god (236).

The whole scene, of course, provides yet another example, before Italy itself is finally reached, of an official finding that Paul was a man to be trusted and valued, on top of the islanders finding that, despite an apparent accusation (via the snake) he was in fact innocent. This sets the narrative up for the final voyage and the theology for its full meaning. The sea and the snake have done their worst and are overcome. New creation is happening, and the powers of evil cannot stop it. Paul may arrive in Rome a more bedraggled figure than he would have liked, but the gospel which he brings is flourishing, and nobody can stop it (237).

Aaron Orendorff

However we may feel at times and whatever our particular situation my look like, the final chapters of Acts (among there other aims) serve to illustrate that in reality (that is, under the kind and sovereign providence of God) there are no “sidelines” in gospel-service: no “back-alleys,” no “wrong-ways,” no “holding-patterns,” no “missteps.” Reading from Acts 24 to Acts 28 only takes a few minutes, so it’s easy to forget that for Paul more than two years have passed since he was told by the Lord, “Take courage, for as you have testified to the facts about me in Jerusalem, so you must testify also in Rome” (Acts 23:11). Two years spent waiting in jail on account of petty, political posturing. Then, as if that weren’t discouraging enough, a sea-voyage that goes from bad, to worse, to catastrophic until finally, water-logged and half-drown, he arrives on a foreign shore only to be bit by a viper while trying to warm himself by the fire.

And yet, all of this is for a purpose. The venom doesn’t kill Paul and he is vindicated before the island’s natives. The father of the “chief man of the island, named Publius” (a Roman) is nearly dead and Paul heals him. News of this healing spreads and before you know it “the rest of the people on the island who had diseases also came and were cured.” Finally, as v. 10 concludes, “They [the people of the island] also honored us greatly, and when we were about to sail, they put on board whatever we needed.”

However we may feel at times and whatever our particular situation my look like, there are no “sidelines” in gospel-service.

Through Waters to Salvation

2009-12-22T09:22:00.000-08:00

Acts 27:42-44

The soldiers’ plan was to kill the prisoners, lest any should swim away and escape. But the centurion, wishing to save Paul, kept them from carrying out their plan. He ordered those who could swim to jump overboard first and make for the land, and the rest on planks or on pieces of the ship. And so it was that all were brought safely [literally, “thoroughly saved”] to land.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

All hope of being “saved” had been lost (verse 20). If the sailors had carried out their secret plan to slip away in the ship’s boat, they could none of them be “saved” (verse 31). Taking some food—involving the breaking of bread!—will be “for your salvation” (verse 34). The centurion wished to “save” Paul (verse 43). And the end result is that they all were “utterly saved” in coming to land (verse 44). Luke could hardly make it clearer. As in Philippi, yet again, the meaning “rescued” is clear, and the meaning “saved in a far, far deeper sense” corresponds to Luke’s larger intention throughout this chapter. Through the waters to safety: that’s the Noah story, the Exodus story, the John-the-Baptist story, the Jesus story. The Paul story. Our story. . . . Through the cross, through the waters, to salvation. This is at the heart of Paul’s own understanding of Jesus’ death, and, I suggest, Luke’s as well (233-234).

re:Generātion/5(hundred) Hours - Community

2009-12-21T11:16:00.000-08:00

5(hundred) Hours - Community from New Life Church on Vimeo.

The Storm at Sea

2009-12-21T10:33:00.000-08:00

Acts 27:18-26

Since we were violently storm-tossed, they began the next day to jettison the cargo. And on the third day they threw the ship's tackle overboard with their own hands. When neither sun nor stars appeared for many days, and no small tempest lay on us, all hope of our being saved was at last abandoned.

Since they had been without food for a long time, Paul stood up among them and said, “Men, you should have listened to me and not have set sail from Crete and incurred this injury and loss. Yet now I urge you to take heart, for there will be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship. For this very night there stood before me an angel of the God to whom I belong and whom I worship, and he said, ‘Do not be afraid, Paul; you must stand before Caesar. And behold, God has granted you all those who sail with you.’ So take heart, men, for I have faith in God that it will be exactly as I have been told. But we must run aground on some island.”

Aaron Orendorff

Being an apostle is hard, exhausting, draining work. When God decides to send a person somewhere—i.e., Paul to Rome—what we normally expect is for Him to send them first-class, or, at the very least, with speed and safety. But that simply isn’t the case.

Fourteen days at sea. “All hope” abandoned. No food. Jettisoned cargo. The tackle thrown overboard. Even the lifeboat cut loose. What is God’s point?

God’s point is this: There’s work to be done. Looking ahead to chapter 28, Paul is to be used mightily on the island of Malta as a witness to God’s preserving power before taking his stand in the presence of Caesar. In other words, the storm, with all its fearful fury, is not ultimately opposed to God’s plan; it is his plan. Though it is impossible to see from within, the storm is God’s agent, accomplishing his will, testing his servant and driving forward his mission.

Three Arguments

2009-12-18T11:31:00.000-08:00

Acts 26:24-27

And as he was saying these things in his defense, Festus said with a loud voice [shouted at the top of his voice], “Paul, you are out of your mind; your great learning is driving you out of your mind.”

But Paul said, “I am not out of my mind, most excellent Festus, but I am speaking true and rational words. For the king knows about these things, and to him I speak boldly. For I am persuaded that none of these things has escaped his notice, for this has not been done in a corner. King Agrippa, do you believe the prophets? I know that you believe.”

Aaron Orendorff

While Luke’s record of Paul’s defense against Festus’ accusation is certainly a condensed summary of the apostle’s actual speech and not an exact replication, three substantial arguments may be identified. First, Paul’s message is intellectual coherent: “I am speaking true and rational words.” Literally: “words of truth and reasonableness (i.e., mental soundness).” Second, Paul’s message is historically reliable: “none of these things has escaped his [King Agrippa’s] notice, for this has not been done in a corner.” The events of the gospel are not private, spiritual events; they are public, historical events that can be verified in space and time. Third, Paul’s message is religiously consistent: “King Agrippa, do you believe the prophets? I know that you believe.” Paul appeals, as his does throughout Acts, to the Jewish Scriptures to validate (for lack of a better word) the “religious” authenticity (i.e., the thoroughly Jewish pedigree) of the gospel.

Paul: A Light to the Gentiles

2009-12-17T09:54:00.000-08:00

Acts 26:15-18

“And I said, ‘Who are you, Lord?’

“And the Lord said, ‘I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. But rise and stand upon your feet, for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you as a servant and witness to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you, delivering you from your people and from the Gentiles—to whom I am sending you to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’”

Aaron Orendorff

Paraphrasing Paul’s call, Jesus tells him: I have made you a “servant and witness” both to what you have just seen—that is, my post-resurrection glory, that I am who my followers say I am—and to what you will see in the future—which, again, is not going to be some abstract vision of God or revelatory lessons in theology, ethics or philosophy, but rather, revelations of Me.

Jesus, in other words—crucified and risen—is the person to whom Paul has become a servant and a witness. This commission by Christ is a call, therefore, to mission: “I am sending you.” The purpose of Paul’s mission is described in four parts: (1) to open their (the “Gentiles’”) eyes, so that (2) they may turn (that is, repent) from (2a) darkness to light and (2b) from the power of Satan to God, (3) in this way they will receive “forgiveness and sin,” and (4) a place in God’s family, described here as “those who are sanctified by faith in me.”

re:Generātion Video Update - Mission

2009-12-16T09:45:00.000-08:00

5(hundred) Hours - Mission from New Life Church on Vimeo.

Resurrection, Paul’s “Conversion” and the Promises Made to Abraham

2009-12-16T09:41:00.000-08:00

Acts 26:6-8

Then Paul stretched out his hand and made his defense: . . . “And now I stand here on trial because of my hope in the promise made by God to our fathers, to which our twelve tribes hope to attain, as they earnestly worship night and day. And for this hope I am accused by Jews, O king! Why is it thought incredible by any of you that God raises the dead?”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

[T]his passage is saying, at its heart, that though there was an obvious break between Sal of Tarsus prior to his conversion and Paul the apostle afterwards, there was a strong line of continuity making a bridge between the two. This is, in fact, where the language of “conversion” may be misleading because, as Paul himself would have put it, and indeed did put it frequently to anyone who would listen, at no point did he waver in his belief that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was and is the true God, the one and only creator God. He didn’t change Gods. From his point of view, he didn’t even, really, change religions. Rather, he followed (so he would have said) the one God, the creator, Abraham’s God, down the line he had always promised to lead his people, the line that would lead to resurrection (206).

His message about resurrection—(a) that it is what we were all waiting for, and (b) that is has happened, to our enormous surprise, in Jesus—is at the heart of his claim that this changes everything at the same moment as fulfilling everything. It is the changes, of course, which are the controversial bits, but Paul’s point would be that they are not changes for change’s sake, nor changes because there was something wrong with the old ways, but changes because God’s new world had arrived, fulfilling the promises to bless all nations through Abraham, and that in this new world it appeared that some things which Jews, himself included, had thought were fixed for ever had turned out to be, quite deliberately from God’s point of view, only temporary (207-208).

Points of Contention

2009-12-15T09:47:00.000-08:00

Acts 25:19

And Festus said, . . . “Rather they [Paul’s accusers] had certain points of dispute with him about their own religion and about a certain Jesus, who was dead, but whom Paul asserted to be alive.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

This is how the Christian faith appeared to one outsider, at least. Paul was not charged with the sort of crimes one might have imagined. Instead, it was a matter of disputes about the Jewish religion, “and about some dead man called Jesus whom Paul asserted was alive.”

There we have it: resurrection from the pagan viewpoint. At least it shows Festus had been listening; and it shows, too, how “resurrection” appeared. It wasn’t “about some dead man called Jesus who had gone to heaven and whom one might have a relationship.” It was about a dead man—no question in Festus’ mind—and about the fact that Paul said he was alive—no question of that either. And “alive” meant “alive,” bodily of course (202-203).

