The Bible as the Ποῦ Στῶ for Knowledge and Personal Significance

When God gave his Word to us, he gave us much more than simply basic information about himself. He gave us the ποῦ στῶ, pou stō, or base that justifies both our knowledge claims and our claims to personal significance.

THE JUSTIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE
It is an epistemological axiom that unless there is comprehensive knowledge of all things somewhere there can be no knowledge anywhere. This is because all knowledge data is inextricably interrelated. For the finite knower to begin from himself alone with any datum, whether that datum be subjective or objective, ideal or material, mental or nonmental, and to seek to understand it comprehensively and exhaustively must inevitably lead him to other data, but being finite he cannot examine any datum or all possible relationships of that one datum comprehensively or exhaustively, not to mention examine all the other data in the universe. Furthermore, there is no way he can be assured that the next datum he might have examined at the point at which he concluded his research in his finiteness would have accorded with all that he had concluded to that point or would have required him to reevaluate his entire enterprise to that point. The only way to escape the force of this fact is to avoid the entire question of epistemology.
The entire history of philosophy up to more recent times may be summarized as precisely man’s rational effort, beginning with himself and accepting no outside help, to “examine” enough of certain chosen particularities of the universe—particularities both subjective and objective, ideal and material, mental and nonmental—to find the universals which give to these particularities their meaning. To be somewhat more specific, men have attempted to come to knowledge and then to the justification of their claims to knowledge via the epistemological methods of rationalism or empiricism.
Rationalists, believing that all knowledge begins with innate criterial a priori truths from which further truths are derived by the deductive process, urge that by this method one will arrive at knowledge that is certain. But even if these criterial a priori ideas were to include the laws of logic, our own mental states, and the existence of objective truth, we can, as Frame has urged,
deduce very little from such a priori ideas. Certainly, we cannot deduce the whole fabric of human knowledge from them or even enough knowledge to constitute a meaningful philosophy. Nothing follows from the laws of logic, taken alone, except possibly more laws of logic. From propositions about our own mental states, nothing follows except further propositions about our own mental states. From the statement “there are objective truths,” nothing specific follows, and a statement that tells us nothing specific … is not a meaningful statement.… Thus if knowledge is limited to the sorts of propositions we have just examined, we will know only about our own minds and not about the real world because our mental states often deceive us. Thus rationalism leaves us not with the body of certainties that Plato and Descartes dreamed of but with no knowledge at all of the real world.
Empiricists, believing that a world of “real facts” is “out there” to be studied and comprehended, urge that knowledge is to be gained through the inductive method of the scientist—observing, forming hypotheses, experimenting, and inferring conclusions from that experimentation. They are satisfied that such a procedure provides humanity with a program for the achieving of knowledge. But aside from the fact of myriad a priori assumptions that are implicit in the inductive method, one who would consistently follow the empirical approach to knowledge must surrender many claims to knowledge that would otherwise be made without hesitation. For example, to cite Frame:

(i) Empiricism cannot justify a general proposition, such as “all men are mortal.… Similarly, the propositions of logic and mathematics, propositions that claim to be universally true, cannot be established on an empirical basis. (ii) Empiricism cannot justify any statement about the future.… (iii) Empiricism cannot justify any statements about ethical values. Statements about sensible facts do not imply anything about ethical goodness or badness, right or wrong, or obligation or prohibition.… (iv) [But if empiricism cannot justify the language about ethical values, then it cannot justify any claim to knowledge, for] empiricism cannot justify empiricism. For empiricism is a view of how one ought (an ethical “ought”) to justify his beliefs, and on an empiricist basis, we cannot justify from sense-experience the proposition that we ought to justify our beliefs in that way.

