Ecclesiophilist

Luther on Ministerial Praise and Criticism

krandolph — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 21:20:14 +0000

The ministers of the Gospel should be men who are not too easily affected by praise or criticism, but simply speak out the benefit and the glory of Christ and seek the salvation of souls.

Whenever you are being praised, remember it is not you who is being praised but Christ, to whom all praise belongs. When you preach the Word of God in its purity and also live accordingly, it is not your own doing, but God’s doing. And when people praise you, they really mean to praise God in you. When you understand this–and you should because “what hast thou that thou didst not receive?”–you will not flatter yourself on the one hand and on the other hand you will not carry yourself with the thought of resigning from the ministry when you are insulted, reproached, or persecuted. (Commentary on Galatians 5:25)

Square One in the Quest for Meaningful Existence

krandolph — Thu, 05 May 2011 15:05:47 +0000

M.L. Barre said, “The fear of Yahweh is…the first step – square one – in the quest for a meaningful existence.” This an assessement of the importance of the concept of the fear of the Lord in the wisdom literature of the Bible. The fear of the Lord is a major theme in the Book of Proverbs. Just a few of the references demonstrate its significance. The fear of the Lord…

is the beginning of knowledge (1:7)
is the beginning of wisdom (9:10)
prolongs life (10:27)
is a fountain of life (14:27)
leads to life (19:23)

So, what does it mean to fear the Lord? Here are some helpful definitions.

It is that indefinable mixture of reverence and pleasure, joy and awe which fills our hearts when we realize who God is and what He has done for us. It is a love for God which is so great that we would be ashamed to do anything which would displease or grieve Him, and makes us happiest when we are doing what pleases Him. (Sinclair Ferguson)

The fear of God in which godliness consists is the fear which constrains adoration and love. It is the fear which consists in awe, reverence, honour, and worship, and all of these on the highest level of exercise. It is the reflex in our consciousness of the transcendent majesty and holiness of God. (John Murray)

To fear God means to acknowledge His superiority over man, to recognize His deity and thus respond in awe, humility, worship, love, trust, and obedience. (R.N. Whybray)

To fear God is to know God as He has revealed Himself and to orient every part of your life around that fundamental understanding of God. It is to live theocentrically. It is a life in which every aspect orbits around the foundational reality of who God is. Tremper Longman said it this way, “Thinking about life begins with acknowledging that God is at the center of the universe, not humans.” As the defnitions above demonstrate, this orientation produces a number of different responses including awe, humility, love, adoration, grief (when we disobey God), obedience, and trust among others.

According to Proverbs, if you don’t get this, you never leave the starting line in terms of living properly. Without God, as he has revealed himself, at the center of your reality, everything is distorted, imbalanced, flawed. As John Murray put it, “The first thought of the godly man in every circumstance is God’s relation to him and it, and his and its relation to God. That is God-consciousness and that is what the fear of God entails.”

What’s Wrong with People?

krandolph — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 02:27:26 +0000

Short answer – sin. Sin is what is wrong with people. It is a universal malady. In an essay entitled “Justification in Galatians,” Douglas J. Moo quotes Stephen Westerholm: “The fundamental question addressed by Galatians is not ‘What is wrong with Judaism (or the Sinaitic law)?’ but ‘What is wrong with humanity that Judaism (and the Sinaitic law) cannot remedy?’” Later in the essay, Moo states, “Works are a problem in Galatians, therefore, not simply because they involve an outmoded torah; they are a problem also, and more fundamentally, because human inability renders them incapable of delivering people from sin.” As someone poetically stated, the heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart.

The reason that obedience to the law of God won’t work as a way of salvation is that no human being is capable of conforming to the law of God. None of us can obey it. We fail miserably. Like a mirror, the law can show us our true condition as violators but it cannot save us. Like an MRI, it can reveal the disease but it can’t heal it. This is why Paul insists that no flesh will be justified by the works of the law (Gal. 2:15-16).