Aaron Orendorff

Throughout the book of Acts, Luke presents the contention between Judaism and the early followers of Jesus as regarding two interlocking points: first, the continuing validity of the Mosaic Law (and with it the role of both circumcision and the temple) and second the person of Jesus Christ (namely, did he or didn’t he rise from the dead?). In Paul we see a picture of how a positive answer to the second point—“Yes, in fact, Jesus did rise from the dead and is now reigning with power over the nations.”—deeply affects one’s answer to the first—“The role of the Mosaic Code is therefore fundamentally fulfilled.”

Providence and Initiative

2009-12-14T09:58:00.000-08:00

Acts 25:10-12

But Paul said, “I am standing before Caesar's tribunal, where I ought to be tried. To the Jews I have done no wrong, as you yourself know very well. If then I am a wrongdoer and have committed anything for which I deserve to die, I do not seek to escape death. But if there is nothing to their charges against me, no one can give me up to them. I appeal to Caesar.” Then Festus, when he had conferred with his council, answered, “To Caesar you have appealed; to Caesar you shall go.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

Paul has been promised by God through his sense of vocation (19.21), and has been promised by Jesus through a special vision (23.11), that he would get to Rome. What Luke has now told us is that Paul himself has had to take responsibility, at one level, for making this happen.

This is an important point about the interaction between God’s purposes and our praying. Sometimes, when we pray and wait for God to act, part of the answer is that God is indeed going to act, but that he will do so through our taking proper human responsibility in the matter. It’s hard to tell in advance what the answer will be. There are times when it is “The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be still” (Exodus 14.14), and other times when it is “Be strong and very courageous, for you shall put this people in possession of the land I swore to give them” (Joshua 1.6). Discerning and discovering which applies in which case . . . is a major element in the discernment to which all Christians, and especially all Christian leaders, are called (199).

Paul and Felix

2009-12-12T11:30:00.000-08:00

Acts 24:24-25

After some days Felix came with his wife Drusilla, who was Jewish, and he sent for Paul and heard him speak about faith in Christ Jesus. And as he reasoned about righteousness and self-control and the coming judgment, Felix was alarmed and said, “Go away for the present. When I get an opportunity I will summon you.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

Paul seems to have exercised . . . a kind of fearful fascination: the twisted, crooked ruler found the straight talking extraordinary and even appealing but of course frightening as the same time. If what Paul was saying was true, his own life was a tangled mess indeed. Faith in the Messiah, Jesus, would mean coming to terms with justice, self-control, and the coming judgment, and on each of those scores Felix must have realized that he was, to say the least, doing rather badly. . . .

We must never forget that Acts is the book in which Luke descries all that Jesus continued to do and to teach (1.1). This is what that continuing ministry looks like, as the living Jesus once more confronts a Roman governor and puts him straight on matters of truth, justice and the kingdom of God (John 18.33—19.12) (193).

The Way, the Law and the Prophets

2009-12-11T16:41:00.000-08:00

Acts 24:14-16

“But this I confess to you, that according to the Way, which they call a sect, I worship the God of our fathers, believing everything laid down by the Law and written in the Prophets, having a hope in God, which these men themselves accept, that there will be a resurrection of both the just and the unjust. So I always take pains to have a clear conscience toward both God and man.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

In other words, Paul is claiming the moral, theological and biblical high ground. For him, following Jesus is not an odd hobby that might lead him away from scripture and tradition, but it is the way, indeed the Way, by which the one true God has fulfilled all that the scriptures had said. Paul in other words, is claiming to be a loyal and faithful Jew. That was his boast throughout, that Jesus had not made him stop being true to his ancestral faith, but that Jesus had revealed who the God of Abraham had been all along and what he had been up to. . . . For Paul, the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus the Messiah meant not that he was abandoning the faith of his ancestors but that he was penetrating to its very heart (187).

Where do you go for justice?

2009-12-10T09:43:00.000-08:00

Acts 24:4-5

Tertullus [the spokesman] began to accuse him, saying . . . “We have found this man a plague, one who stirs up riots among all the Jews throughout the world and is a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes. He even tried to profane the temple, but we seized him. By examining him yourself you will be able to find out from him about everything of which we accuse him.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

Only when we allow the weight of these charges, and their prima facie plausibility, do we face the real theological problem that has been looming up behind the rather stylized account of a typical first-century barrister [lawyer] making a sly speech to a typical first-century provincial governor. If this is how the authorities get at “truth,” so that they can do “justice,” is the world threatening to collapse into chaos after all? Would not Paul be better doing what many revolutionaries have done in many places and at many times—and what many people today assume will result from any attempt to “combine religions and politics”—namely, to deny the validity of the court and declare that he wouldn’t have anything to do with it, since obviously it wasn’t capable of bringing about God’s justice? . . . Or are more important principles [than mere pragmatism] at stake, principles such as we find in the thirteenth chapter of his own letter to Rome? And do those principles not flow directly from the deeply Jewish belief that the God with whom we have to do is the God of both creation and providence? (184)

Innocent . . .

2009-12-09T10:12:00.000-08:00

Acts 23:25-29

And he [the Roman tribune] wrote a letter to this effect: “Claudius Lysias, to his Excellency the governor Felix, greetings. This man was seized by the Jews and was about to be killed by them when I came upon them with the soldiers and rescued him, having learned that he was a Roman citizen. And desiring to know the charge for which they were accusing him, I brought him down to their council. I found that he was being accused about questions of their law, but charged with nothing deserving death or imprisonment.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

The heart of the letter . . . is the point which yet again Luke wants to emphasize. Paul was accused of things to with the Jewish law, but my judgment as a Roman official is that he deserves neither death nor imprisonment. Where have we heard that before? Oh, in Corinth, Philippi, Thessalonica, a variant of it in Ephesus. And we shall hear it again, more than once, before the story is out. Who is Luke really writing for? What is he trying to tell them? (178)

Aaron Orendorff

There is—as has already been pointed out in previous posts—great irony in the method of Paul’s escape from the plot in Jerusalem to kill him. Those whom he has for all intents and purposes avoided in his previous missionary journeys, except for the occasional (and always uncomfortable) brush—i.e., the Romans—now serve as his rescuers. Moreover, the Roman tribune even vindicates Paul from his Jewish accusers: “I found that he was being accused about questions of their law, but charged with nothing deserving death or imprisonment.” Luke’s inclusion of this brief letter, as Wright points out, is meant not only to provide the political rationale for Paul’s narrow escape but to also stress his innocence (at least from the Roman perspective) in the matter at hand. It is evidence, in other words, not only in the trial Paul has just entered but in the larger question Luke’s narrative is after: Is Paul a blasphemer of the law or is he truly a messenger sent from Jesus, Israel’s resurrected Messiah?

“scuppered by a little boy”

2009-12-08T09:24:00.000-08:00

Acts 23:16, 19-21

Now the son of Paul's sister heard of their ambush, so he went and entered the barracks and told Paul. . . . The tribune took [Paul’s nephew] by the hand, and going aside asked him privately, “What is it that you have to tell me?” And he said, “The Jews have agreed to ask you to bring Paul down to the council tomorrow, as though they were going to inquire somewhat more closely about him. But do not be persuaded by them, for more than forty of their men are lying in ambush for him, who have bound themselves by an oath neither to eat nor drink till they have killed him. And now they are ready, waiting for your consent.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

[G]ranted that throughout history people have made plots against other people, and have often carried them out all too successfully, isn’t it interesting that on this occasion the plot which might so easily have done away with Paul once and for all was scuppered by a little boy? (172)

What we all want to know at this point is, of course, what did they all do next, once the plan was thwarted? . . . I imagine that few of them, if any starved. I imagine the high priest found a legal loophole to absolve them from their silly vow. Or maybe, since they were legal experts, they invented one themselves. It wouldn’t be the first or the last time. And—since part of the point of all this is that they were the ultra-orthodox legal experts, concerned above all for the honor of God and his law—there would be a nice irony in imagining them cautiously explaining to their own consciences how even that most solemn oath hadn’t quite meant what it said (173).

re:Generātion Video Update - Worship

2009-12-07T13:11:00.000-08:00

5(hundred) Hours - Worship from New Life Church on Vimeo.

The Road to Rome

2009-12-07T09:55:00.000-08:00

Acts 23:11

The following night the Lord stood by him and said, “Take courage, for as you have testified to the facts about me in Jerusalem, so you must testify also in Rome.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

Once again, the moment of crisis becomes the moment of vision. . . . And the word this time is encouraging indeed, and provides a key turning-point in Luke’s plot. Paul is not, after all, to die in Jerusalem. His sense of vocation, to go to Rome, was genuine. He isn’t promised a comfortable ride. But he will get there, and must do there what he has done here: bear witness (170).

Aaron Orendorff

We can trace what Wright calls Paul’s “sense of vocation, to go to Rome” back to the apostle’s two-year stay in Ephesus during his third and final missionary journey. Acts 19:21 reports, “Now after these events Paul resolved in the Spirit to pass through Macedonia and Achaia and go to Jerusalem, saying, ‘After I have been there, I must also see Rome.’” This same desire is expressed in Paul’s letter to the church at Rome, most likely written from Corith just after he left Ephesus (Acts 20:2-3): “I always ask that somehow by God’s will I may at last succeed in coming to you” (Rom. 1:10).

There is a great, almost comical (were it not so painful), irony to way in which God provided for this desire. Bound by the tribune in Jerusalem, with his life in profound and increasing danger, God sets into motion a series of “lucky” events that will eventually end (as all roads do) in the great city. The encouragement in Acts 23:11 is aimed at fortifying Paul for the coming storms (both literally and figuratively) and to assure him that the resurrected Christ is also the reigning Christ whose will (in this case, Paul arriving in Rome alive and ready to preach) cannot be thwarted by opposition, whatever its shape or form, but will actually be propelled by it.