[And, of course,] empiricism rules out claims to know God, if God is thought to be invisible or otherwise resistant to empirical “checking procedures.” Immanuel Kant attempted to avoid the pitfalls of pure rationalism and pure empiricism, neither of which, he averred, can justify its knowledge claims in isolation from the other, by formally arguing in his monumental Critique of Pure Reason that the knowing subject, although he possesses the innate ideas of space and time as well as twelve specific categories of thought (unity, plurality, totality, reality, negation, limitation, substantiality, causality, reciprocity, possibility and impossibility, existence and nonexistence, and necessity and contingency), also needs the objective facts of the “noumenal world”—the world as it really is apart from our experience—which are brought to him by sensory experience. Otherwise, these “thoughts without percepts” would be “blank” or “empty.” On the other hand, if the knowing subject has only the data of the noumenal world streaming via the senses into a mind that is a blank tablet, these “percepts without concepts” would be “blind” or “chaotic.” So he argued for the necessary combining of some elements of both rationalism (which provides the form) and empiricism (which provides the “matter”) in the acquisition and build-up of knowledge.

However, because the mind’s innate ideas and categories of thought impose a structure on the sensory data brought to it, one can never know the objective facts of the world as they really are but only as the mind itself has “created” them. Standing always between the knowing subject and the thing to be known is just the knower’s creative knowing process itself. But if one can never know “the thing in itself” (das Ding-an-sich) but only “the thing as it has been created by the mind,” we are left again with skepticism if not total ignorance. Also, Kant’s epistemology, as later thinkers noted, raises the prospect of the nonexistence of even his objective noumenal world, for since it is unknowable it cannot be shown to be objective. Furthermore, although he posited a “pre-established harmony” as the basis of his categories in human minds (having rejecting the Christian view of man as a knower created in the divine image for the purpose of cognitive relations with God, the external world, and other selves as the ground for knowledge), Kant can provide no valid reasons why such a pre-established harmony exists. For if, as he contends, knowledge is exclusively a joint product of forms and perceptions, he cannot explain how it is possible to acquire valid information about the categories which for him are purely mental.

It should be apparent that all of these philosophical efforts have ended with dismal results. In more recent times, from Hegel and Kierkegaard to the present, many philosophers, recognizing the failure of this human effort to arrive at the certain knowledge of anything, have concluded that this failure was due to these earlier thinkers thinking rationally (or antithetically). Of course, when Hegel abandoned the biblical concept of rational antithesis (A is not non-A) for his concept of dialectic truth (the thesis-antithesis-synthesis process), in which concept syntheses continue to emerge from the process of conflict between opposing theses and antitheses and in which concept truth is to be found only at the ultimate end of the process, his own philosophy is untrue because it is only a part of the unfinished dialectic process. In other words, if Hegel’s philosophy is true, it is false! And when Kierkegaard abandoned the biblical concept of truth for his concept of truth as unresolvable theses and antitheses, he gave up all possibility of ever identifying a real truth statement anywhere. Accordingly, these philosophers have abandoned rationality for irrationality and are now urging that meaning has nothing to do with thinking rationally. Truth is relative and life’s meaning is to be achieved by a “leap of faith” to anything that gives even a momentary raison d’être.
All this the Christian eschews in favor of the epistemology graciously given in the fact and propositional content of Holy Scripture. He recognizes that in the fact of Scripture itself he has a truly profound solution to man’s need for an infinite reference point if knowledge is to become a reality. He understands that because there is comprehensive knowledge with God, real and true knowledge is possible for man, since God who knows all the data exhaustively in all their infinite relationships and who possesses therefore true knowledge is in the position to impart any portion of that true knowledge to man. The Christian believes that this is precisely what God did when he revealed himself to man propositionally. And he rests in the confidence that it is precisely in and by the Scriptures—coming to him ab extra (from “outside the cosmos”)—that he has the “Archimedean ποῦ στῶ” that he needs for the buildup of knowledge and the justification of his knowledge claims. Taking all his directions from the transcendent ποῦ στῶ of the divine mind revealed in Holy Scripture, the Christian affirms, first, the created actuality of a real world of knowing persons and knowable objects external to these knowing persons. Second, he affirms the legitimate necessity of both sensory experience and the reasoning process in the activity of learning, for the legitimacy of these things are authenticated by the Scriptures themselves. Finally, he happily acknowledges that the divine mind which has revealed something of its knowledge in Scripture is his ποῦ στῶ for universals in order to justify his truth claims. In short, he makes the Word of the self-attesting Christ of Scripture the epistemic basis for all reasoning and knowledge—even when reasoning about reason or about God’s revelation.

