On the discussion board for my book, someone asked the question "What is the gospel."
And at first I gave the answer representing what the gospel Jesus spread would have been: the idea that the time of the Kingdom was at hand to a people who had been yearning for it for centuries. By the way, I discuss this gospel in a youtube video here.
But then the person asked me "But what is the good news for me?" And that is an excellent question...what is the Good News today...I decided I'd give my answer here for anyone who cared.
Well, there are several pieces of good news for you:
First piece of good news:
God has declared through Christ that God's Kingdom is now open to all races. You, as a Gentile, no longer are excluded from God. You are no longer a second-class citizen simply because you do not follow the covenant given to Abraham's heirs. That's a HUGE piece of good news that people today simply take for granted. But consider the situation of 1st century Gentiles, many of whom were attracted and respected the Jewish faith but could not bring themselves to convert. The idea that the Jews no longer had God's favor cornered is a huge bit of Good news.
Second piece, related to the first:
God has declared through Christ a new covenant whose joiners receive the holy spirit as a "signing bonus." This is an INCREDIBLE piece of good news if you put yourself in the mind of a 1st century believer. The Jews had only rarely tastes the Holy Spirit, and only for short bits of time. This person or that person of old may have been "in the spirit" for a time, receiving special revelation...but now EVERYONE in God's community has access to it. UNBELIEVABLE. Note that the Spirit is what Christ refers to at the end of Luke when he says "That which was promised" and in John he says it can only come if he dies...and in Acts it is repeated referred to as "the gift"
Third piece of Good News:
God has declared through Jesus' resurrection what God intends to do to everyone later on. Jesus resurrection is proof that God raises the dead (and it also is a warning to those who think they can do anything they want in this life without consequences). Note Paul's words to Felix in Acts 24:14-21 .
Showing posts with label Gospel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gospel. Show all posts
Friday, March 19, 2010
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
The Gospel Story and Wandering in the Desert
The question of what counts as “the Gospel,” is oft-debated among Christians, but most of those debates come down to questions of “how much is included” rather than questions of what the core narrative underlying salvation history is.
Many people have been told a version of the gospel that is summarized in five steps:
1. God creates everything, and all is well.
2. Adam rebels against God’s command, causing all creation to fall. God’s sense of perfect justice mandates that, outside mitigating circumstances, the all-powerful Almighty would be forced to punish all people for all eternity.
3. God curses the serpent who brought about this calamity (Genesis 3:15), promising that the woman’s “seed” and the serpent’s “seed” would be at odds, but the woman’s “seed” would crush the head of the serpent’s while the serpent would strike the heel of the woman’s offspring.
4. Fast-forward 4000 years. Jesus comes as the promised “crusher of the serpent’s head,” and through His sacrificial death, God now has the ability not to roast everyone forever.
5. Fast-forward to either the day of Judgment or the death of the believer, where said believer is pardoned/forgiven of all sin through Christ's sacrifice and allowed into heaven.
Anyone who reveres the Bible should take significant exception to the above version of the Gospel story. There are several problems with it from a scripture-based perspective, but I will just mention a few.
First, it casts as marginal about 80% of the Bible. If the gospel story is rooted in scripture, one has to be rather skeptical of any version that considers incidental everything from Genesis 4 to Matthew 1.
Second, if we step off our 20th century perch, we recognize an immediate chronological issue preventing the above from being the “Gospel” Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, Peter, Paul and Co. were spreading. If the above represents the Gospel story, then someone in 50 AD trying to spread such a tale would be claiming that nothing that has happened in the last 6000 years (give or take) is critical. Imagine someone today trying to start a theological/philosophical/sociological movement that claimed nothing essential to the overall scheme of things has occurred between now and the first generation of humanity.
Thirdly, it is a very self-serving, anthro-centric gospel. It is a story revolving about how we are blessed in the way we want. Note there are two separate issues here: both that we are the primary beneficiary and the manifestation of that blessing is exactly what we humans think of as the greatest gift: immortality.
While there are many, many more problems with the above (as shall become evident later in this article), I am going to finish here with what is perhaps the most obvious biblical problem with the above: it suggests as core concerns items that have practically no presence in the evangelical writings of the apostles themselves!
Mark wrote his entire gospel without reference to the fall or the curse on the serpent. So did Luke. So did Matthew. So did John. Furthermore, neither of these items appear anywhere in the many evangelism periscopes found in Acts. If numbers 2 and 3 of the above 5-step gospel are critically important, you would think they would show up somewhere in the actual writings of the apostles to those they were trying to convert! Indeed, the only place Genesis 3:15 shows up in the entire New Testament is Romans 16:20, where Paul depicts the prophecy as neither fulfilled by Christ’s sacrifice nor, even, by Christ Himself!
Indeed, not only does this 5-step gospel not match the evangelistic sermons found in Acts, but it suggests a purpose for the Christ altogether alien from the Later Prophets [Isaiah, Jeremiah, …, Malachi] who spoke through the Spirit of the coming savior. We Gentile Christians tend to plunder these books to prove that Jesus is the Christ while ignoring completely what the same prophets describe as the reason and purpose for the Christ’s coming. There are many deeds and accomplishments ascribed to the Christ throughout those many, many pages of scripture, but “saving us from God’s eternal, righteous judgment” is not one of them.
This is not to say the 5-step gospel has no inkling of truth behind it. The fall is, at least indirectly, the principal calamity subverting creation. There is a promise involved, and an afterlife, and Christ’s work is certainly at the gospel's heart. I want to describe here an alternative less alien to the apostle’s preaching and scripture as a whole.
Fundamentally, the gospel story is a description of how God blesses Jesus and, secondarily, how both humanity and all creation are blessed through that blessing. This might sound odd, that we are not the primary targets of God’s love and blessing, but Christians in general need to get used to putting Jesus as the center of the universe instead of themselves.
Paul hints at this blessing in Galatians 3:16 as part of an explanation as to why it was possible for Gentiles to have any part in Christ's salvation. His point is that the promised blessing was not to Abraham’s descendants (plural) but to Abraham and his descendant, who is Christ.
And if we tug on these promises, and try to see things from the perspective of a 1st century Jewish Christian instead of a 21st century Gentile, many things become much clearer. Let’s do just that.