Playing the Rome Card

2009-12-06T15:42:00.000-08:00

Acts 22:25-29

But when they had stretched him out for the whips, Paul said to the centurion who was standing by, “Is it lawful for you to flog a man who is a Roman citizen and uncondemned?” When the centurion heard this, he went to the tribune and said to him, “What are you about to do? For this man is a Roman citizen.” So the tribune came and said to him, “Tell me, are you a Roman citizen?” And he said, “Yes.” The tribune answered, “I bought this citizenship for a large sum.” Paul said, “But I am a citizen by birth.” So those who were about to examine him withdrew from him immediately, and the tribune also was afraid, for he realized that Paul was a Roman citizen and that he had bound him.

Aaron Orendorff

We have seen this sort of interaction once before: at the end of Acts 16, after Paul and Silas’ wrongful imprisonment in the Philippian jail. There Paul uses his Roman citizenship to extend his stay in Philippi by putting the city’s magistrates in an extremely uncomfortable position of their own political making. Here in Jerusalem he uses it in a way that, at first glance, seems to be about little more than saving his own skin . . . literally. Tracking the story out, however, we see that Paul’s protests set him on a course of speaking the truth to power that eventually ends in Roman itself.

Whether we attribute to Paul’s choice the big picture that eventually develops is beside the point. Paraphrasing Philippians 1:18, the lesson seems to be this: “. . . that in every way, even with political pretense, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice.”

“He should not be allowed to live.”

2009-12-05T10:22:00.000-08:00

Acts 22:14-16

“And [Ananias] said [to me], ‘The God of our fathers appointed you to know his will, to see the Righteous One and to hear a voice from his mouth; for you will be a witness for him to everyone of what you have seen and heard. And now why do you wait? Rise and be baptized and wash away your sins, calling on his name.’”

Acts 22:21-22

“And [Jesus] said to me, ‘Go, for I will send you far away to the Gentiles.’”

Up to this word they listened to him. Then they raised their voices and said, “Away with such a fellow from the earth! For he should not be allowed to live.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

If Paul thought this was a “defense,” he had another thing coming. They [the Jewish crowd] were going to show him otherwise. He was guilty, guilty as the Gentiles whose friend he had become, guilty as sin itself (159).

[T]hey will not see . . . that God is offering them all of that [righteousness, zeal and knowledge] and more: fulfillment of the covenant, the real and final “return from exile” promised in Deuteronomy 30, the gift of the law not just as a book to be studies but as the very beating of their own hearts, and, above all, the Messiah. The Messiah is the goal, the completion, the crown of it all, bringing to its destination the long, sad story of God’s people, taking upon himself all the anger, all the fear, all the bitterness of the centuries, and making an end of it for all except those who are now so identified with and by that anger that they dare not let it go for fear that they won’t know who they are anymore (160).

Loyal to Whom?

2009-12-03T09:38:00.000-08:00

Acts 21:27-28, 32-34

When the seven days were almost completed, the Jews from Asia, seeing him in the temple, stirred up the whole crowd and laid hands on him, crying out, “Men of Israel, help! This is the man who is teaching everyone everywhere against the people and the law and this place. Moreover, he even brought Greeks into the temple and has defiled this holy place.” . . . [The Roman tribune] at once took soldiers and centurions and ran down to them. And when they saw the tribune and the soldiers, they stopped beating Paul. Then the tribune came up and arrested him and ordered him to be bound with two chains. He inquired who he was and what he had done. Some in the crowd were shouting one thing, some another. And as he could not learn the facts because of the uproar, he ordered him to be brought into the barracks.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

The one note of clarity in the whole scene is the point Luke is making yet again. The mob is trying to kill Paul because of false charges to do with his disloyalty to the Jewish law and customs. And the Roman solder rescues him. Luke is not, as some have supposed, trying to suck up to Rome, saying that Romans always do the right thing while Jews always do the wrong thing. . . . No: Luke is trying to establish a pattern . . . . Give this man a chance and he will show you his innocence. Let cool-headed justice prevail over hot-tempered mobs, and Paul will be vindicated.

Luke is not just trying to make a general point, for a general readership, about Christians in general. He is making a specific point about Paul. Yes, wherever he goes there is a riot. But that is because he is being loyal to the true, if extraordinary and dangerous, purposes of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the creator God who will one day call the whole world to account. Every vindication of Paul is another advance signal of that eventual day (151).

re:Generātion/5(hundred) Hours

2009-12-01T12:18:00.000-08:00

In January, New Life Church is planning to launch a new young adults ministry Sunday nights entitled re:Generātion. I’m incredibly excited to be a part of the leadership team in preparation. Here’s a copy of the promotional video Grant Blomdahl, Taylor Reavely and myself put together to preview the ministry along with a pre-launch project called 5(hundred) Hours: A Call to Prayer.

re:Generation/5(hundred) Hours Promotional Video from New Life Church on Vimeo.

A Complicated Situation

2009-12-01T12:15:00.000-08:00

Acts 21:15, 18-22

After these days we got ready and went up to Jerusalem. . . . On the following day Paul went in with us to James, and all the elders were present. After greeting them, he related one by one the things that God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry. And when they heard it, they glorified God.

And they said to him, “You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed. They are all zealous for the law, and they have been told about you that you teach all the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or walk according to our customs. What then is to be done?”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

Speaking for a moment as a church leader, I take great comfort in Paul’s uncomfortable position. It’s where we often find ourselves. Zealots to the lefts of us, zealots to the right of us, zealots in front of us, volley and thunder their absolute and undoubted truths, while those of us who have to find a way through with real people who are struggling to live real lives in loyalty to the real Jesus know, but realize we simply cannot explain to such people, that things are more complicated than that. Not because we have made them complicated, or because the gospel itself isn’t clear, or because we are fatally compromised, but because real life in God’s world is complicated and the gospel must not only address that real life from a distance but must get down on its hands and knees alongside it and embrace it right there with the love of God (146-147).

Instructions to Elders

2009-11-29T19:08:00.000-08:00

Acts 20:28-30

Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood. I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them.

Acts 20:32

And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

More worrying still, some of the sheep, and even some of the shepherds, may turn out to be wolves in disguise (verse 30). And the attack will then take the form, not of direct contradiction or a clash of powers, but of distorting the truth. The greatest heresies do not come about by straightforward denial; most the church will see that for what it is. They happen when an element which may even be important, but isn’t central, looms so large that people can’t help talking about it, fixating on it, debating different views of it as though this were the only thing that mattered (137-138).

Aaron Orendorff

Paul’s remedy to the coming “wolves” is two-fold.

First, the elders are to “pay careful attention to [themselves] and the flock.” In other words, their vocation from the Lord via Paul is to know the sheep with which they have been entrusted, to know them intimately and personally, to care for them, understand them, watch over them and (in some cases) scrutinize them, closely and perhaps at times in ways quite uncomfortable to both the shepherd and the sheep. And yet all of this sheep-watching is to run parallel to the elders own self-watch: “[N]o good using your care for the flock as displacement activity to prevent you needing to think about your own discipline, obedience and maturity.”

Second, Paul commends the elders (and, by extension, the sheep) in general to God and in particular “to the word of his grace.” He describes this word, which would probably be better translated as “message,” as “able to build you up and give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified.” In other words, running alongside watchfulness must be a positive presentation of what God’s word—the truth of the gospel—really says. This doesn’t mean that heresy is never to be confronted head-on, Paul’s own letters rule out such an outlandish assumption. But it does mean, as the saying goes, the best defense is a good offense.

What Do You Value?

2009-11-28T10:44:00.000-08:00

Acts 20:18-27

You yourselves know how I lived among you the whole time from the first day that I set foot in Asia, serving the Lord with all humility and with tears and with trials that happened to me through the plots of the Jews; how I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable, and teaching you in public and from house to house, testifying both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance toward God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. And now, behold, I am going to Jerusalem, constrained by the Spirit, not knowing what will happen to me there, except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me. But I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God. And now, behold, I know that none of you among whom I have gone about proclaiming the kingdom will see my face again. Therefore I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all of you, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

All he knows is that it isn’t going to get any easier, and in that, at least, he was absolutely correct. Those in Ephesus who had watched him through a sustained ministry knew very well that he meant it when he said what he did in verse 24, which stands as a model, challenging but also strangely beckoning, to all who work for the gospel: “I don’t reckon my life at any value, so long as I can finish my course, and the ministry which I have received from the Lord Jesus, to bear witness to the gospel of God’s grace.” That witness, as much by what Paul was and did as by what he said, stands to this day (133).

Aaron Orendorff

With the Ephesian elders gathered to him, Paul’s farewell address draws together a number of themes that dominated his ministry.

First: the act of preaching. Paul uses four terms to describe this element of his ministry: declaring, teaching, testifying and proclaiming.

Second: the content of his preaching. Again, Paul strings together a number of descriptive (and most likely, conceptually parallel) phrases: “repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ,” “the gospel of the grace of God,” “the kingdom” and finally “the whole counsel of God.”

Third: his lifestyle. Just as Paul’s preaching was Christ-shaped, in that what he “proclaimed” was Jesus Christ crucified and raised, so too was his lifestyle. He describes it, in v. 19, as “serving the Lord with all humility and with tears” as he faced various trials and torments at the hands of his opponents. The reference here to “tears” reminds us that the pain Paul endured was real. There was no hint in Paul’s ministry of either unfeeling stoicism or proud triumphalism. This is reiterated in vv. 22-24 when he tells the elders that although he doesn’t know what exactly will happen to him in Jerusalem what he does know is that “in every city imprisonment and afflictions await me.” Nonetheless, what drives Paul is not the value of his life but the aim of “finishing the course” and faithfully discharging the “ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus.”

The question then is this: what do I value? What is it that drives and motivates me? Is it “my own life,” that is my own comfort and well-being? Perhaps it’s my reputation, being liked, well thought of or made much of? Perhaps it’s success, even ministerial success? It is absolutely inevitable that something will drive us and motivate us to say what we say, be who we are and to what we do. The basic choice this: either it will be our own lives that are of ultimate value or it will be the life of Christ.

“Manmade gods are no gods at all.”

2009-11-25T10:11:00.000-08:00

Acts 19:23-27

About that time there arose no little disturbance concerning the Way. For a man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no little business to the craftsmen. These he gathered together, with the workmen in similar trades, and said, “Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth. And you see and hear that not only in Ephesus but in almost all of Asia this Paul has persuaded and turned away a great many people, saying that gods made with hands are not gods. And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis may be counted as nothing, and that she may even be deposed from her magnificence, she whom all Asia and the world worship.”

