Struggle

I've recently been thinking about sanctification. In past studies I learned that the law has three uses - the pedagogical, the civil, and the didactic. It is with this third use of the law that I have concerned myself with in my recent studies. As I studied I came across these words by Horatius Bonar:

"What, then, is this new relationship between us and the law, which faith establishes?
There are some who speak as if in this matter there is the mere breaking up of the old relationship. the canceling of the old covenant, without the substitution of anything new. They dwell on such texts as these: "Not under the law," "delivered from the law," "without the law," affirming that a believing man has nothing more to do with law at all. They call that "imperfect teaching" which urges obedience to law in the carrying out of a holy life; they brand as bondage the regard to law which those pay. who, studying Moses and the prophets, and specially the psalms of him who had tasted the blessedness of the man to whom the Lord imputeth righteousness without works (Psa 32:1), are drinking into the spirit of David, or more truly. into the spirit of the greater than David, the only begotten of the Father, who speaks, in no spirit of bondage. of the laws and statutes and judgments and commandments of the Father."

Below is another recent article I came across:

"...what does it mean to struggle with God? It means, in the first place, that we struggle with the providence of God. The tension between the already and the not yet indicates that Christians live in a sinful world, a world that is affected by sin and inhabited by sinners. Illness, disease, famine, and natural disasters are all consequences of living in a world that is itself affected by sin and is “not yet” made new. Lawlessness, violence, terrorism, and war are consequences of living in a world inhabited by sinners who have also “not yet” been made new or who may never be.

Christians living between the times must struggle with these kinds of consequences in the providence of God. Our struggle, however, is never to be against Him. No matter how dark His providence may be, we are never to fight against God or to shake our fist at Him. But there are many times in the Christian life when we may not understand what God is doing. There are many times when we may question why “bad things” are happening to us. What is the Christian to do, for instance, when the marriage breaks down? When the child runs away, turns her back on the family, or dies an unexpected death? What is the Christian to do when the doctors say it is cancer? When an accident takes away all “quality of life” in an instant? When, as has been true in my own experience, the nation’s worst natural disaster destroys one’s home, business, church, and community? What is the Christian to do at times like this? Quite simply, he or she is to struggle with God."

Read this article in it's entirety HERE

The Big Picture

This month a lot of sermons will be preached about Jesus’ incarnation. And taking its cue from the angel’s announcement to the shepherds on the plains of Ephrathah, my generation simply celebrates the “good news” that some two thousand years ago, in the words of the announcing angel, “unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:10–11). My generation tends to concentrate its attention in their worship services throughout the Advent season on the fact that Christ was virginally born a babe in Bethlehem. And that is about as far as they go in their thinking as they reflect upon the momentous fact that God became man through the miraculous conception of Jesus in the womb of the Virgin Mary.

But why did Jesus do that? If I were to ask my generation why Jesus came, I would very likely get answers such as these: “He came to be my Savior,” “He came to die for me,” and “He came to pay the penalty for my sins” (you get the picture) — all answers correct in themselves, but all answers that fail to place Christ’s coming within the broader context that the Bible places it. And when one fails to place His coming in the Bible’s broader context, he fails to appreciate its full significance.

Don’t misunderstand: There is nothing wrong with Christians celebrating the birth of our Lord at Christmas time. Indeed, it is appropriate for the church universal as well as local individual congregations during the Christmas season to think about the incarnation of God the Son and the means whereby that great event was effected, namely, His conception in His mother’s virgin womb. But I submit that something larger and grander than Christ’s birth should seize our minds and set the bells of our hearts pealing with joy at Christmastime. I’ll explain.

My generation of evangelical pastors has not done a good job at teaching Christian people that the isolated events of the Christian proclamation such as Christ’s incarnation, His death, His resurrection, and so on did not occur in isolation from the “metanarrative” of Holy Scripture (by this I simply mean the “big-picture story” that provides the redemptive-historical significance of all the “lesser stories” of Scripture). When one fails to place the gospel events within the context of the Scripture’s metanarrative, he will miss nuances that he should not miss, and he will fail to appreciate the unity of scriptural teaching. Let me say this another way: Since the facts of Jesus and His life, death, and resurrection are what they are only within the framework of the biblical doctrines of creation, fall, redemption, and the consummation of history, we must place the message of the cross within the framework of Scripture as a whole if we would properly understand the significance of that message. And if we don’t do this, we will not understand the gospel in its fullness.

So let me ask my question again: Why did Jesus come two thousand years go? When the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she was going to be the virgin mother of the long-awaited Messiah, in her Magnificat in Luke 1:54–55, she declared among other things: “[God] has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his offspring forever.”

And when Zechariah, John the Baptist’s father, prophesied about his infant son’s future ministry as the one who would go before the Lord to prepare His way, he said this: “[God] has shown] the mercy promised to our fathers [by remembering] his holy covenant, the oath that he swore to our father Abraham, to grant us that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days” (Luke 1:72–75).

What have we just witnessed? We’ve seen both Mary and Zechariah place the Christ event within the context of the Abrahamic covenant and extol the covenant faithfulness of God to His people in sending His Son. In their awareness of the broader significance of the incarnation and the words of praise that that awareness evoked from them we see biblical theology being beautifully honored and redemptive-history magnificently depicted. It is little wonder that God selected such a maiden as Mary to be the mother of the Christ and Zechariah to be the father of the Baptist. They were both “covenant theologians”!

So I would urge you young folk of the next generation to celebrate not only the isolated events of the Christmas miracle but also to do more than my generation has done in celebrating at Christmastime God’s covenant fidelity to us His people, for this is the “big-picture” reason for the season!

Source: Robert Reymond

Trade Off

The following is a quote from David F. Wells' book "Above All Earthly Pow'rs": Christ in a Postmodern World

Speaking about an effort to find a synthesis between Christianity and Modernity, Wells said this:

"The eventual outcome to this kind of project was a form of faith that, as Greshman Machen argued in his Christianity and Liberalism, was unrecognizable as Christian faith, yet the irony of it was that these liberals set out to save Christianity and not to destroy it, to preserve the possibility of some kind of belief when the enlightenment was making traditional Christian believing quite impossible. The parallels between the liberal project and what is now being attempted in evangelical churches are quite striking in several ways, though there are differences too.

It should be said immediately that, for the liberals, this was a deliberate, self-consciously accepted tradeoff between the necessary loss of historical, orthodox belief and acceptance within a culture dominated by Enlightenment humanism and rationalism. This loss of the orthodoxy was the price that liberals felt had to be paid for a seat at the table. For evangelicals today, this new strategy is also one of survival but there is no sense at all that their orthodox views are in jeopardy."

Postmodern Justice?

The deconstructive power of postmodernism’s attempt at leveling the statutes and stigma of a given culture has given rise to a social fragmentation that enslaves freedom through a purely nihilistic ideological superstructure. An eclipse of justice is prevalent in the multiplicity of Cartesian trends which litter the spectral landscape end to end.This quasi techno-interpretation of justice has aimed its charges directly at the Church, issued it's declaration, and has demanded she be interrogated for the reason of her hope in the old paths. Christianity finds itself on a collision course with the dominance of a chameleonic virtual emerging reality which abhors any absolute. This nucleus of opacity (postmodern freedom) dispenses its own brand of justice within a utilitarian network of transparent significations – suspicion, uncertainty, and conflict. While suffering opposition is nothing new to the Christian, Christology has never before in the history of mankind been subjected to the kind of ruthless analysis any hollow chested street corner skeptic proffers. It would behoove us to remember these words of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ:

“All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”