People cannot fix what’s wrong with people. Only God can do that. He sent Jesus Christ to become a curse for us so that we could be delivered from the curse of the law (Gal. 3:10-14). Dying on the cross and bearing our sin, Jesus was cursed so that we could be redeemed. Those who trust in Jesus Christ are counted righteous by God (Gal. 3:5-9). Jesus was treated like a sinner so that those who trust in him could be treated as righteous.

Packer on Penal Substitution

krandolph — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 14:37:17 +0000

As we contemplate the death of Jesus on this Good Friday, here is an excerpt from an article by J.I. Packer on The Logic of Penal Substitution. This excerpt comes from a section of the essay in which Packer is dealing with substitution and divine love.

Furthermore, if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help, and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear, then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement, for it sees the Son at his Father’s will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest. That death on the cross was a criminal’s death, physically as painful as, if not more painful than, any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen; and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man, and yet of being despised and rejected, whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness, by persons he had loved and tried to save — this is ground common to all views, and tells us already that the love of Jesus, which took him to the cross, brought him appallingly low. But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress, compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance. This is the dimension indicated by Denney — ‘that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race.’ Owen stated this formally, abstractly and non-psychologically: Christ, he said, satisfied God’s justice ‘for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction, by undergoing that same punishment which, by reason of the obligation that was upon them, they were bound to undergo. When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure, though not in all accidents of duration and the like . . .’ Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought with tender and noble empathy: ‘God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him, and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath. This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him, because they were from the hand of his Father, whom he infinitely loved, and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of. Besides, it was an effect of God’s wrath that he forsook Christ. This caused Christ to cry out . . . “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” This was infinitely terrible to Christ. Christ’s knowledge of the glory of the Father, and his love to the Father, and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Father’s love to him, made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Father’s love as terrible to him, as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned, that have no knowledge of God’s excellency, no love to him, nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love.’ And the legendary ‘Rabbi’ Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence, in a famous outburst to one of his classes: ‘D’ye know what Calvary was? what? what? what?’ Then, with tears on his face — ‘It was damnation; and he took it lovingly.’ It is precisely this love that, in the last analysis, penal substitution is all about, and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it.

Finding the Nails and Losing the Cross

krandolph — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 15:41:49 +0000

Simcha Jacobovici thinks he may have found the nails that were used to crucify Jesus. If you have ever seen any of his documentary style films, you have probably noticed he has a penchant for the dramatic. It feels a little bit like archaeology meets the National Enquirer. At any rate, Jacobovici suggests that some nails found in an excavation of a first century Jewish tomb may be the nails that were used to crucify Jesus.

The International Antiquities Authority was not impressed. They stated in an email, “There is no doubt that the talented director Simcha Jacobovici created an interesting film, at the center of which is a genuine archaeological artifact. However, the interpretation presented in it has no basis in the find or in archaeological research.” Nails are often found in ancient burial sites. They were used to inscribe names on sarcophagi (burial boxes).

Like the Shroud of Turin, the nails will no doubt hold some fascination for people. People have always been interested in relics. If such a find should ever be validated, for many people it would be looked upon with a sort of spiritual power beyond its archaeological and historical value. Such a find would be displayed and venerated by pilgrims who would travel great distances to get a glimpse of the very nails that fixed Jesus to the cross.

The sad thing in such a scenario is that the real meaning of the cross is eclipsed. Make no mistake, the crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection are historical facts. There was a real cross onto which the real body of the historical Jesus was fastened with real nails. I do not take issue with the historicity of the crucifixion. If the nails that fastened Jesus to the cross were found, it would be an important archaeological artifact to be sure. The problem is not that people find interest in the death of Jesus as a historical event. The problem is missing the theological significance of this historical event.

The Apostle Paul stated it succinctly in 1 Corinthians 1:18, “For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” The historical event of Christ’s crucifixion was also the power of God being exercised in the salvation of those who believe. This theme is repeated throughout the New Testament. The apostles viewed the crucifixion as a saving act by which the sinless Christ suffered as a sacrifice for the salvation of sinners. Peter said, “For he himself bore our sins in his body on the cross so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness, for by his wounds you were healed (1 Peter 2:24).” The cross is never less than a historical event. Yet, it is much more. It is a saving event in which Jesus became sin so that all who trust in him could be made righteous (2 Cor. 5:21).