Acts 19:35 & 37

And when the town clerk had quieted the crowd, he said, “. . . you have brought these men here who are neither sacrilegious nor blasphemers of our goddess.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

There are all kinds of lessons here for the church in later days. Have we learned the lesson of being so definite in our witness to the powerful name of Jesus that people will indeed find their vested interests radically challenged, while being so innocent in our actual behavior that there will be nothing to accuse us of? There is fine line to be trodden between a quiet, ineffective “preaching” of a “gospel” which will make no impact on real life, on the one hand, and a noisy, obstreperous, personally and socially offensive proclamation on the other (123).

Aaron Orendorff

The accusation here in Acts 19:23-27 that Paul has been preaching against “Artemis of the Ephesians,” persuading “a great many people” to turn away from idolatry and therefore destabilizing the “business” and the “wealth” her idolatry supports is probably a direct response to the kind of preaching represented in the Areopagus sermon from Acts 17:22-31. There, Paul’s critique of idolatry is simple: “The God who made and sustains the world does not ‘live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands.’ We are his offspring and therefore ought not to think ‘that the diving being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man’” (17:24, 29).

The issue of idolatry is, in this instance, one of control. Manmade gods are not gods. The real, creator God cannot be contained, neither in a temple nor a statue. The real, creator God cannot be manipulated, neither by sacrifice nor service. Such a God, as C. S. Lewis said, is without a doubt unsafe and yet thoroughly and unreservedly good.

Gospel-Power and Gospel-People

2009-11-24T09:45:00.000-08:00

Acts 19:18-20

Also many of those who were now believers came, confessing and divulging their practices. And a number of those who had practiced magic arts brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all. And they counted the value of them and found it came to fifty thousand pieces of silver. So the word of the Lord continued to increase and prevail mightily.

Aaron Orendorff

There is an organic and indissoluble connection between the life of God’s people and power of God’s word.

Here in Ephesus, the connection in this: wide-scale, public repentance of a very costly and counter-culture kind is both preceded by and adds to the triumph of God’s word. This is not so much a formula for church-growth as it is a culturally specific example of what happens when the power of the gospel collides with and gets inside a city filled with every other kind of power imaginable—political, magical and religious.

The relationship is reciprocal—as Paul preaches, people change; as people change, Paul preaches. Another way to say this is: gospel-power produces gospel-people and gospel-people produce gospel-power. Both are uniquely dependent on the other.

Another “Twelve”

2009-11-20T12:01:00.000-08:00

Acts 19:6-8

And when Paul [after their baptism into the name of Jesus] had laid his hands on [the disciples of John the Baptist], the Holy Spirit came on them, and they began speaking in tongues and prophesying. There were about twelve men in all. And he entered the synagogue and for three months spoke boldly, reasoning and persuading them about the kingdom of God.

Aaron Orendorff

It’s tempting, when studying a text like the Bible, to want to make much of numbers. Numerology, however—as well as it might sell books—is a genre related matter and not one of hidden mathematics and Gnostic codes. Still, in Acts 19:7, we must ask the question: why does Luke take the time to point out that there were “about twelve men in all”? We have, at this point in the story, moved through a number of conversion scenes—some with individuals, some with groups; some in private, some in public—and yet rarely does Luke record, to the chagrin of our fascination with numbers, how many people were included. Yet here he does. Why is that?

One clue to answering the question is to ask another: where else have we seen a collection of themes like those in Acts 19:6-8, namely, the baptism of John, baptism into “the name of Jesus,” a miraculous outpouring of the Holy Spirit resulting in prophesy and tongues, a recorded number of converts (“twelve”) and the bold declaration that God’s “kingdom” has come?

To answer that question we must go back to the very beginning of the book. After speaking to his disciples for forty days about God’s kingdom (Acts 1:3), Jesus instructs them to stay in Jerusalem until “the promise of the Father” arrives, which he describes in terms of a Holy Spirit “baptism” greater than the baptism of John (1:4-5). Interestingly, this “promise” only arrives after Matthias is chosen to replace Judas thus restoring the number of disciples to Jesus’ original twelve. Then, once the Holy Spirit does descend on the day of Pentecost and the twelve disciples begin to “speak in other tongues” and prophesy as Joel foretold (2:4-21), Peter instructs the awed and cut-to-the-heart crowd to repent and “be baptized everyone of you in the name of Jesus.” As a result, Acts 2:41 tells us, “So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.”

The parallels are staggering and the point seems to be this: what’s happening here in Ephesus is precisely what happened in Jerusalem at Pentecost which is also precisely what happened inside Cornelius’ house in Acts 10: God is redefining and expanding the communal identity of His people.

So, why twelve? For the same reason that Jesus chose twelve originally and that Matthias replaced Judas: the locus of God’s people—the twelve tribes of Israel—have, at the in-breaking of God’s kingdom, been reconstituted around the person of Jesus and it is faith in Jesus (i.e., his name), instead of an ethnic or nationalistic marker, that now identifies those who belong to the Spirit-produced people of God.

Community and Learning

2009-11-19T09:38:00.000-08:00

Acts 18:24-26

Now a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria, came to Ephesus. He was an eloquent man, competent in the Scriptures. He had been instructed in the way of the Lord. And being fervent in spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus, though he knew only the baptism of John. He began to speak boldly in the synagogue, but when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him and explained to him the way of God more accurately.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

Luke offers us no set pattern for the way in which people come, step by step, into full membership of the Christian family and full participation in all the possibilities that are thereby open to them. Sometimes it happens this way, sometimes that. Just as humans grow to maturity at different paces, and some make great strides in one area while other have to catch up later, so it seems to be in the church. What matters is that we are open, ready to learn even from unlikely sources [i.e., “Priscilla helping her husband Aquila to teach a learned scholar from the great university city of Alexandria”], and prepared for whatever God has to reveal to us through the scriptures, the apostolic teaching, and the ongoing and always unpredictable common life of the believing family (108-109).

Aaron Orendorff

Throughout the book of Acts, great stress is laid upon the centrality of community in the Christian life. This stress runs contrary to a number of distinctly American assumptions about how life in general and Christianity in particular works. Many well-meaning (though misguided) disciples live out of on a nexus of individualistic principles that revolve, in one way or another, on the assumption “It’s just me and Jesus” or “It’s just me and the Bible.”

Here, with the introduction of Apollos, is one of the most powerful antidotes to those kinds of assumptions. Luke takes great pains to describe Apollos’ pedigree: a native of Alexandria (the great, as Wright points out, “university city”), an “eloquent man” (literally, a man of the word, that is, learned or cultured), “competent in the Scriptures,” having been “instructed in the way of the Lord,” “fervent in spirit,” and speaking and teaching “accurately the things concerning Jesus.” Luke could hardly have compiled a more flattering picture of a preacher-teacher. And yet, for all of his excellent learning and clear ability, two tent-makers—a man and a (gasp) woman—take this scholar aside in order to explain to him the way of God more accurately.

The lesson: God has built the Christian life—in all its various parts, including both learning and teaching—to be done in the context of community. To learn from and lean upon the insight and knowledge of others is not a weakness in faith, it is its fruit.

A Matter of Worship

2009-11-18T09:46:00.000-08:00

Acts 18:12-15

But when Gallio was proconsul of Achaia, the Jews made a united attack on Paul and brought him before the tribunal, saying, “This man is persuading people to worship God contrary to the law.” But when Paul was about to open his mouth, Gallio said to the Jews, “If it were a matter of wrongdoing or vicious crime, O Jews, I would have reason to accept your complaint. But since it is a matter of questions about words and names and your own law, see to it yourselves. I refuse to be a judge of these things.”

Aaron Orendorff

One of the most insightful features of Acts is that we are given (through the eyes of Luke) a window into both the actual content of Paul’s preaching as well as how those who heard it perceived it. Here, in Corinth, the gospel (in the understanding of its opponents) was conceived as a matter of worship; namely, worship “contrary to the law [nomos, or Torah].”

Contrary how? N. T. Wright calls attention to at least three points of contention: “[1] The Christians didn’t insist on circumcision for non-Jewish converts; [2] they did insist on believing Jews and Gentiles sharing table-fellowship; and [3] they had expressed, early on, a strong repudiation of the Temple in Jerusalem” (102).

I would add to these objections two more points of contention that actually provide for and undergird the first three. One, the central feature of Paul’s preaching was, as 18:5 itself reads, “that the Christ was Jesus.” The Messiah, Israel’s anointed king, had come and he had come in the person of Jesus to both suffer and rise. Two, faith in this Jesus—placing your personal trust in him and him alone—is God’s means of justifying all people without ethnic distinction so that in Jesus one, new, grace-dependent people have now been created. As Paul writes in Philippians 3:3, “We are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh . . . .”

Proximity, Responsibility and Success

2009-11-16T14:05:00.000-08:00

Acts 18:9-11

And the Lord said to Paul one night in a vision, “Do not be afraid, but go on speaking and do not be silent, for I am with you, and no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many in this city [Corinth] who are my people.” And he stayed a year and six months, teaching the word of God among them.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

[T]he last vision [Paul] had had was of someone telling him to go somewhere he hadn’t expected (16.9), this one was telling him to say put. And the Lord, speaking to him personally . . . gave him an interesting reason: There are many of my people in this city. In other words, evangelism is only just beginning here. Settle down and get on with it. I am at work here and you must trust me and stick it out.

Presumable, Paul needed the encouragement. Visions, both in the New Testament and in much later experience, are not normally granted just for the sake of it. . . . One of the many lessons Acts teaches quietly, as it goes along, is that you tend to get the guidance you need when you need it, not before, and not in too much detail. Enough to know that the Lord Jesus has many people in this city, and that he wants you, Paul, to stay here and work with them (98-99).

Aaron Orendorff

The question that immediately comes to mind when reading Acts 18:9-11 is this: Can I apply what Jesus said to Paul in Corinth to my situation here in (blank)? Are there also “many in this city who are [His] people?” How are we to answer this question?