The Basis for the Gospel
The center of the gospel is not a problem to be a solved but a promise to be fulfilled. To be sure, there is a problem to be fixed, but its solution is a secondary item. The center of the gospel was a promise made to Abraham (which the promise made to David is an extension of). This sounds harsh to us Gentiles, but scripture very much defends the view. I would cite in particular Hebrews 2:16, but the Bible is rife with discussions placing the promises made to Abraham and David at the root of salvation, not the curse of the serpent. [Isaiah 37:35, Jeremiah 23:5, 30:9, 33:15-21, Ezekiel 34:23-24, 37:24-25, Hosea 3:5, Amos 9:11, Matthew 1:1, 9:27, 12:23, 15:22, 20:30, 21:9, Mark 10:47-48, 11:10, Luke 1:27, 32, 69-76, 3:8, 13:16, 18:38-39, 19:9, 24:49, John 7:42, Acts 2:33-39, 3:25, 7:17, 13:23-24, 26:7, Romans 1:3, 4:16, 9:7, Galatians 3:7-8, 14:29, 2nd Timothy 2:8, Revelation 5:5, 22:16.]
It would not be too much an exaggeration to say the Bible is a description of the fulfillment of these promises. But what was promised? And how were these promises actualized?
The First Promise
The first promise to Abraham was an inheritance in Canaan, aptly called “The Promised Land.” God showed that the time had come for that fulfillment by breaking the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt. This Exodus was not the fulfillment of the promise, but was proof to those who had a stake in the inheritance that God planned on making good on the promise. The signs in Egypt, the successful escape, the manna, the covenant on Sinai, these were all pledges or indications that the Living God has the power and the desire to fulfill the promise made to Abraham.
However, that in-between-time in the wilderness was a very taxing one for the Israelites. They had a stake in the inheritance and they had been saved from their oppressors, but they had not received the inheritance or life of ease that had been promised to them. They were wandering around with only manna to eat and only God’s signs as proof that God would see them through.
We Christians should meditate on the story in Exodus 16-33 and Numbers 1-14. The Israelites were pulled in two directions. They had had better food and stability in the servitude endured in Egypt, and they were looking forward with only the promise of God that eventually they would have something better to do than wander around with only bread to eat. We might see them foolish today, but in reality they were just a people having trouble keeping their eyes on the promise in the straits of difficulty.
They did not have the faith to obey God. That might sound like a strange statement because we generally separate “faith” from “works,” and “obey God” sounds like “works.” But the writer of Hebrews 3:17-19 describes it in exactly that way. They did not have faith that God would provide for them, so they refused to go into Canaan [see Numbers 14:1-30]. They had a stake in the inheritance, but they forfeited that stake through disobedience. They died in the desert, never entering the Promised Land. They had been saved from Egypt, but did not receive the blessing they had been saved for.
The Second Promise
The second promise was that all the earth would be blessed through Abraham’s descendant. Before going forward on this, it is very useful to summarize the first promise:
I have taken pains to call out these matters because Christ’s salvation mirrors them and is described by them so well. Christ was faithful to God and so God exalted Him, giving Him Lordship over heaven and earth [see Philippians 3:8-9, among other places], He is thus the principal benefactor of the promise, as He has inherited the world [Romans 4:13]. Those who have faith become adopted sons of Abraham and receive a stake in this inheritance (Romans 8:16-17, Galatians 3:29).
Just as Abraham’s physical children piggy-backed on his faith and received a stake in his physical inheritance, those who have the same kind of faith he had, become his spiritual children and can piggy-back on Christ’s merit to receive what He has received, a resurrected body free of selfish temptation. Romans 6 discusses this at length, but in general it was this reward that was the focus of early Christian evangelism: Acts 23:6, 24:21, 26:6-8, 1 Corinthians 15:13, 21, 2 Corinthians 1:9, Philippians 3:10-11. Today we conflate "afterlife" with "physical resurrection," because all we care about is immortality, but for the Jews these items were quite different. The Jews and the nation of Israel in general had an understanding of a spiritual existence of some sort for many, many centuries [see 1 Samuel 28:15], but belief in an actual physical resurrection only started to spring up during the exile period, a few centuries prior to Christ.
Moving on to the third bullet, the purpose of Christ’s exaltation is the same as the purpose of the original Exodus, to have a righteous kingdom for God [Jeremiah 33:15-21, Ezekiel 37:24-25, Hosea 3:5, Malachi 3:3, Acts 3:26, Titus 2:14, 1 Peter 2:24, Revelation 22:3-4, among others].
Regarding the fourth bullet, Christ’s teachings, model life, and (most importantly) His resurrection are the manna now, showing God’s power and desire to fulfill the promise. The Holy Spirit is many times called a “pledge” and “the promise.” These are the signs and proofs for our faith.
The Israelites were enslaved externally in Egypt. They were put under forced labor, and they had Egypt’s idols thrust upon them. These external slaveries were broken in the exodus. The New Covenant breaks the internal slavery to sin. This is not slavery to the “punishment of sin.” When I speak of “slavery to sin,” I refer to what Paul describes in Romans 7:15-25: the inability to do God’s will and refuse to buckle under our desire to serve ourselves. Paul refers to this as a type of spiritual "death" that all inherited from Adam's rebellion. [See Romans 5:12-21]
It was this weakness and concomitant refusal to repent that had caused Israel’s downfall. This behavior is given as the reason for the new covenant [Jeremiah 31:31-34]. This is the problem cited again and again in the Old Testament: even when God’s people were freed externally, they did not have the internal strength to do God’s will. This is the slavery Christ speaks of John 8:34, the slavery He says He will free people from. And it is this slavery that Paul says Christ’s death was meant to end in Romans 6:6 and Romans 7:6.
It is the Spirit that breaks us free of these things, the ‘first fruits” of the more glorious existence we will have later when we are no longer dogged by the selfish flesh.
And, just as the Israelites did, we too are wandering in a desert. We who have received the Spirit have been freed from captivity to sin, but we have not received the inheritance. We have the promise of a renewed body in an eternal kingdom to look forward to, but we live in a dying, decaying world that tests this faith. We live in a world that teaches us to rely on what we can see and touch (like our retirement accounts) rather than on God to provide. We live in a world that tells us God is not real and those who live by God’s commands are wasting what precious time we have. We are constantly called to look back at our own Egypt, a much worse existence, but one that requires no faith in the unseen. We are tempted to live by the laws of this world, the lies that say our image before other people is more important than our image before God.
These temptations are dangerous, just as they were to the Israelites in the desert. For, while the Spirit is a pledge of the “Promised Land” (Our resurrected bodies: See Romans 8:23), we risk forfeiting this inheritance by not following Jesus’ commands. This is why Paul uses the words he uses in Ephesians 5:5, Colossians 3:24-25, Galatians 5:21, and 1st Corinthians 6:9-10 to describe why even believers are in danger if they continue in sin. Hebrews 10:26-31 also speaks on this topic, but the clearest description on the fifth bullet (which we have now progressed to) is given by Peter in quoting a prophecy about Christ in Acts 3:22-23, the latter verse reads:
And it will be that every soul that does not heed that prophet shall be utterly destroyed from among the people.