Source: Reymond, R. L. (1998). A new systematic theology of the Christian faith

Embrace The Negative

If madison avenue executives were trying to attract people to the Christian life, they would stress its positive and fulfilling aspects. They would speak of Christianity as a way to wholeness of life and all happiness. Unfortunately, we who live in the West are so conditioned to this way of thinking (and to precisely this type of Christian evangelism or salesmanship) that we are almost shocked when we learn that the first great principle of Christianity is negative. It is not, as some say, “Come to Christ, and all your troubles will melt away.” It is as the Lord himself declared, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?” (Mt. 16:24–26).
If I were writing of Christianity the way our culture writes, I might produce a poem such as this one, found on the wall of a guest room on a Christian college campus:

May the years of your life be pleasant;
May your beautiful dreams come true,
And in all that you plan and practice
May blessings descend upon you.
May the trail of your life beat onward
With many surprises in store,
And the days that are happy with memories
Prove merely the promise of more.

If we are true to the Word of God, we will speak as Jesus did: “If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple.… So therefore, whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple” (Lk. 14:26–27, 33); “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (Jn. 12:24–25); “Blessed are the poor in spirit.… Blessed are those who mourn.… Blessed are the meek.… Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.… Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account” (Mt. 5:3–5, 10–11).

We recognize that there is a certain amount of Semitic hyperbole in these statements. The One who told us to love each other is not advocating that we cultivate a literal animosity toward the members of our own family. Moreover, this is only one side of the story. Jesus also said, “There is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life” (Mk. 10:29–30). But even this is to be with persecutions, and it does not eliminate the element of death and denial.
We do not work ourselves up to death and denial, however. Rather, we need them before we can start out at all. Paul shows this by introducing self-sacrifice as the initial principle of the Christian life in his most formal treatment of that life. “I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Rom. 12:1).
Calvin understood this theme well. In his comments on Romans 12:1–2, he provides us with some of the most moving appeals in the Institutes of the Christian Religion:
If we, then, are not our own (cf. 1 Cor. 6:19) but the Lord’s, it is clear what error we must flee, and whither we must direct all the acts of our life. We are not our own: let not our reason nor our will, therefore, sway our plans and deeds. We are not our own: let us therefore not set it as our goal to seek what is expedient for us according to the flesh. We are not our own: in so far as we can, let us therefore forget ourselves and all that is ours.

Conversely, we are God’s: let us therefore live for him and die for him. We are God’s: let his wisdom and will therefore rule all our actions. We are God’s: let all the parts of our life accordingly strive toward him as our only lawful goal (Rom. 14:8; cf. 1 Cor. 6:19). O, how much has that man profited who, having been taught that he is not his own, has taken away dominion and rule from his own reason that he may yield it to God! For, as consulting our self-interest is the pestilence that most effectively leads to our destruction, so the sole haven of salvation is to be wise in nothing and to will nothing through ourselves but to follow the leading of the Lord alone.
This idea of death in Christ is repeated with slight variations in other places in the Gospels.2 So it is worthwhile to consider its three parts: (1) we are to deny ourselves, (2) we are to take up Christ’s cross and (3) we are to follow Jesus.