Are the nails really the ones that were used in Jesus’ crucifixion? Who knows. But even if archaeologists were by some strange twist to find the entire cross on which Jesus died, the excitement which would accompany such a find should pale in comparison to the amazement at the fact that the sinless Son of God would humble himself to die on that cross for undeserving sinners. If they find the nails, that’s fine. But let’s not lose the cross in the process.

Be Still and Know

krandolph — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 20:16:51 +0000

Jonathan Edwards preached a sermon entitled The Sole Consideration, that God Is God, Sufficient to Still all Objections to His Sovereignty. The text is Psalm 46:10. The sermon is fantastic. If you read it, prepare to be humbled. Here is an excerpt:

What are we? and what do we make of ourselves, when we expect that God and his ways should be upon a level with our understandings? We are infinitely unequal to any such thing, as comprehending God. We may less unreasonably expect that a nut-shell should contain the ocean…

A Powerful Perspective on Suffering

krandolph — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 02:59:58 +0000

In his autobiography, John G. Paton writes the account of the deaths of his wife and baby son on the island of Tanna. His wife died on March 3, 1859. On March 20, 1859, his five week old son died also. Here is his reflection on these events:

It was very difficult to be resigned, left alone, and in sorrowful circumstances; but feeling immovably assured that my God and father was too wise and loving to err in anything that he does or permits, I looked up to the Lord for help, and struggled on in His work. I do not pretend to see through the mystery of such visitations – wherein God calls away the young, the promising, and those sorely needed for his service here; but this I do know and feel, that, in the light of such dispensations, it becomes us all to love and serve our blessed Lord Jesus so that we may be ready at his call for death and eternity.

Matthias Media

krandolph — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 21:42:05 +0000

If you haven’t discovered Matthias Media yet, you need to. It is a ministry based in Australia which produces excellent evangelical resources.

The Briefing - an evangelical monthly magazine with great articles about theological issues as well as practical ministry.

Two Ways to Live - a really well done, biblically sound online gospel presentation

There are lots of other resources available at http://www.matthiasmedia.com.au/. Enjoy!

Update: I forgot to mention the blog Sola Panel which features some of the folks from Matthias Media.

They Have Moses and the Prophets…

krandolph — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 03:04:02 +0000

Tim Challies writes a good reminder about why we should be wary of the “I went to heaven (or hell) and lived to tell about it” kind of books. Every time one of these books comes out I think about the story of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16. The rich man dies and goes to hell. He desperately wants to tell his family members about this terrible place so they will avoid it. Here is the dialogue in the story as Luke writes it:

²⁷ “He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, ²⁸ for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’ ²⁹ “Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’ ³⁰ “‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’ ³¹ “He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

Beside the questionable nature of these post-mortem heaven and hell experiences, there is a clear emphasis on the superior nature of the Scriptures as a sufficient witness to the glories of heaven and the terrors of hell. Even the most well-intentioned people can be deceived by experience. Scripture, on the other hand, is a sure and reliable witness to guide our understanding on how to get to heaven and avoid hell.

A Real Survivor Vanuatu

krandolph — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 16:02:01 +0000

I am currently reading this autobiography of John G. Paton. Paton was a Scottish missionary to the New Hebrides (now called Vanuatu). I first became acquainted with Paton by listening to a talk given by John Piper. The book is fascinating reading. Paton tells his story with interesting detail and inspiring pathos.

Christian biography should be a regular part of your reading diet. Such biography fuels your passion for serving Christ’s cause. It also reminds us that faithfulness to Jesus and the gospel involves a measure of suffering and sorrow. Reading about others who have lived faithfully for Jesus in dire circumstances is an important reality check for those of us who live in the relative comfort of American Christianity.