To "heed" Jesus does not just refer to the commands we think of, like not stealing, but also refers to our having the kind of faith that Jesus refers to in, say, Matthew 6. Faith that God has the power and inclination to take care of us so we do not choose to depend on the power of the world. Some of the greatest punishment visited upon Jerusalem was due to the Jews seeking aid from Egypt when their enemies attacked them. God was incensed that Judah would seek aid there rather than trust in the Almighty. When we hoard up excess wealth in our barns rather than give to the poor (which Christ demands) and trust God to navigate our future, we are essentially doing the same thing that caused judgment to reign down on Judah. [See Isaiah 31] When we try to live by the rules of the world, we are turning back to Egypt, just as the murmuring Israelites did in the wilderness. We should not expect this epic of our existence to be all fun and games. It certainly wasn't for Paul, John the Baptist, Peter, etc.
We cannot simply live in this world with the perspective of this world and wait for our inheritance to come to us. We have to accept that Christ calls us out into the desert to rely on God to provide. And while we are in the desert we cannot live by the conventional wisdom of Egypt. We must, instead, live by the commands of Christ, even when they seem foolish. It was hard for the Israelites in the desert to rely on God, and it hard for us to do so now. It was hard for the young man in Luke 18:22-23 to sell his possessions and give to the poor. It is hard to put our priorities and insecurities to the side and take on God's priorities instead.
Thus, the gospel is not a story about how God saves us from God’s own justice, but rather a story about Christ’s exaltation to lead a Kingdom of people after God’s own heart, a kingdom those who believe have an inheritance in, but that inheritance can be forfeited, as the writer of Hebrews remarks, through disobedience. We are not being saved from God, but rather we are saved from spiritual infirmity for God.
The Judgment, then, is not about God’s justice but about Christ’s choosing those who will contribute to the society He is lord over. Given that the aim of that society is to do God’s will, it is no surprise that Christ says in Matthew 5:19,
Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others {to do} the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches {them,} he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
Many people have been told a version of the gospel that is summarized in five steps:
1. God creates everything, and all is well.
2. Adam rebels against God’s command, causing all creation to fall. God’s sense of perfect justice mandates that, outside mitigating circumstances, the all-powerful Almighty would be forced to punish all people for all eternity.
3. God curses the serpent who brought about this calamity (Genesis 3:15), promising that the woman’s “seed” and the serpent’s “seed” would be at odds, but the woman’s “seed” would crush the head of the serpent’s while the serpent would strike the heel of the woman’s offspring.
4. Fast-forward 4000 years. Jesus comes as the promised “crusher of the serpent’s head,” and through His sacrificial death, God now has the ability not to roast everyone forever.
5. Fast-forward to either the day of Judgment or the death of the believer, where said believer is pardoned/forgiven of all sin through Christ's sacrifice and allowed into heaven.
Anyone who reveres the Bible should take significant exception to the above version of the Gospel story. There are several problems with it from a scripture-based perspective, but I will just mention a few.
First, it casts as marginal about 80% of the Bible. If the gospel story is rooted in scripture, one has to be rather skeptical of any version that considers incidental everything from Genesis 4 to Matthew 1.
Second, if we step off our 20th century perch, we recognize an immediate chronological issue preventing the above from being the “Gospel” Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, Peter, Paul and Co. were spreading. If the above represents the Gospel story, then someone in 50 AD trying to spread such a tale would be claiming that nothing that has happened in the last 6000 years (give or take) is critical. Imagine someone today trying to start a theological/philosophical/sociological movement that claimed nothing essential to the overall scheme of things has occurred between now and the first generation of humanity.
Thirdly, it is a very self-serving, anthro-centric gospel. It is a story revolving about how we are blessed in the way we want. Note there are two separate issues here: both that we are the primary beneficiary and the manifestation of that blessing is exactly what we humans think of as the greatest gift: immortality.
While there are many, many more problems with the above (as shall become evident later in this article), I am going to finish here with what is perhaps the most obvious biblical problem with the above: it suggests as core concerns items that have practically no presence in the evangelical writings of the apostles themselves!
Mark wrote his entire gospel without reference to the fall or the curse on the serpent. So did Luke. So did Matthew. So did John. Furthermore, neither of these items appear anywhere in the many evangelism periscopes found in Acts. If numbers 2 and 3 of the above 5-step gospel are critically important, you would think they would show up somewhere in the actual writings of the apostles to those they were trying to convert! Indeed, the only place Genesis 3:15 shows up in the entire New Testament is Romans 16:20, where Paul depicts the prophecy as neither fulfilled by Christ’s sacrifice nor, even, by Christ Himself!
Indeed, not only does this 5-step gospel not match the evangelistic sermons found in Acts, but it suggests a purpose for the Christ altogether alien from the Later Prophets [Isaiah, Jeremiah, …, Malachi] who spoke through the Spirit of the coming savior. We Gentile Christians tend to plunder these books to prove that Jesus is the Christ while ignoring completely what the same prophets describe as the reason and purpose for the Christ’s coming. There are many deeds and accomplishments ascribed to the Christ throughout those many, many pages of scripture, but “saving us from God’s eternal, righteous judgment” is not one of them.
This is not to say the 5-step gospel has no inkling of truth behind it. The fall is, at least indirectly, the principal calamity subverting creation. There is a promise involved, and an afterlife, and Christ’s work is certainly at the gospel's heart. I want to describe here an alternative less alien to the apostle’s preaching and scripture as a whole.
Fundamentally, the gospel story is a description of how God blesses Jesus and, secondarily, how both humanity and all creation are blessed through that blessing. This might sound odd, that we are not the primary targets of God’s love and blessing, but Christians in general need to get used to putting Jesus as the center of the universe instead of themselves.
Paul hints at this blessing in Galatians 3:16 as part of an explanation as to why it was possible for Gentiles to have any part in Christ's salvation. His point is that the promised blessing was not to Abraham’s descendants (plural) but to Abraham and his descendant, who is Christ.
And if we tug on these promises, and try to see things from the perspective of a 1st century Jewish Christian instead of a 21st century Gentile, many things become much clearer. Let’s do just that.