Denying Ourselves
Self-denial should not be difficult for any Christian to understand for this is what it means to become a Christian. It means to have turned your back on any attempt to please God through your own human abilities and efforts, and instead to have accepted by faith what God has done in Christ for your salvation. No one can save himself or herself. So we stop trying. We die to our efforts. We must say no to them. When we have done this, we receive God’s salvation as a free gift. Living the Christian life is, therefore, only a matter of continuing in the way we have started. Yet this is difficult to apply. This principle is so uncongenial that even Christians quickly forget it and try to live by other standards.
It can hardly be otherwise, given our own natural dispositions and the culture in which we live. “We are surrounded by a world that says No to nothing. When we are surrounded with this sort of mentality, in which everything is judged by bigness and by success, then suddenly to be told that in the Christian life there is to be this strong negative aspect of saying No to things and No to self, must seem hard. And if it does not feel hard to us, we are not really letting it speak to us.”3
To experience death and denial means we must be willing to say no and then actually say no to anything that is contrary to God’s will for us. This includes anything contrary to the Bible. We are free from law in the sense of being under a list of rules and regulations. But we are to obey the law in the sense that it reveals the nature of God and shows us those areas of life which by the power of God we are to say no to in order that we might go on with Christ.
The first of the Ten Commandments is an example: “You shall have no other gods before me.” Here is a negative, an obvious one. It tells us that we are to say no to anything that would take God’s rightful place in our lives. Is it an actual idol? We must say no to the idol; we must burn it or destroy it, as many primitive people have done when they have responded to the gospel. Is it money? We must get rid of the money for it is better to be poor and yet close to Christ than rich and far from him. Money is not something that necessarily takes the place of God in a life. It is possible to be a devoted and deeply spiritual Christian and rich at the same time. But if money has become a god, then we must say no to it. Has another person taken the place of God? Has a business? An ambition? Your children? Fame? Achievement? Whatever it is, we must say no to it if it is keeping us from Christ.
If you want to test yourself on this, you may do so with each of the other commandments. “You shall not kill.” We are to say no to any desire to take another’s life or slander his or her reputation. “You shall not commit adultery.” We are to say no to any desire to take another man’s wife or another woman’s husband. “You shall not steal.” We should say no to the desire to take another person’s property. If we have not said no at these points, we can hardly pretend that we are living in the newness of Christ’s resurrection life. Indeed, we are not living the life of Christ at all.
To experience death and denial we must also say no to anything that is not the will of God for us. This goes beyond the previous point about the law. Not everything permitted in the Word of God is God’s will for us. For instance, there is nothing wrong with marriage. In fact, the contrary is true. Marriage has been established by God and has his blessing. Still, marriage may not be the will of God for you; and if it is not, then you must say no to marriage, consciously and deliberately. The same thing holds for a profession, our own conception of ourselves and other things.
Is this hard? Yes, it is hard. It is hard for the strongest saint as well as for the weakest sinner. Here is Augustine’s description of the struggle that went on in him:
The new will that had begun in me—and made me want to be free to worship and to enjoy you, God, the only certain joy—was not yet strong enough to overpower the old will that had become tough with age. So there were now two wills battling it out inside me, one old, one new; one carnal, one spiritual; and in the conflict they ripped my soul to pieces.
From my own experience I know, therefore, what Paul meant when he said, “The flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.” I was on both sides, but mostly I was on the side that I approved in myself, rather than the side I disapproved. When I did things that I knew were wrong I did not act willingly, but just endured them; but habit had been reinforced by that part of my will that had deserted to the enemy, so it was by my own will that I found myself in a spot I didn’t want to be in. And what point is there in complaining when a sinner gets what is coming to him? I used to excuse myself by saying I had no clear concept of truth, and that was why I still followed the ways of the world rather than serve you. Now, however, I was quite certain about the truth; and still I kept myself grounded and refused to enlist in your service. I was more afraid of getting rid of my frustrations than I was of being frustrated.
Thus I was put under pressure by the oppressions of the world, but I took it all with a light heart, like a man sound asleep. When I did think about you, my meditations were like the feeble struggles of a man who is trying to wake up but is overcome with drowsiness and falls back to sleep. I had no answer when you said, “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.” You used every possible means to communicate to me the truth of your words. You had me under conviction so that I could give no reply except a lazy and drowsy, “Yes, Lord, yes, I’ll get to it right away, just don’t bother me for a little while.” But “right away” didn’t happen right away; and “a little while” turned out to be a very long while. In my inmost self I delighted in the law of God, but I perceived that there was in my bodily members a different law fighting against the law that my reason approved and making me a prisoner under the law that was in my members, the law of sin. For the law of sin is the force of habit, by which the mind is carried along and held prisoner against its will, deservedly, of course, because it slid into the habit by its own choice. Messed-up creature that I was, who was there to rescue this doomed body? God alone through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Augustine’s words are a classic statement of the divided will and of the difficulty of surrendering that will to God. On the other hand, here is a classic statement of the blessing of having denied oneself for Christ—from the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis: “O Lord, thou knowest what is the better way; let this or that be done as thou shalt please. Give what thou wilt, and how much thou wilt, and when thou wilt. Do with me as thou knowest, and as best pleaseth thee, and is most for thy honor. Set me where thou wilt, and deal with me in all things just as thou wilt.… When could it be ill with me, when thou wert present? I had rather be poor for thee, than rich without thee. I rather choose to be a pilgrim on earth with thee, than without thee to possess heaven. Where thou art, there is heaven; and where thou art not, there is death and hell.”
How can you know when you have said no? When you have stopped complaining. If you are murmuring, as the Israelites murmured in the wilderness, you have not really turned your back on Egypt. If you have stopped murmuring, you are ready to press on.