One line of reasoning seems to be this: If, as Paul said in Acts 17:26, there is one creator God—“being Lord of heaven and earth”—who has sovereignly “determined” both when and where people live for the express purpose of seeking Him, then concluding that this same God—who passionately desires to be known—has also “determined” both when and where we, His redeemed people, live for the express purpose of leading others to seek Him seems more than just reasonable, it seems required. I recently heard someone say, “Proximity implies responsibility.” What this means is that God has placed us when and where we live to be agents of his gospel calling those around us—those within our “proximity”—to Him. We are, perhaps, not quite as guaranteed as Paul to assume all those we meet “are His people,” but we can be nonetheless assured that some certainly are. Proximity not only implies responsibility; it (to some degree) also implies success.

A Change in Time and the Resurrected Judge

2009-11-14T11:20:00.000-08:00

Acts 17:29-31

“Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

Now something new had happened! Now there was something to say, particular news about particular events and a particular man, which provided just the sort of new evidence that the genuinely open-minded agnostic should be prepared to take into account, that Epicurean and Stoic should see as forming both a confirmation of the correct elements in their worldviews and a challenge to the misleading elements, and that the ordinary pagan, trudging off to yet another temple with yet another sacrifice, should see as good news indeed. This God . . . has set a time when he is going to do what the Jewish tradition always said he would do, indeed what the must do if he is indeed the good and wise creator: he will set the world right, will call it to account, will in other words judge it in the full, Hebraic, biblical sense (92).

[W]ith the resurrection of Jesus God’s new world has begun; in other words, his being raised form the dead is the start, the paradigm case, the foundation, the beginning, of that great setting-right which God will do for the whole cosmos at the end. The risen body of Jesus is the one bit of the physical universe that has already been “set right.” Jesus is therefore the one through whom everything else will be “set right.”

The double challenge, then, is: first, repent. Turn back from your ways, particularly from your idolatry, your supposing that the gods can be made of gold and silver, or that they live in man-made houses, or that they want or need animal sacrifices! Turn away from these things, give them up, shake yourself free of them. And, second, turn to the living God . . . grope for him and find him (Acts 17.27). You will only do that if you abandon the parodies, the idols that get in the way and distract you from the true God. But if can be done. And it can be done because the living God is at work, changing the times and season so that now the day of ignorance is over and the time of revealing truth has arrived (93).

The Creator Lord and the Good News

2009-11-13T10:47:00.000-08:00

Acts 17:24-27

The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

So far, so Jewish. . . . [Paul’s message] is the message about the creator God, which is the foundation of all good news, all gospel. Without a creator God, even such good news as you might have (there is hope for bliss yet to come) is purchased at the cost of very bad news (this bliss will not involve the rescue of the present beautiful creation). . . . People sometimes grumble that Paul doesn’t seem to have put much “gospel” into this speech. But actually the whole thing is good news, from start to finish. The specific “good news” of Jesus Christ grows directly out of this doctrine of creation (89).

Aaron Orendorff

Back behind, or perhaps better, running in and through, our relationship with God is the reality of who God is. For example: as a relational, responsive Being, we pray, God listens and God acts. This is true; wonderfully true. And yet this is not all that is true. God is the creator: the vast, incomparable, incomprehensible, untamed God who “made the world and everything in it.” God is also the lord . . . the Lord “of heaven and earth,” of all there is, both physical and immaterial. He has not only made all that exists—all of it!—he has ordered it and governed it so that everything from the boarders of nations to the house you live in has been “determined” by him. And why has this sovereign, all-powerful creator Lord done this? As a show of cosmic strength? To flex is divine, narcissistic muscles? No. He has done so “that [we, all people] should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find.”

The Norming Norm

2009-11-12T09:52:00.000-08:00

Acts 17:11-12a

Now these [Berean] Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. Many of them therefore believed . . . .

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

What a relief to find some people who are actually prepared to say, in effect, “Well, we hadn’t even thought this sort of thing before; but let’s have a look at the scriptures and see if it’s true.” That is, again and again, all a preacher can really ask for: don’t take it from me, we say, go home and study the scriptures for yourselves and see how it all fits together (82-3).

Aaron Orendorff

Within the bounds of orthodox Christian faith, Scripture functions as a sort of ethical, epistemic and theological first principle. God’s word in written form is, as D. A. Carson and others have said, a “norming norm” against which all other norms, or standards, must be plumbed. Everything else—whether practical or philosophical—is held to this measurement. Why? Because the words of Scripture are the words of God.

The nobility of the Berean Jews—that is, their virtue—was integrally connected to their relationship to Scripture. It is not merely that they “received the word [of Paul] with all eagerness,” but that they examined this new word against God’s old word “to see if these things were so.” The result, of course, was not mere intellectual assent, as if all Paul was after was simple agreement—“Yes, that appears to be true.”—but rather belief, trust in the Messiah. Ethics—i.e., “nobility”—epistemology—i.e., “examination”—and theology—i.e., “belief”—all therefore meet together, held not in tension with one another but in proportion to the word of God and the holistic response it produces.

Another King!

2009-11-11T09:32:00.000-08:00

Acts 17:6-8

And when they could not find [Paul and Silas], they dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities, shouting, “These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also, and Jason has received them, and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.” And the people and the city authorities were disturbed when they heard these things.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

Well, yes. Paul would probably, if pushed, say that they were turning the world the right way up, because it was currently upside down, but he would most likely have been quite pleased to see that the people had at least understood that he wasn’t just offering people a new religious experience, but announcing to the world that its creator was at last setting it all right. And the charge goes on, “all of them [are] acting against Caesar’s decrees”—they don’t say which ones, but the meaning seems to be in the final phrase—“saying that there is another king, namely Jesus.”

Another king! Well, they really have got the message. Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn’t; the fundamental “decree” or “dogma” of Caesar is that he and he alone in the emperor (78).

[W]hen we stand back from the present incident and look at the whole sweep of Acts as it unfolds before our eyes, we begin to see a pattern emerging, a pattern which will grow and swell until it leaves us . . . wondering what on earth happened next. In Acts 1—12 Jesus is hailed as Messiah, king of the Jews, until eventually the present king of the Jews tries to do something about it but is struck down for his pagan arrogance. Now, from Acts 13 onwards, Jesus is being hailed as “another king,” “lord of the world”; but there already is a “lord of the world,” and anyone who knows anything about tyrants, particularly ancient Roman ones, knows well that they don’t take kindly to rivals on the stage (79).

A Political Citizen and a Christian Apostle

2009-11-10T09:39:00.000-08:00

Acts 16:37-38

But Paul said to them, “They have beaten us publicly, uncondemned, men who are Roman citizens, and have thrown us into prison; and do they now throw us out secretly? No! Let them come themselves and take us out.” The police reported these words to the magistrates, and they were afraid when they heard that they were Roman citizens.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

God had given [Paul] the extraordinary position of being a highly trained Pharisee and a Roman citizen, and had called him to do a job. Paul took it for granted that the tools God had given him were tools he should use.

This doesn’t provide an easy template for all subsequent Christians to figure out how they should employ their political or civic status within their Christian vocation. That will vary from time to time, regime to regime, and vocation to vocation. It does suggest, once more, that we should avoid easy dogmatisms of this or that kind and, while holding firmly to the belief that Jesus is Lord and the through him God’s kingdom is indeed coming on earth as in heaven, be ready for some surprises as to how that latter reality is brought to birth (73).

Aaron Orendorff

While much is often said in the church about spiritual gifting, very little instruction is devoted to the much more complicated question of position and vocation. Often, this imbalance is owing to an assumed, though unexamined, dualism that separates the spiritual from the secular. The church, it is implicitly presumed, has to do with what is spiritual in nature and its aim, therefore, ought to be to extract people more and more from the world around them into a cloistered, “godly” existence.

Here, however, in Acts 16, and elsewhere along his journeys, Paul makes full use of his political position as a Roman citizen in the service of his Christian vocation as an apostle of Jesus Christ. In Paul’s mind, the two roles—one secular, the other spiritual—were not separate entities but rather two sides of the same, holistic coin. Paul was who he was and he was willing to bring the totality of his life to bear on his calling to spread the gospel.

The question for us, therefore, ought to be similar: what “secular” positions has God placed us into and how are we being called to bring them to bear in service for the gospel?

Summarizing the Good News

2009-11-09T21:29:00.000-08:00

Acts 16:29-30

And the jailer called for lights and rushed in, and trembling with fear he fell down before Paul and Silas. Then he brought them out and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” And they said,“Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

[T]he Christian message, the evangel or “good news” . . . isn’t about getting in touch with one’s inner spiritual self. It isn’t about committing oneself to a life of worship, prayer and good works. It isn’t even about believing in some particular theory of how precisely God deals with our sins in the death of Jesus. It is about recognizing, acknowledging and hailing Jesus Christ as Lord . . . . Everything else is contained within that--all the volumes of systematic and pastoral theology, all the worship and prayers and devotions and dogma, all the ethics and choices and personal dilemmas (68).

“Come over to Macedonia and help us.”

2009-11-06T22:15:00.000-08:00

Acts 16:9-10

And a vision appeared to Paul in the night: a man of Macedonia was standing there, urging him and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” And when Paul had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go on into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.

Aaron Orendorff

Ultimately, the spread of the gospel is not about God winning at the expense of those who oppose him. Often, our vision of evangelism reflects an “I don’t want to bother you but . . .” sort of attitude instead—as the Macedonian vision presents it—an “I know you’re desperate for hope and meaning so let me share with you . . .” attitude. What a difference it would make to feel called not just by God by the lost around us to share the message of the gospel.