The Basis for the Gospel
The center of the gospel is not a problem to be a solved but a promise to be fulfilled. To be sure, there is a problem to be fixed, but its solution is a secondary item. The center of the gospel was a promise made to Abraham (which the promise made to David is an extension of). This sounds harsh to us Gentiles, but scripture very much defends the view. I would cite in particular Hebrews 2:16, but the Bible is rife with discussions placing the promises made to Abraham and David at the root of salvation, not the curse of the serpent. [Isaiah 37:35, Jeremiah 23:5, 30:9, 33:15-21, Ezekiel 34:23-24, 37:24-25, Hosea 3:5, Amos 9:11, Matthew 1:1, 9:27, 12:23, 15:22, 20:30, 21:9, Mark 10:47-48, 11:10, Luke 1:27, 32, 69-76, 3:8, 13:16, 18:38-39, 19:9, 24:49, John 7:42, Acts 2:33-39, 3:25, 7:17, 13:23-24, 26:7, Romans 1:3, 4:16, 9:7, Galatians 3:7-8, 14:29, 2nd Timothy 2:8, Revelation 5:5, 22:16.]
It would not be too much an exaggeration to say the Bible is a description of the fulfillment of these promises. But what was promised? And how were these promises actualized?
The First Promise
The first promise to Abraham was an inheritance in Canaan, aptly called “The Promised Land.” God showed that the time had come for that fulfillment by breaking the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt. This Exodus was not the fulfillment of the promise, but was proof to those who had a stake in the inheritance that God planned on making good on the promise. The signs in Egypt, the successful escape, the manna, the covenant on Sinai, these were all pledges or indications that the Living God has the power and the desire to fulfill the promise made to Abraham.
However, that in-between-time in the wilderness was a very taxing one for the Israelites. They had a stake in the inheritance and they had been saved from their oppressors, but they had not received the inheritance or life of ease that had been promised to them. They were wandering around with only manna to eat and only God’s signs as proof that God would see them through.
We Christians should meditate on the story in Exodus 16-33 and Numbers 1-14. The Israelites were pulled in two directions. They had had better food and stability in the servitude endured in Egypt, and they were looking forward with only the promise of God that eventually they would have something better to do than wander around with only bread to eat. We might see them foolish today, but in reality they were just a people having trouble keeping their eyes on the promise in the straits of difficulty.
They did not have the faith to obey God. That might sound like a strange statement because we generally separate “faith” from “works,” and “obey God” sounds like “works.” But the writer of Hebrews 3:17-19 describes it in exactly that way. They did not have faith that God would provide for them, so they refused to go into Canaan [see Numbers 14:1-30]. They had a stake in the inheritance, but they forfeited that stake through disobedience. They died in the desert, never entering the Promised Land. They had been saved from Egypt, but did not receive the blessing they had been saved for.
The Second Promise
The second promise was that all the earth would be blessed through Abraham’s descendant. Before going forward on this, it is very useful to summarize the first promise:
- Abraham was faithful to God and God freely promised the land to him. [Note that this is the biblical understanding of "grace," not that God "forgives" or that our righteousness is irrelevant to God. The Biblical understanding of "grace" is that God chooses to do what God wills without obligation to us. God can be swayed by our good deeds, but is under no requirement to be. Paul's point in many of his epistles is that Christ's coming was not part of the Mosaic covenant, so even if the Jews had kept the law, they would have no exclusive claim on the Messiah. Christ's coming was based on a promise freely given without regard to the Law (Galatians 3:17-18), so God had every right to save the Gentiles through Christ as well as the Jews.]
- His physical offspring piggy-backed on this promise and received a stake in the inheritance.
- The purpose of the whole Exodus was that God would have a righteous people of God’s own.
- There were two blessings: one in which a group was saved from oppression and given a pledge of the coming fulfillment of the promise, and the second was the fulfillment itself (possession of Canaan).
- Being a descendant of Abraham gave someone a stake in the inheritance, but disobedience could prevent someone from receiving this inheritance.
I have taken pains to call out these matters because Christ’s salvation mirrors them and is described by them so well. Christ was faithful to God and so God exalted Him, giving Him Lordship over heaven and earth [see Philippians 3:8-9, among other places], He is thus the principal benefactor of the promise, as He has inherited the world [Romans 4:13]. Those who have faith become adopted sons of Abraham and receive a stake in this inheritance (Romans 8:16-17, Galatians 3:29).
Just as Abraham’s physical children piggy-backed on his faith and received a stake in his physical inheritance, those who have the same kind of faith he had, become his spiritual children and can piggy-back on Christ’s merit to receive what He has received, a resurrected body free of selfish temptation. Romans 6 discusses this at length, but in general it was this reward that was the focus of early Christian evangelism: Acts 23:6, 24:21, 26:6-8, 1 Corinthians 15:13, 21, 2 Corinthians 1:9, Philippians 3:10-11. Today we conflate "afterlife" with "physical resurrection," because all we care about is immortality, but for the Jews these items were quite different. The Jews and the nation of Israel in general had an understanding of a spiritual existence of some sort for many, many centuries [see 1 Samuel 28:15], but belief in an actual physical resurrection only started to spring up during the exile period, a few centuries prior to Christ.
Moving on to the third bullet, the purpose of Christ’s exaltation is the same as the purpose of the original Exodus, to have a righteous kingdom for God [Jeremiah 33:15-21, Ezekiel 37:24-25, Hosea 3:5, Malachi 3:3, Acts 3:26, Titus 2:14, 1 Peter 2:24, Revelation 22:3-4, among others].
Regarding the fourth bullet, Christ’s teachings, model life, and (most importantly) His resurrection are the manna now, showing God’s power and desire to fulfill the promise. The Holy Spirit is many times called a “pledge” and “the promise.” These are the signs and proofs for our faith.
The Israelites were enslaved externally in Egypt. They were put under forced labor, and they had Egypt’s idols thrust upon them. These external slaveries were broken in the exodus. The New Covenant breaks the internal slavery to sin. This is not slavery to the “punishment of sin.” When I speak of “slavery to sin,” I refer to what Paul describes in Romans 7:15-25: the inability to do God’s will and refuse to buckle under our desire to serve ourselves. Paul refers to this as a type of spiritual "death" that all inherited from Adam's rebellion. [See Romans 5:12-21]
It was this weakness and concomitant refusal to repent that had caused Israel’s downfall. This behavior is given as the reason for the new covenant [Jeremiah 31:31-34]. This is the problem cited again and again in the Old Testament: even when God’s people were freed externally, they did not have the internal strength to do God’s will. This is the slavery Christ speaks of John 8:34, the slavery He says He will free people from. And it is this slavery that Paul says Christ’s death was meant to end in Romans 6:6 and Romans 7:6.