Taking Up Christ’s Cross
The second expression of the principle of death and denial is death itself, which Jesus points to by saying that we are to take up our cross in his service. To understand this image we must first leave behind the meaning usually given to it. Today when people speak of bearing their cross or taking up their cross, what they usually have in mind is stoic endurance of some inescapable hardship: sickness, an alcoholic spouse, blindness, an uncongenial place of work or similar limitations. This is not what Christ meant. In Jesus’ day the cross was a symbol of death, a means of execution. So Jesus really referred to our dying, dying to self—a step beyond mere self-denial. Moreover, in saying that we were to “take up” our cross, he was indicating that our act is to be a voluntary and continuous activity.
Taking up our cross is beyond mere self-denial because it is possible to deny ourselves many things and yet not utterly give ourselves. It is possible to stop somewhere between the indecision of Augustine and that total surrender we find in à Kempis. We often do what Jacob did (in Gen. 32) when he was returning to the land of promise after twenty years of working for his uncle Laban. Jacob had cheated his brother and had to run away and live with his uncle Laban on the other side of the desert. His brother had said he was going to kill him, and he was afraid then. But twenty years had passed, and he had forgotten the force of the threat.
Yet as Jacob got closer and closer to the land from which he had fled and in which Esau was still living, he became frightened again. He began to remember what he had done. He began to remember the threats Esau had made. Every step he took became more and more difficult. Finally, he came to the brook Jabbok and looked across to where he knew Esau lived. I believe that if he could have gone back, he would have. But things were so difficult with Laban that retreat was cut off. Jacob had nowhere to go but forward. Finally he told his servants to go over ahead of him and find out what Esau was doing.
The servants went. But they had not gone very far when they met Esau coming with a band of four hundred men. This was an army. So the servants went back and said to Jacob, “Your brother knows you’re coming, all right. He’s coming to meet you. The only difficulty is that he has his army with him.” Now Jacob was truly afraid. What was he to do? Resourcefully he looked around at his possessions and decided that he would begin to give them up. He would give the things he did not care too much about.
First he took a flock of two hundred goats. He sent them over the Jabbok with his servants. He said to the servants, “When Esau sees you and asks, ‘Whose servants are you? And where are you going? And who owns these animals?’ you must say, ‘They belong to your servant Jacob; they are a present sent to my lord, Esau; and Jacob himself is behind us.’ ” Jacob thought this would soften Esau up.
But he thought, “Suppose Esau isn’t satisfied with the goats? I’d better send some ewes.” And so he sent two hundred of them. Then he sent thirty camels, followed by forty cows, followed by ten bulls, followed by twenty female donkeys and ten foals. As you read about it in Genesis 32 it is hilarious. All Jacob’s possessions were stretched out in bands across the country going toward Esau. In every case the servants were to say, “These are a present for my lord, Esau.”
Finally, all the possessions were gone. Jacob did not have any more camels or sheep or goats or bulls or cows to give up. But he still had his wives and children. So he said, “I’d better give them up too.” He took Leah, who was the least favorite wife, and he sent her first with her children. Then he took Rachel, who was the favorite wife, and he sent her with her children. And there at last, all alone and trembling, was Jacob. He still had not given himself.
That is what we do. God gets close to us, and we are a little afraid of him. So we say, “I’ll placate him; I’ll give him my money.” But God does not seem to be satisfied with that, and we do not quite understand why. We say, “I’ll give him my time. I’ll serve on the church board. I’ll teach a Sunday-school class.” At last we give him our family. But we do not give ourselves. And the time comes when we are standing alone, naked in his sight, and God sends his angel to wrestle us to the point of personal submission.
The only trouble with this illustration is that it suggests that achieving death to self and taking up our cross is a once-for-all surrender when actually it is the continuous business of daily obedience and discipline. There can be moments of important personal crisis and decision; there probably have to be. But the battle is not won even then, for these decisions must be followed by continuous daily decisions to say no to ourselves in order to say yes to God. The Greek text indicates this by the use of the present (continuative) sense: “Let him take up his cross (repeatedly and continuously) and keep on following me.”