A Sharp Disagreement

2009-11-03T10:10:00.000-08:00

Acts 15:37-41

Now Barnabas wanted to take with them John called Mark. But Paul thought best not to take with them one who had withdrawn from them in Pamphylia and had not gone with them to the work. And there arose a sharp disagreement, so that they separated from each other. Barnabas took Mark with him and sailed away to Cyprus, but Paul chose Silas and departed, having been commended by the brothers to the grace of the Lord. And he went through Syria and Cilicia, strengthening the churches.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

[I]f anyone suggests that Luke . . . is trying to whitewash early church history, or make out that the apostles were fledged angles, they should think again. This is a shameful episode, and the fact that it stands in scripture should not make us afraid to say so. On the contrary, its scriptural status should be interpreted as a sign that the Bible itself is warning us against allowing such a thing to happen (52).

The [Greek word in v. 39] is paroxysm, from which of course we get “paroxysm” [meaning, a “sudden violent emotion or action”]. When the word is used in a medical context it can mean “convulsion” or refer to someone running a high fever. It carries overtones of severely heightened emotions, red and distorted faces, loud voices, things said that were better left unsaid. A sorry sight (53).

Aaron Orendorff

It doesn’t seem to be readily apparent what sort of lesson Luke is teaching in the separation of Barnabas and Paul. In one sense, of course, his primary aim isn’t to “teach a lesson” but rather to report the facts—the history of how the church came to be. And yet, Luke’s history (like all biblical history) isn’t a bare presentation historical events, but instead history with a purpose, history endowed with meaning, both theological and ethical. Instead of just venturing a guess, I’m going to spend a bit more time with this particular episode and see what comes up.

The Freeness of Grace

2009-10-30T10:23:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Edwards, On Knowing Christ

The grace of God in bestowing this gift [i.e., His Son] is most free. It was what God was under no obligation to bestow. He might have rejected fallen man, as he did the fallen angles. It was what we never did any thing to merit; it was given while we were yet enemies, and before we had so much as repented. It was from the love of God who saw no excellency in us to attract it; and it was without expectation of ever being required for it.—And it is from mere grace that the benefits of Christ are applied to such and such particular persons. Those that are called and sanctified are to attribute it alone to the good pleasure of God’s goodness, by which they are distinguished. He is sovereign, and hath mercy on whom he will have mercy (37).

Now whatever scheme is inconsistent with out entire dependence on God fall, and of having all of him, through him, and in him, it is repugnant to the design and tenor of the gospel, and robs it of that which God accounts its lustre and glory (47).

Aaron Orendorff

It is a profoundly frightening thing to be exposed to the sheer graciousness of the gospel. To understand, as Edwards writes, that God might have simply rejected fallen humanity and been none the less glorious, just or perfect is to simultaneously understand that nothing (save the free and sovereign activity of God) stands in the way our rejection. There was and is no “excellency” inherent to us us that motivated God to act; not even the prospect of our repentance, which is itself an outworking and result of grace, propelled God toward us. God and God alone—through the unmerited (and, in fact, counter-merited) grace of the gospel—is all that separates us from who we are, what we deserve and the rescue of forgiveness and eternal life.

Rebuilding the House of David

2009-10-26T10:46:00.000-07:00

Acts 15:13-19

After they finished speaking, James replied, “Brothers, listen to me. Simeon has related how God first visited the Gentiles, to take from them a people for his name. And with this the words of the prophets agree, just as it is written,
“‘After this I will return, and I will rebuild the tent of David that has fallen; I will rebuild its ruins, and I will restore it, that the remnant of mankind may seek the Lord, and all the Gentiles who are called by my name, says the Lord, who makes these things known from of old.’
“Therefore my judgment is that we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God . . .”

Amos 9:11-12

“In that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen and repair its breaches, and raise up its ruins and rebuild it as in the days of old, that they may possess the remnant of Edom and all the nations who are called by my name,” declares the LORD who does this.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

[C]rucially, [James] cites a biblical passage which sums up so much of the theology both of Acts and Paul: when the house of David has been re-established, then the Gentiles will come flocking in to share in the blessings that will follow. This passage, from the end of the prophet Amos (9.11-12), follows hard on the heels of a warning about God’s judgment on his own people . . . . But, once “the house of David that has collapsed” is restored—and James, like all early Christians believed as a first principle that that was what had happened through Jesus being established as Messiah by his resurrection—then not only will the nations come flocking in, but Israel itself will be restored (9.11-15). James goes for the center of the passage, and draws the conclusion that the Gentiles are indeed welcome as they are, on the basis of God’s grace and with faith in Jesus as their only badge of membership (44-5).

Through Many Tribulations

2009-10-23T11:05:00.000-07:00

Acts 14:21-23

When they had preached the gospel to that city and had made many disciples, they returned to Lystra and to Iconium and to Antioch, strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith, and saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God. And when they had appointed elders for them in every church, with prayer and fasting they committed them to the Lord in whom they had believed.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

The worrying thing, of course, is this: when Paul and Barnabas laid hands on the newly appointed elders, and then left them to it, that didn’t mean they were automatically “safe.” Indeed, it probably meant that that was when new times of testing would burst in on them. That is often how it works. But Paul meant what he said in verse 22: it is through much suffering that we shall enter God’s kingdom. And sometimes the suffering comes in the form of terrible, church-dividing controversy (36).

Aaron Orendorff

There’s nothing romantic about suffering in the moment. Many beautiful and profound words may be said in expectation and reflection, but the point of suffering is just that: suffering. No matter how prepared you are or how cross-centered your theology, suffering hurts (particularly in the first round). We may arm ourselves so as not to be blindsided nor sinfully provoked, but pain is still (nonetheless) pain. This, of course, is not by defect, but by design. Suffering is supposed to hurt.

So then, what makes suffering bearable in the short term and profitable in the long? Just this: it is in the suffering that Christ is known. Paul described the pattern like this: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead” (Phil. 3:10-11). Here in v. 22, Luke echoes Paul’s sentiments: “through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God.”

The journey isn’t easy. But again: that’s the point. To have a crucified King means living a crucified life.

The Glory of the Giver - John Piper on Prayer

2009-10-22T10:21:00.000-07:00

John 14:13

Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.

John 16:24

Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.

John Piper, Desiring God

[T]he pursuit of our interest and our happiness is never above God’s, but always in God’s. The most precious truth in the Bible is that God’s greatest interest is to glorify the wealth of His grace by making sinners happy in Him—in Him (159)!

How then do we glorify Him? Jesus gives the answer in John 15:7: “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” We pray! We ask God to do for us through Christ what we can’t do for ourselves—bear fruit. Verse 8 gives the result: “By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit.” So how is God glorified by prayer? Prayer is the open admission that without Christ we can do nothing. And prayer is the turning away from ourselves to God in the confidence that He will provide the help we need. Prayer humbles us as needy and exalts God as wealthy (161).

Psalm 50:15

. . . call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.

John Piper, Desiring God

God’s insistence that we ask Him to give us help so that He gets glory (Psalm 50:15) forces on us the startling fact that we must beware of serving God and take special care to let Him serve us, lest we rob Him of His glory (168).

Isaiah 64:4

From of old no one has heard or perceived by the ear, no eye has seen a God besides you, who acts [or, “works”] for those who wait for him.

John Piper, Desiring God

To wait! That means to pause and soberly consider our own inadequacy and the Lord’s all-sufficiency and to seek counsel and help from the Lord and to hope in Him (Psalm 33:20–22; Isaiah 8:17). . . . God aims to exalt Himself by working for those who wait for Him. Prayer is the essential activity of waiting for God—acknowledging our helplessness and His power, calling upon Him for help, seeking His counsel (170).

God is not looking for people to work for Him, so much as He is looking for people who will let Him work for them. The gospel is not a help-wanted ad. Neither is the call to Christian service. On the contrary, the gospel commands us to give up and hang out a help-wanted sign (this is the basic meaning of prayer). Then the gospel promises that God will work for us if we do. He will not surrender the glory of being the Giver (171).

1 Peter 4:11

If anyone speaks, he must do it as one speaking the very words of God. If anyone serves, he must do it with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen.

John Piper, Desiring God

The Giver gets the glory. So all serving that honors God must be a receiving. Which means that all service must be performed by prayer (173).

Taken Out of [Worldview] Context

2009-10-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

Acts 14:11-13

And when the crowds saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices, saying in Lycaonian, “The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men!” Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul, Hermes, because he was the chief speaker. And the priest of Zeus, whose temple was at the entrance to the city, brought oxen and garlands to the gates and wanted to offer sacrifice with the crowds.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

It is remarkable what can happen to a message when the hearers insist on inserting it firmly into their own worldview (29).

One of the things this passage highlights is the almost bottomless pit of potential misunderstandings that await anyone who tries to speak, and live out, the essentially Jewish message of the gospel, with its remarkable news of the one true creator God. . . . But the point of this whole narrative, in its larger framework, is precisely to show the explosive, if deeply confusing, effects of taking the message of Jesus out into the wider world. The journey of the gospel from Jerusalem “to the ends of the earth” (1.18) is unstoppable, but uncomfortable. That comes with the territory (31).

Telling the World’s Story and the Jesus Story

2009-10-21T09:59:00.000-07:00

Acts 14:1-4

Now at Iconium they entered together into the Jewish synagogue and spoke in such a way that a great number of both Jews and Greeks believed. But the unbelieving Jews stirred up the Gentiles and poisoned their minds against the brothers. So they remained for a long time, speaking boldly for the Lord, who bore witness to the word of his grace, granting signs and wonders to be done by their hands. But the people of the city were divided; some sided with the Jews and some with the apostles.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

[The gospel message must be], for our world and our day, what Paul’s message to the synagogue always was: that for which you have longed is here, but it doesn’t look like you thought it would.

But what is our society longing for? Peace; justice; freedom; a voice and a vote which will count; health. Around and above all of those, love. Inside and through all of those: to satisfy the hunger of the heart, a hunger which no amount of money, fine houses, fast cars, luxury vacations and love affairs will ever begin to reach. And the task of the church, though it certainly goes much wider and deeper than this, at least includes the following: that we should, in prayer and with wisdom, be able to tell the story of our world, our increasingly neo-pagan society, in terms of the long history of promises we have clung onto and pledges we have made and broken. We should be prepared to think it all through so we can tell the story that people know is their story, the one they always knew they wanted to hear. And we have to tell it so that, like Paul telling the story of Israel, it ends with Jesus, not artificially or like a [magician] pulling a rabbit out of a hat, but so that he appears as what and who he is: the truly human one, the one in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, the living bread through whom all our hungers are satisfied (26).