It is the Spirit that breaks us free of these things, the ‘first fruits” of the more glorious existence we will have later when we are no longer dogged by the selfish flesh.
And, just as the Israelites did, we too are wandering in a desert. We who have received the Spirit have been freed from captivity to sin, but we have not received the inheritance. We have the promise of a renewed body in an eternal kingdom to look forward to, but we live in a dying, decaying world that tests this faith. We live in a world that teaches us to rely on what we can see and touch (like our retirement accounts) rather than on God to provide. We live in a world that tells us God is not real and those who live by God’s commands are wasting what precious time we have. We are constantly called to look back at our own Egypt, a much worse existence, but one that requires no faith in the unseen. We are tempted to live by the laws of this world, the lies that say our image before other people is more important than our image before God.
These temptations are dangerous, just as they were to the Israelites in the desert. For, while the Spirit is a pledge of the “Promised Land” (Our resurrected bodies: See Romans 8:23), we risk forfeiting this inheritance by not following Jesus’ commands. This is why Paul uses the words he uses in Ephesians 5:5, Colossians 3:24-25, Galatians 5:21, and 1st Corinthians 6:9-10 to describe why even believers are in danger if they continue in sin. Hebrews 10:26-31 also speaks on this topic, but the clearest description on the fifth bullet (which we have now progressed to) is given by Peter in quoting a prophecy about Christ in Acts 3:22-23, the latter verse reads:
And it will be that every soul that does not heed that prophet shall be utterly destroyed from among the people.
To "heed" Jesus does not just refer to the commands we think of, like not stealing, but also refers to our having the kind of faith that Jesus refers to in, say, Matthew 6. Faith that God has the power and inclination to take care of us so we do not choose to depend on the power of the world. Some of the greatest punishment visited upon Jerusalem was due to the Jews seeking aid from Egypt when their enemies attacked them. God was incensed that Judah would seek aid there rather than trust in the Almighty. When we hoard up excess wealth in our barns rather than give to the poor (which Christ demands) and trust God to navigate our future, we are essentially doing the same thing that caused judgment to reign down on Judah. [See Isaiah 31] When we try to live by the rules of the world, we are turning back to Egypt, just as the murmuring Israelites did in the wilderness. We should not expect this epic of our existence to be all fun and games. It certainly wasn't for Paul, John the Baptist, Peter, etc.
We cannot simply live in this world with the perspective of this world and wait for our inheritance to come to us. We have to accept that Christ calls us out into the desert to rely on God to provide. And while we are in the desert we cannot live by the conventional wisdom of Egypt. We must, instead, live by the commands of Christ, even when they seem foolish. It was hard for the Israelites in the desert to rely on God, and it hard for us to do so now. It was hard for the young man in Luke 18:22-23 to sell his possessions and give to the poor. It is hard to put our priorities and insecurities to the side and take on God's priorities instead.
Thus, the gospel is not a story about how God saves us from God’s own justice, but rather a story about Christ’s exaltation to lead a Kingdom of people after God’s own heart, a kingdom those who believe have an inheritance in, but that inheritance can be forfeited, as the writer of Hebrews remarks, through disobedience. We are not being saved from God, but rather we are saved from spiritual infirmity for God.
The Judgment, then, is not about God’s justice but about Christ’s choosing those who will contribute to the society He is lord over. Given that the aim of that society is to do God’s will, it is no surprise that Christ says in Matthew 5:19,
Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others {to do} the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches {them,} he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
A new favorite passage
As I am revising my book, I was reminding of what has recently become a favorite passage of mine.
Luke 1:67-75 is breathtakingly powerful in putting Christ's salvation in the context of 2nd temple Judaism. We have a prophet being "filled with the Holy Spirit" and proclaiming (of Christ):
Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, because he has come to help and has redeemed his people. For he has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from long ago, that we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hand of all who hate us. He has done this to show mercy to our ancestors, and to remember his holy covenant -- the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham. This oath grants that we, being rescued from the hand of our enemies, may serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him as long as we live.
This passage is breathtakingly powerful in clearly describing salvation as a fulfillment of the promises to Abraham while delineating in specific terms what that promise was. In particular the as long as we live part places the blessing squarely in the present. We see the end goal not our immortality but rather God's glory. Not deliverance from God's wrath but protection from anything that would hinder our serving God.
Luke 1:67-75 is breathtakingly powerful in putting Christ's salvation in the context of 2nd temple Judaism. We have a prophet being "filled with the Holy Spirit" and proclaiming (of Christ):
Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, because he has come to help and has redeemed his people. For he has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from long ago, that we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hand of all who hate us. He has done this to show mercy to our ancestors, and to remember his holy covenant -- the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham. This oath grants that we, being rescued from the hand of our enemies, may serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him as long as we live.
This passage is breathtakingly powerful in clearly describing salvation as a fulfillment of the promises to Abraham while delineating in specific terms what that promise was. In particular the as long as we live part places the blessing squarely in the present. We see the end goal not our immortality but rather God's glory. Not deliverance from God's wrath but protection from anything that would hinder our serving God.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Comparison between Biblical and Evangelical Christianity
Bev had early suggested I create a more clear presentation of how my views on the Bible differ from the modern version of the gospel.
I spent today doing that very thing.
Any feedback is welcome.
I would welcome'request that anyone who finds the page interesting link to it on their own site.
I spent today doing that very thing.
Any feedback is welcome.
I would welcome'request that anyone who finds the page interesting link to it on their own site.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
What John 3:16 does (and does not) say
Of course, most people reading this blog will have heard a version of John 3:16. Many people consider it a concise description of "the gospel," and I would agree with that. The question is, if John 3:16 is a summary of the gospel, what gospel does it summarize?
The reason I bring this up is that the surrounding verses indicate that John 3:16 cannot possibly be a summary of the gospel of evangelical Christianity. Let's take a look at what John says after this oft-quoted verse.
John 3:16-17-
For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.
So far, so good. Nothing odd there.
John 3:18a-
He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already,
At first this appears to drive home the commonly accepted gospel even more. We are told that those who do not believe have "been judged already." That sounds a lot like the idea of everyone being condemned to hell "by default" for their sins, and Christ is pictured as saving them, hence showing the love mentioned in John 3:16
But then we get to John 3:18b-
because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.
And this really should raise an eyebrow or two. The evangelical gospel is primarily focused on heaven and hell, and how everyone more or less deserves the latter but through God's grace some receive the former. The issue here is that the "condemnation" John speaks of is not a condemnation for general sin, but rather a condemnation because someone "has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God."