Daily Discipleship
This leads to the next point: discipleship. For when Jesus said that we are to deny ourselves and take up our cross he obviously did not mean that we are literally to die or to cease to function. We are to enter by that gate into a path of lifelong discipleship. In that discipleship the principles with which we started out, self-denial and death to self, are determinative.
How do we learn such denial, such death to our own plans and interests? There is only one way. We must follow Jesus and constantly keep our eyes on him. He is the supreme example of self-denial. He said no even to the glories of heaven in order to become man and die for our salvation (Phil. 2:5–11). The author of Hebrews captures this solution when, in the verses immediately following his great chapter on the heroes of the faith, he writes, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb. 12:1–2).
Jesus taught this also. We notice when we study the verses on death and denial carefully that in nearly every case they are set in the context of Jesus’ teaching concerning his own suffering and death by crucifixion. Mark 10 is the clearest example. In that chapter Jesus is teaching about discipleship, showing that his disciples must all be bound by the revealed Word of God (vv. 1–12), that they must come to God with the simple faith of children (vv. 13–16) and that possessions are often a hindrance and deterrent to discipleship (vv. 17–31). In this last section he introduces the matter of loss of family and lands for his sake and for the gospel.
Then we read, “And they were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them; and they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid. And taking the twelve again, he began to tell them what was to happen to him, saying, ‘Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem; and the Son of man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death, and deliver him to the Gentiles; and they will mock him, and spit upon him, and scourge him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise’ ” (Mk. 10:32–34).
Jesus was asking the fullest possible measure of devotion from those who followed him. They were to give up everything. But he was not asking them to do something he was not willing to do himself. He was providing them with a perfect example.
He also spoke of his resurrection and thus taught that the way of denial and death, though it involves a true and sometimes painful death to our own desires, is nevertheless the way to the fullness of living. Paul writes in Romans, “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Rom. 6:5). It is the same in Galatians. “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). In the biblical scheme of things death is always followed by life, crucifixion by resurrection. It is this that is truly exciting and for which we are willing to die.
When we give up trying to run our own life or when we give up what seems so precious and so utterly indispensable to us, it is then (and only then) that we suddenly find the true joy of being a Christian and enter into a life so freed from obsession that we can hardly understand how it could have had such a hold on us.
This is the primary difference between a joyless and a joyful Christian, a defeated and a victorious one. Death and resurrection! Joyless Christians may have died and risen with Christ in some abstract sense, so they can in the same sense be termed new creatures in Christ. But they have certainly never known it in practice. Joyful Christians have found satisfaction in whatever God gives them and are truly satisfied. They have said no to anything that might keep them from the richness of God’s own blessing and presence and have risen to new life.

Boice, J. M. (1986). Foundations of the Christian faith

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.”

The Wrong Category

I want to tag this onto my thoughts in my last post:

"So what this question of whether “salvation is available” or not drives me to is “why ask the question in these plainly-casual terms?” That is: what is achieved by asking about salvation in the category of “availability” rather than in some other biblical category – such as the necessity of salvation, or the motive of salvation, or the source of salvation, or the consequences of salvation (and there are more categories, but you get the idea)?

Why frame “salvation” in terms of its “availability”? I suspect the goal is to cause the person who is listening to consider the convenience of salvation, therefore encouraging him to do what they call in retail, which is to make an “impulse buy”. That is: it looks good right now, and it’s easy to get one, so I’ll just put it in my cart.

It’s available: I’ll take one.

Let me say: that’s a horrible reason to choose Christ. It undermines His greatness and our lack which only he can fill up; it minimizes our offenses and His great mercy. It minimizes the cost of discipleship and the cost of the sacrifice made. Framing the Gospel in terms of “availability” is a minimization of all the necessary attributes of salvation, and makes opportunistic buyer out of people who are dying in their sins."

This comes from a guy - Frank Turk - I have a lot of respect for. Catch the entirety of his post here.