Responding to the Word of the Lord

2009-10-20T10:18:00.000-07:00

Acts 13:48-52

And when the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord, and as many as were appointed to eternal life believed. And the word of the Lord was spreading throughout the whole region. But the Jews incited the devout women of high standing and the leading men of the city, stirred up persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and drove them out of their district. But they shook off the dust from their feet against them and went to Iconium. And the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

The gospel doesn’t leave things intact. At the end of this first major missionary visit, we have three distinct groups: the angry and aggressive people who don’t want to know; the joyful, spirit-filled local people who had believed the message; and the two apostles, escaping persecution and scurrying on to the next town (22).

Aaron Orendorff

What is the proper response to “the word of the Lord”—i.e., the good news of God’s saving work through His Son, Jesus? The end of Acts 13 provides us with three examples.

First: believing obedience. V. 48 says it like this, “. . . as many as were appointed to eternal life [literally, the ‘life of the age’] believed.” This is perhaps one of the strongest connections made in the New Testament between belief and God’s election. Those who rightly responded to God’s word were not more spiritual sensitive than the rest, they weren’t wiser or more well educated nor were they more humble or virtuous. What distinguished them from those who disbelieved was God’s sovereign “appointment.”

Second: worship. Again, v. 48: “. . . when the Gentiles heard this, they began . . . glorifying the word of the Lord.” Hearing the message of salvation and embracing it leads immediately to spontaneous praise. We aren’t told how they glorified God’s word, whether it was through song or story, we are simply told that they did.

Third: joy. Twice in this paragraph we read “they began rejoicing” (v. 48) and “the disciples were filled with joy” (v. 52). Interestingly, while we readily understand the need to believe God’s word and give him glory, what is often overlooked is the equal necessity of joy. It is not enough to simply trust God, we must delight in Him. Nor is it the case that God is interested merely in our worship. What he desires in our joy. As Jeremy Taylor wrote, “God threatens terrible things if we will not be happy.”

Justified and Forgiven

2009-10-19T09:36:00.000-07:00

Acts 13:32-33, 38-39

“And we bring you the good news that what God promised to the fathers, this he has fulfilled to us their children by raising Jesus . . . .

“Let it be known to you therefore, brothers, that through this man forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you, and by him everyone who believes is freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses.”

Acts 13:38-39 (Literal Translation)

. . . and from everything that you were not able by the law of Moses to be justified by (in) him all who believe are justified.

Aaron Orendorff

The Law of Moses cannot justify, not because the law itself is somehow flawed or defective, but rather—as the literal translation of v. 38 reads— because we ourselves “were not able.” Romans 8:3-4 reads in many ways like an expanded commentary on vv. 38-39: “For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”

The point in both places is the same: the law (as a system of salvation) demands perfect obedience; we—in the weakness of our flesh, that is, under the power and willful influence of sin—cannot fulfill its “righteous requirements.” God, therefore, through the person of his Son, “condemned” sin by condemning Christ. In other words, God destroyed sin, emptying it of its legal power by, as Colossians 2:14 says, “nailing it to the cross.”

The result? Acts 13:38: “. . . through this man forgiveness of sins is proclaimed . . .”

Forgiveness, not because of who we are or what we’ve done; not because of our desert or even on account of our pleading. Forgiveness because “what God promised to the father, this he has fulfilled to us.”

Great David’s Greater Son or Sometimes It Takes a While

2009-10-16T09:39:00.000-07:00

Acts 13:16-23

So Paul stood up, and motioning with his hand said: “Men of Israel and you who fear God, listen. The God of this people Israel chose our fathers and made the people great during their stay in the land of Egypt, and with uplifted arm he led them out of it. And for about forty years he put up with them in the wilderness. And after destroying seven nations in the land of Canaan, he gave them their land as an inheritance. All this took about 450 years. And after that he gave them judges until Samuel the prophet. Then they asked for a king, and God gave them Saul the son of Kish, a man of the tribe of Benjamin, for forty years. And when he had removed him, he raised up David to be their king, of whom he testified and said, ‘I have found in David the son of Jesse a man after my heart, who will do all my will.’ Of this man's offspring God has brought to Israel a Savior, Jesus, as he promised.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

What [Paul] says about the early period, though, is enough to establish the fact that God’s method of operation is to choose his people, to prepare them, to lead them through one stage after another, and then finally, to give them “the man after my own heart” as king. In other words, perhaps the main point of verses 17-20 is to stress that God’s purposes normally take a while to unfold, to get to the place where the ultimate purpose can be revealed. . . .

But the point is not that the story stopped at David, but that in working with Israel for several hundred years to produce the king who would establish the pattern of someone ruling over God’s people with justice and truth . . . God was establishing a further pattern as well: the notion of waiting for the true king, the ultimate king, “great David’s greater son” (10).

A Would be god and the Word of God

2009-10-12T17:38:00.000-07:00

Acts 12:21-24

On an appointed day Herod put on his royal robes, took his seat upon the throne, and delivered an oration to them. And the people were shouting, “The voice of a god, and not of a man!” Immediately an angel of the Lord struck him down, because he did not give God the glory, and he was eaten by worms and breathed his last. But the word of God increased and multiplied.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

The official king of the Jews plays at being a pagan [god], and comes to a bad end; meanwhile, the word of God grows and multiplies. You couldn’t say it much clearer than that. . . .

The chief priests have been left spluttering angrily into their beards in Jerusalem; Saul of Tarsus, the most prominent and violent of the Pharisaic persecutors, has been converted; and now Herod Agrippa, having had an unsuccessful attempt at killing off the church’s main leadership, is himself suddenly cut down with a swift and fatal disease. . . .

There may be [in the life of the church] real reverses, tragedies and disasters. And yet the God who has revealed himself in and through Jesus remains sovereign, and his purpose is going ahead whatever the authorities from without, or various controversies from within, may do to try and stop it (190).

Heaven-to-Earth, Down-to-Earth

2009-10-10T09:40:00.000-07:00

Acts 12:11-16

When Peter came to himself, he said, “Now I am sure that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me from the hand of Herod and from all that the Jewish people were expecting.” When he realized this, he went to the house of Mary, the mother of John whose other name was Mark, where many were gathered together and were praying. And when he knocked at the door of the gateway, a servant girl named Rhoda came to answer. Recognizing Peter’s voice, in her joy she did not open the gate but ran in and reported that Peter was standing at the gate. They said to her, “You are out of your mind.” But she kept insisting that it was so, and they kept saying, “It is his angel!” But Peter continued knocking, and when they opened, they saw him and were amazed.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

I find all this strangely comforting: partly because Luke is allowing us to see the early church for a moment not as a bunch of great heroes and heroines of the faith, but as the same kind of muddled, half-believing, faith-one-minute-and-doubt-the-next sort of people as most Christian we all know. And partly I find it comforting, because it would be easy for skeptical thinkers to dismiss the story of Peter’s release from jail as a pious legend—except for the fact that nobody, constructing a pious legend out of think air, would have made up this ridiculous little story of Rhoda and the praying-but-hopeless church. It has the ring of truth: ordinary truth, down-to-earth truth, at the very moment that it is telling us something truly extraordinary and heaven-on-earthish (186).

Who’s King?

2009-10-09T09:01:00.000-07:00

Acts 12:1-3

About that time Herod the king laid violent hands on some who belonged to the church. He killed James the brother of John with the sword, and when he saw that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to arrest Peter also.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

Luke has told the story [of Acts] in such a way as to leave this first half with a direct showdown between the official, reigning “king of the Jews” and the unofficial king, Jesus the Messiah. The good news of his kingly rule has been announced in Jerusalem, Judaea and Samaria; the local king who would be most threatened by this has done his worst, and it hasn’t worked. Now, Luke is suggesting, it’s time to see what will happen when Jesus is announced as Lord of the world (183).

The Gospel Spreads to the “Hellenists”

2009-10-08T09:43:00.000-07:00

Acts 11:20-24

But there were some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyrene, who on coming to Antioch spoke to the Hellenists also, preaching the Lord Jesus. And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number who believed turned to the Lord. The report of this came to the ears of the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas to Antioch. When he came and saw the grace of God, he was glad, and he exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast purpose, for he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. And a great many people were added to the Lord.

Aaron Orendorff

To recap: first, “men of Cyprus and Cyrene,” scattered as a direct result of the persecution that “arose over Stephen,” arrived in Antioch and immediately begin “preaching the Lord Jesus”—that is, heralding the message of Jesus’ triumphant victory over sin, evil and death—to (stunned hush) the “Hellenists,” Greek-speaking, non-Jews. Second, the “hand of the Lord was with them” and as a result a “great number” both believe and turn (i.e., repent) to the Lord. Third, news of the Hellenist conversions reaches Jerusalem and Barnabas is dispatched to investigate the events. Fourth, upon arriving in Antioch, Barnabas witnesses what v. 23 calls “the grace of God,” the evidence of God’s hand at work in the lives of these newly converted non-Jews and, as the verse continues, is “glad.” Fifth, Barnabas exhorts the believers in Antioch to “stay firmly loyal to the Lord form the bottom of their hearts.” Sixth, again “a great many people” are then “added” to the Lord.

non-Jewish, Jewish Gentiles

2009-10-07T09:32:00.000-07:00

Acts 10:36-43

“As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell on them just as on us at the beginning. And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ If then God gave the same gift to them as he gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could stand in God's way?” When they heard these things they fell silent. And they glorified God, saying, “Then to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance that leads to life.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

[C]learly the major concern, which if allowed to stand would blow a hole right through the worldview of the “circumcision group,” was that these Gentiles had been admitted as full members of the new and rapidly developing Jesus-family without having had to become Jews in the process.

We can only conclude [from Luke’s “major repetition within his normally fast-paced narrative”] that for Luke the admission of Gentiles into God’s people, reformed around Jesus, without needing to take on the marks of Jewish identity, i.e., circumcision and the food taboos, was one of the central and most important things he wanted to convey (173).