Reformed Christianity in particular is adamant that we are not condemned due to rejecting Christ (if so, that would not condemn the millions who never knew of Him). But here that is exactly what John is referring to.
Some would say that John is not speaking of "rejecting Christ" but simply "not believing." Those who "do not believe" (for whatever reason) are still "being judged" rather than having escaped that judgment. (Of course, this whole line of thought is contrary to those passages that describe the Judgment, where all are clearly Judged, believers and non-believers.)
But John is not talking about mere ignorance or "not believing," because he tells us exactly what the Judgment is for in the next verse, John 3:19-21
This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.
John is clearly describing two groups of people everyone who does evil and he who practices the truth. This latter forms another problem for evangelical Christianity, which says that no one can really practice the truth until they have already come to believe. But here John says the opposite: those who desire to please God are exactly those who come to Christ.
In any event, this last section shows that John is not saying "those who believe" versus "those who do not believe." He is making a separation between those who actively rejected Christ and those who actively came to Christ. You cannot with any intellectual integrity claim that a 12th century Native American "failed to believe" for the reason John gives here.
The same applies today even where some version of the Gospel is preached everywhere. If someone rejects the message of the church because history has exposed too much hypocrisy in the church to find it a solid source of spiritual wisdom, you certainly cannot say that person rejected Christ for the reason John gives.
So, if this passage serves as your gospel, you have to accept that it does not give a definitive description of who is condemned and who is not, for by its own words it would not apply to all people. Secondly, you would have to accept that the reason people come to Jesus is because they are dispositionally inclined to do God's will. That is very different from the reason most people accept for how or why someone believes.
This latter idea, that people believe in Christ or not based on whether they already have a desire to do God's will is a recurring theme of John's. Jesus says it about as clearly as one could hope for in John 7:17-
If anyone is willing to do [God's] will, he will know of the teaching, whether it is of God or {whether} I speak from Myself.
This is repeated over and over, Jesus wants people to believe in Him because His words make sense. The commands He gives are ones that those who desire God naturally find value in, while those who were interested in their own gain are humiliated by Christ's commands.
This might all seem a bit odd, but it isn't odd if you take into consideration why and when John was written. John was written to Gentiles after the Temple had been destroyed which represented God's prophesied judgment against the Jewish leadership for rejecting Christ.
This is what John has in mind when saying This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil.
Obviously, the men here does not everyone. "Everyone" didn't reject Christ. The Jewish leaders did. And why did they reject Christ? As John tells us: For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.
That is the reason the Jewish leaders rejected Christ. We are often told this fiction that the reason the Jews rejected Christ was that they were looking for a political leader rather than a spiritual one. That is simply not true. If that were the reason for rejecting Christ, then everyone would have done so. All the Jews (including Jesus' disciples) were expecting Jesus to eventually be anointed and become the new David, the new King (just as David had to wait on the fringes for Saul to be deposed). That is why the disciples are so shocked when Jesus is actually killed. The notion that He would rise from the dead to be king was unfathomable. They thought the game was up when He died [hence their forlorn response in Luke 24:21.]
You might be asking, so what is the point if John is just talking about the Jewish leaders?
To see the point of this you have to once again look at John's purpose. He is sharing the gospel with Gentiles, broadcasting that God's Kingdom is now open to them. The focus is not on the God so loved the world. The focus is on the whosoever. This notion of everyone (not just Jews) shows up throughout John. In particular it shows in the verse immediately before John 3:16. John 3:14-15 reads
As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life.
The "lifted up" has a double meaning. It refers to both Christ's crucifixion and ascension, but it also refers to the "lifting up of Christ" for the world to see. Why? so whoever believes can receive eternal life. Note the similar language Christ uses when discussing this very idea later in John 12:32 -
And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself.
So, what we are seeing in John 3:16 is really a commentary on the destruction of the Temple [has been condemned already] and the reason for that judgment against the Jewish leaders.
You might wonder why John uses the term eternal life here if it is referring to the physical destruction of the temple as an indication of the judgment on the Jews. That's a topic for another blog, but it is linked (once again) to the context of this passage. The John 3:16-21 passage is a commentary on Jesus' discussion with Nicodemus. The eternal life here is linked to the kingdom of God Jesus refers to in John 3:3.
This Kingdom of God is not "heaven after we die," as Jesus makes clear in that dialogue. It is the baptism by the Holy Spirit, the seal of the new covenant God makes through Christ, a covenant in which everyone is invited to participate. The term that gets translated eternal life by John, when writing to Gentiles who do not know much about the Jewish O'lam Ha-Ba was the best way to get across the blessedness of living in the spirit. Eternal life is not even the best translation. Boundless life is probably a better one. [Greek does have a word that means "eternal" in the way we would think of the term, but it is not the word used here. It is used in Jude 13]. This shows in John's amazing definition of eternal life in John 17:3
This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.
Note that this is really meant as a definition (or as close as a definition as you can get) to eternal life (or, rather, the Greek John used for that term). The grammar here is one John uses elsewhere when giving a dictionary definition or precise explanation of what something is. Other examples where John uses the exact same grammar are: John 1:19, John 3:19, John 15:12, 1st John 1:15, 1st John 3:13.
And that is why John 3:16 is a fine description of the gospel: God sent Jesus to allow all people to recieve the Holy Spirit (which, if one reads Galatians 3:13-14 closely, you'll find Paul saying the same thing!!!) It just is not necessarily the gospel people generally think of.
The reason I bring this up is that the surrounding verses indicate that John 3:16 cannot possibly be a summary of the gospel of evangelical Christianity. Let's take a look at what John says after this oft-quoted verse.
John 3:16-17-
For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.
So far, so good. Nothing odd there.
John 3:18a-
He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already,
At first this appears to drive home the commonly accepted gospel even more. We are told that those who do not believe have "been judged already." That sounds a lot like the idea of everyone being condemned to hell "by default" for their sins, and Christ is pictured as saving them, hence showing the love mentioned in John 3:16
But then we get to John 3:18b-
because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.
And this really should raise an eyebrow or two. The evangelical gospel is primarily focused on heaven and hell, and how everyone more or less deserves the latter but through God's grace some receive the former. The issue here is that the "condemnation" John speaks of is not a condemnation for general sin, but rather a condemnation because someone "has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God."
Reformed Christianity in particular is adamant that we are not condemned due to rejecting Christ (if so, that would not condemn the millions who never knew of Him). But here that is exactly what John is referring to.
Some would say that John is not speaking of "rejecting Christ" but simply "not believing." Those who "do not believe" (for whatever reason) are still "being judged" rather than having escaped that judgment. (Of course, this whole line of thought is contrary to those passages that describe the Judgment, where all are clearly Judged, believers and non-believers.)
But John is not talking about mere ignorance or "not believing," because he tells us exactly what the Judgment is for in the next verse, John 3:19-21
This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.
John is clearly describing two groups of people everyone who does evil and he who practices the truth. This latter forms another problem for evangelical Christianity, which says that no one can really practice the truth until they have already come to believe. But here John says the opposite: those who desire to please God are exactly those who come to Christ.
In any event, this last section shows that John is not saying "those who believe" versus "those who do not believe." He is making a separation between those who actively rejected Christ and those who actively came to Christ. You cannot with any intellectual integrity claim that a 12th century Native American "failed to believe" for the reason John gives here.
The same applies today even where some version of the Gospel is preached everywhere. If someone rejects the message of the church because history has exposed too much hypocrisy in the church to find it a solid source of spiritual wisdom, you certainly cannot say that person rejected Christ for the reason John gives.
So, if this passage serves as your gospel, you have to accept that it does not give a definitive description of who is condemned and who is not, for by its own words it would not apply to all people. Secondly, you would have to accept that the reason people come to Jesus is because they are dispositionally inclined to do God's will. That is very different from the reason most people accept for how or why someone believes.
This latter idea, that people believe in Christ or not based on whether they already have a desire to do God's will is a recurring theme of John's. Jesus says it about as clearly as one could hope for in John 7:17-
If anyone is willing to do [God's] will, he will know of the teaching, whether it is of God or {whether} I speak from Myself.
This is repeated over and over, Jesus wants people to believe in Him because His words make sense. The commands He gives are ones that those who desire God naturally find value in, while those who were interested in their own gain are humiliated by Christ's commands.
This might all seem a bit odd, but it isn't odd if you take into consideration why and when John was written. John was written to Gentiles after the Temple had been destroyed which represented God's prophesied judgment against the Jewish leadership for rejecting Christ.
This is what John has in mind when saying This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil.
Obviously, the men here does not everyone. "Everyone" didn't reject Christ. The Jewish leaders did. And why did they reject Christ? As John tells us: For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.
That is the reason the Jewish leaders rejected Christ. We are often told this fiction that the reason the Jews rejected Christ was that they were looking for a political leader rather than a spiritual one. That is simply not true. If that were the reason for rejecting Christ, then everyone would have done so. All the Jews (including Jesus' disciples) were expecting Jesus to eventually be anointed and become the new David, the new King (just as David had to wait on the fringes for Saul to be deposed). That is why the disciples are so shocked when Jesus is actually killed. The notion that He would rise from the dead to be king was unfathomable. They thought the game was up when He died [hence their forlorn response in Luke 24:21.]
You might be asking, so what is the point if John is just talking about the Jewish leaders?
To see the point of this you have to once again look at John's purpose. He is sharing the gospel with Gentiles, broadcasting that God's Kingdom is now open to them. The focus is not on the God so loved the world. The focus is on the whosoever. This notion of everyone (not just Jews) shows up throughout John. In particular it shows in the verse immediately before John 3:16. John 3:14-15 reads
As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life.
The "lifted up" has a double meaning. It refers to both Christ's crucifixion and ascension, but it also refers to the "lifting up of Christ" for the world to see. Why? so whoever believes can receive eternal life. Note the similar language Christ uses when discussing this very idea later in John 12:32 -
And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself.
So, what we are seeing in John 3:16 is really a commentary on the destruction of the Temple [has been condemned already] and the reason for that judgment against the Jewish leaders.
You might wonder why John uses the term eternal life here if it is referring to the physical destruction of the temple as an indication of the judgment on the Jews. That's a topic for another blog, but it is linked (once again) to the context of this passage. The John 3:16-21 passage is a commentary on Jesus' discussion with Nicodemus. The eternal life here is linked to the kingdom of God Jesus refers to in John 3:3.
This Kingdom of God is not "heaven after we die," as Jesus makes clear in that dialogue. It is the baptism by the Holy Spirit, the seal of the new covenant God makes through Christ, a covenant in which everyone is invited to participate. The term that gets translated eternal life by John, when writing to Gentiles who do not know much about the Jewish O'lam Ha-Ba was the best way to get across the blessedness of living in the spirit. Eternal life is not even the best translation. Boundless life is probably a better one. [Greek does have a word that means "eternal" in the way we would think of the term, but it is not the word used here. It is used in Jude 13]. This shows in John's amazing definition of eternal life in John 17:3
This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.
Note that this is really meant as a definition (or as close as a definition as you can get) to eternal life (or, rather, the Greek John used for that term). The grammar here is one John uses elsewhere when giving a dictionary definition or precise explanation of what something is. Other examples where John uses the exact same grammar are: John 1:19, John 3:19, John 15:12, 1st John 1:15, 1st John 3:13.
And that is why John 3:16 is a fine description of the gospel: God sent Jesus to allow all people to recieve the Holy Spirit (which, if one reads Galatians 3:13-14 closely, you'll find Paul saying the same thing!!!) It just is not necessarily the gospel people generally think of.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
The Gospel in Three Pages
I have placed a 3-page summary of my understanding of the gospel on my excerpt page This perspective is based on reading the New Testament in the contexts of the Old Testament and 1st century Judaism.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
TGYNH --- The Gospel You've Never Heard
A visitor who had downloaded my excerpt sent me a question asking what, exactly, this "Gospel You've Never Heard" was. The excerpt covers the first two chapters, which are really intended only to show why how the message most people are told is "The Gospel" appears to chafe against everything Matthew, Mark, and Luke actually present.
It is impossible to read, for example, the gospel of Matthew and come away thinking "I need to go tell everyone about Jesus to save them from the hellfire that all are, by default, deserving of." That notion,which one would expect to find stated in no uncertain terms, is not only completely absent but would appear totally unnatural when placed next to the teachings of Christ Matthew included. Whatever "the gospel" is that Matthew is trying to get across, it certain is not that.
So, what is TGYNH?
The answer is best understood by understanding the state of God's people in the centuries leading up to Christ. Too often people present a 4-stop gospel that starts in the Garden of Eden, jumps amazingly (and absurdly) to Christ on the Cross, then skips to when a believer comes to faith, and ends at its 4th stop where the believer is pictured in heaven. You won't find anything like that portrayed by the writers of the gospel narratives, nor will you find it in the evangelism describes at length in Acts, exactly where you would expect to find such a message were it correct.