[T]he question of the value of circumcision and the food laws . . . were the equivalents of the national flag at a time when the whole nation felt under intense pressure. To welcome Gentiles as equal brothers and sisters must have looked like fraternizing with the enemy. To be “zealous for the law,” including circumcision and the food laws, must have looked like the only way that would fit in with the will of God for his people (174).

The Gospel-Acts of God

2009-10-06T09:29:00.000-07:00

Acts 10:36-43

As for the word that [God] sent to Israel, preaching good news of peace through Jesus Christ (he is Lord of all), you yourselves know what happened throughout all Judea, beginning from Galilee after the baptism that John proclaimed: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. And we are witnesses of all that he did both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him on the third day and made him to appear, not to all the people but to us who had been chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. And he commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead. To him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

The key things to be highlighted, within that framework, are the things that God did. The gospel is after all a message about God, a message whose subject matter is Jesus. We already know, and Peter already knew, that Cornelius had showed boundless reverence for Israel’s God. So he tells the story of Jesus as the story of God’s actions (169).

Aaron Orendorff

If the gospel, as Wright says, is the “story of God’s actions” what were/are the acts God performs in the gospel as reported by Peter?

One, God “sent” his word to Israel—“preaching good news of peace through Jesus Christ.” Two, Jesus is both “Lord of all” and God’s Messiah—his “anointed” servant endowed with the “Holy Spirit and with power.” Three, Jesus’ identity as Lord and Messiah is evidenced by (1) his works—“he went about doing good and healing”—(2) his death and (3) his resurrection. Four, the apostles are God’s witnesses to all of this, sent out by God and Christ with the commission to “preach to the people” and, five, to declare that Jesus is “the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead.” Six, this story of God’s acts in Jesus is the culmination (the climax) of both Israel’s story and the story of creation as borne witness to by “all the prophets” with the intention that, seven, “everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

A Real, Deeply Human Process

2009-10-05T11:17:00.000-07:00

Acts 10:13-17, 19 & 28

And there came a voice to him: “Rise, Peter; kill and eat.” But Peter said, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.” And the voice came to him again a second time, “What God has made clean, do not call common.” This happened three times, and the thing was taken up at once to heaven. Now while Peter was inwardly perplexed as to what the vision that he had seen might mean . . .

And while Peter was pondering the vision, the Spirit said to him . . .

And [Peter] said to them, “You yourselves know how unlawful it is for a Jew to associate with or to visit anyone of another nation, but God has shown me that I should not call any person common or unclean.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

[T]he point which is being made in this graphic and deeply human story . . . is that, though Gentiles too had to repent and believe in Jesus just as Jew did, they did not have to become Jews before or after that process (165).

Aaron Orendorff

The process through which Peter is brought to a new understanding of God’s intentions is, as Wright puts it, a “deeply human story.” After receiving the initial vision, at first Peter simply refuses—“Lord, by no means”—and so (with amazing patience) the vision is repeated twice more. Still unconvinced by what would have been no doubt a disturbing revelation, v. 17 describes Peter as “inwardly perplexed” and (behold) “three men” suddenly (though not accidentally) appear at his doorstep. “Pondering the vision,” that is, turning it over in his mind, trying to makes sense of it, the Spirit begins to speak until finally—inside Cornelius’ house—Peter understands: “You yourselves know how unlawful it is for a Jew to associate with or to visit anyone of another nation, but God has shown me that I should not call any person common or unclean.”

Clean Labels

2009-10-04T18:32:00.000-07:00

Acts 10:9-16

The next day, as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the housetop about the sixth hour to pray. And he became hungry and wanted something to eat, but while they were preparing it, he fell into a trance and saw the heavens opened and something like a great sheet descending, being let down by its four corners upon the earth. In it were all kinds of animals and reptiles and birds of the air. And there came a voice to him: “Rise, Peter; kill and eat.” But Peter said, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.” And the voice came to him again a second time, "What God has made clean, do not call common.” This happened three times, and the thing was taken up at once to heaven.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

“Get up, Peter!” says a voice, “Kill and eat!”

Peter is horrified. “Certainly not! I’ve never done that before and I’m not going to start now! It’s unclean!”

Then comes the response which echoes through the centuries, and still challenges all kinds of prejudice.

“What God has made clean, you must not call unclean” (160).

Aaron Orendorff

As trite as it might sound, the temptation to call something “unclean” is basically the religious equivalent of the social temptation to “label.” What makes labeling so comfortable—and similarly, what makes calling something unclean so comfortable—is that both eliminate the need for wisdom, sanity and judgment in the otherwise complex and rightly uncomfortable process of discernment. Once a thing is labeled, we know what it is. There are no ambiguities, no shades, no need to really think. But if God, through the gospel, has made all things clean, then nothing—in and of itself—is off limits. If God is in the business of redeeming creation, not eliminating or escaping it, then money and sex are no more the enemies of true spirituality than food is. What matters—what counts—isn’t how much we can avoid, but how much we can bring under the lordship of Jesus.

The Seamtress Peter Raised

2009-10-03T21:02:00.000-07:00

Acts 9:39-41

So Peter rose and went with them. And when he arrived, they took him to the upper room. All the widows stood beside him weeping and showing tunics and other garments that Dorcas made while she was with them. But Peter put them all outside, and knelt down and prayed; and turning to the body he said, “Tabitha, arise.” And she opened her eyes, and when she saw Peter she sat up. And he gave her his hand and raised her up. Then calling the saints and widows, he presented her alive.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

[T]he group Peter visited in Joppa was basically a group of widows (verses 39, 41). . . . There is something poignant about this group, who by definition were all carrying one of life’s largest forms of grief, becoming recognized and acknowledged as having not merely a claim on the general resources, but a significant contribution to make. Do not belittle the ministry of stitching, sewing, knitting and generally providing for needs of the larger community . . . . And do not forget to celebrate . . . the fact that the apparently ordinary people are not ordinary to God, and that when we tell the story of the great sweep of God’s purpose in history there are, at every point, the Aeneases and Dorcases who smile out of the page at us, like the robin in the garden, and remind us what it’s really all about (155).

The Son of God

2009-10-02T09:27:00.000-07:00

Acts 9:20 & 22

And immediately he proclaimed Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “He is the Son of God.” . . . But Saul increased all the more in strength, and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

But wait a minute. Has not the phrase “son of God” subtly changed in the process? Yes, it has. It has gone from meaning simply “Messiah” [God’s anointed king, the “son” of David], or simply “Israel” [God’s “first born son”], to something else, something which the Old Testament had not envisaged, or not in that way, but which looms up behind as a great unspoken possibility. . . . Somehow, it seems, the early Christians, and perhaps pre-eminently Paul, are discovering that within the expectation of a Messiah who would be, in some sense, “God’s son,” there was a deeper truth: that the Messiah, when he came, would be God’s own second self, God in human form, wisdom incarnate. The phrase “son of God” came, very early in the Christian movement, to carry all of that meaning, without leaving behind (indeed, depending for its full sense upon) the “messianic” sense. And all of it made shocking but very clear sense of what Saul had seen in his vision on the road: “the glory of God in the face of Jesus the Messiah” (150-1).

Chosen to Suffer for the Name

2009-10-01T09:21:00.000-07:00

Acts 9:15-16

But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

The Lord is calling Saul for a particular task. The time has come for the message about the one true God, the Jewish good news of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to be told to the wider world, the world of pagans, Gentiles, people who know nothing and care less about this God. And the person to do this task, to spearhead the work of getting the message out to those outside the law, must be the one who most clearly, of all others of his generation, had been the most keen to stamp the message out. . . . [W]hen you want to reach the pagan world, the person to do it will be a hard-line, fanatical, ultra-nationalist, super-orthodox Pharisaic Jew. And then they say God doesn’t have a sense of humor (145).

Aaron Orendorff

The very instrument chosen to “carry [the] name” of Jesus is the same instrument chosen to suffer for its sake. In fact, the call, it appears, is one in the same. To bear the name of Jesus—as all followers of Christ do—means being remade into his likeness. This likeness, as Paul is soon to discover, means more than just moral conformity and spiritual satisfaction. It means “becoming like him in his death” in order to likewise share in his resurrection (Phil. 3:10):
We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you (2 Co. 4:8-12).

Saul “Seeing”

2009-09-30T09:44:00.000-07:00

Acts 9:3-5

Now as he went on his way, he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. And falling to the ground he heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” And he said, “Who are you, Lord?” And he said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

Suddenly Saul’s world turned upside down and inside out. Terror, ruin, shame, awe, horror, glory and terror again swept over him. Years later he would write of seeing “the glory of God in the face of Jesus the Messiah” (2 Corinthians 4.6), and though, to show that this was something he shared with all Christians, he described it as God shining “in our hearts,” elsewhere he makes it clear that his own “seeing” was unique, a seeing, like Stephen in his death, which involved the coming together of heaven and earth, earthly eyes seeing heavenly reality. “Am I not an apostle” he wrote to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 9.1). “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?”

But this “seeing” went far, far beyond a mere qualification for office . . . . It confirmed everything Saul had been taught; it overturned everything he had been taught. The law and the prophets had come true; the law and the prophets had been torn to pieces and put back together in a totally new way. It was a new world; it was the old world made explicit. . . . It showed him that the God he had loved from childhood, the God for whose glory he had been so righteously indignant, the God in whose name and for whose honor he was busy rounding up those who were declaring that Jesus of Nazareth was Israel’s Messiah, that he was risen form the dead, that he was the Lord of the world (this Jesus who had led Israel astray with his magic tricks and false prophecy about the Temple, this Jesus who the Romans had, thankfully, crucified, to make it clear that whoever was God’s Messiah it certainly couldn’t be him!)—it showed him that the God he had been right to serve, right to study, right to seek in prayer, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, had done what he always said he would, but done it in a shocking, scandalous, horrifying way. The God who had always promised to come and rescue his people had done so in person. In the person of Jesus (140-1).