Rather than jumping from the Garden to Christ on a cross, we should look at the conditions of Israel during the time when the Messiah was prophesied. A reading of the prophets who foretold the Christ's coming and the kingdom He would create describe in detail what was wrong with Israel and Judah:
It is impossible to read, for example, the gospel of Matthew and come away thinking "I need to go tell everyone about Jesus to save them from the hellfire that all are, by default, deserving of." That notion,which one would expect to find stated in no uncertain terms, is not only completely absent but would appear totally unnatural when placed next to the teachings of Christ Matthew included. Whatever "the gospel" is that Matthew is trying to get across, it certain is not that.
So, what is TGYNH?
The answer is best understood by understanding the state of God's people in the centuries leading up to Christ. Too often people present a 4-stop gospel that starts in the Garden of Eden, jumps amazingly (and absurdly) to Christ on the Cross, then skips to when a believer comes to faith, and ends at its 4th stop where the believer is pictured in heaven. You won't find anything like that portrayed by the writers of the gospel narratives, nor will you find it in the evangelism describes at length in Acts, exactly where you would expect to find such a message were it correct.
Rather than jumping from the Garden to Christ on a cross, we should look at the conditions of Israel during the time when the Messiah was prophesied. A reading of the prophets who foretold the Christ's coming and the kingdom He would create describe in detail what was wrong with Israel and Judah:
- People had turned away from God. In this they acted as their ancestors. Indeed, from the beginning, humans have shown an inability to be faithful to God on a large scale. There were certainly righteous people here and there, but as a nation Israel had failed to remain faithful.
- Special blame was placed on the rulers, the priests, and the false prophets. The rulers were blamed for failing to model righteousness, instead leading their subjects to faithlessness. The priests were blamed for misconstruing and abusing God's Law for their own personal gain. The false prophets were blamed for telling people it was okay not to repent because they were God's people and God would be kind to them even if they sinned.
- This behavior provoked God to allow first Israel and eventually Judah to be captured and enslaved. This caused even more problems because those who captured them mistreated them, causing God's anger to burn against all creation, both Israel and the Gentiles.
- To make matters worse, part of the punishment against Israel/Judah was to harden them, making them less able to repent until God's wrath had been assuaged over time.
- The behavior of Israel, and God's punishment of them, had failed to convince others to worship the Living God. Rather than being a light to the nations, the Gentiles blasphemed the Living God, assuming the fate of Israel was due to their God not having any power.
- God's people would strengthen the spirit of believers so that they would no longer find it so impossible to remain faithful to God.
- The unfaithful rulers would be replaced by a righteous Lord, who would be given power over all creation.
- The corrupt priests would be replaced by a righteous High Priest.
- The teachers who had warped God's law by self-aggrandizing interpretations and the false prophets would all be put to shame because God would write God's Will upon our hearts. As Matthew says "We have one Rabbi." As Jeremiah writes, "I will write My Law upon their hearts... and no man will have teach his neighbor to know God, for they will all know me, from the least to the greatest."
- The cup of wrath that burned against all creation [setting it up for another total destruction] as well as the cup of wrath that had made Israel drunk, unable to repent, would be downed by Christ, not only saving creation but drawing people to repent.
- God would remove the wall of division between Jew and Gentile, allowing anyone to join the kingdom of the Almighty.
Friday, April 3, 2009
The Gospel of the Gospels
A useful exercise is to put ourselves as original readers of the gospel narratives and ask ourselves what message those writers were trying to convey. The reasoning is that anything that really counts as being fundamental to Christianity or should be considered part of the "gospel message" should be found clearly in each gospel narrative since the point of the narratives were to either spread the news about Christianity or clarify a sound message from a false one in the early church.
In other words, what items are clearly presented and obvious from any reading of each Gospel?
A list that comes to my mind:
i) Jesus was raised from the dead [the fundamental belief of all biblical Christianity]
ii) Jesus has authority given by God and elevated to God's right hand in power. (indeed Psalm 110 is supposed to be the most often quoted OT passage in the NT.)
iii) Jesus was sent by God
iv) Jesus was anointed with the Holy Spirit at His baptism [one of the very few items described explicitly in all four Gospels.]
v) The existence of Hell and importance of repentance to avoid it. (Do all the gospels describe that Jesus will be the Judge? Matthew, Luke and John do...not sure about Mark.)
vi) Jesus will return.
vii) Jesus has the power to forgive sins.
I think everyone could agree that each of these:
A. Appears and is emphasized by every gospel
B. Is made absolutely clear in every gospel without any interpretation. (or any interpretation that is needed is aided by the gospel writer, Like John 2:21.)
Are there other items that are made absolutely clear in all four gospels that any reader would come away from?
In other words, what items are clearly presented and obvious from any reading of each Gospel?
A list that comes to my mind:
i) Jesus was raised from the dead [the fundamental belief of all biblical Christianity]
ii) Jesus has authority given by God and elevated to God's right hand in power. (indeed Psalm 110 is supposed to be the most often quoted OT passage in the NT.)
iii) Jesus was sent by God
iv) Jesus was anointed with the Holy Spirit at His baptism [one of the very few items described explicitly in all four Gospels.]
v) The existence of Hell and importance of repentance to avoid it. (Do all the gospels describe that Jesus will be the Judge? Matthew, Luke and John do...not sure about Mark.)
vi) Jesus will return.
vii) Jesus has the power to forgive sins.
I think everyone could agree that each of these:
A. Appears and is emphasized by every gospel
B. Is made absolutely clear in every gospel without any interpretation. (or any interpretation that is needed is aided by the gospel writer, Like John 2:21.)
Are there other items that are made absolutely clear in all four gospels that any reader would come away from?
Friday, January 9, 2009
Prodigal Son, Lazarus, and other parables
I've added an article to www.biblicalheresy.com with commentary on various parables in Luke.
You can now find several such tracts on the articles page.
One of those articles, Biblical Problems with the Modern Gospel, is not meant merely to cast suspicion on the modern gospel but to serve as jumping off points toward a more scripturally sound one. It is not meant to challenge people's faith but rather to have them reconsider what their faith in Christ entails.
You can now find several such tracts on the articles page.
One of those articles, Biblical Problems with the Modern Gospel, is not meant merely to cast suspicion on the modern gospel but to serve as jumping off points toward a more scripturally sound one. It is not meant to challenge people's faith but rather to have them reconsider what their faith in Christ entails.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Bread of Life (and a little Promotional Help)
A comment by Stephen to another post compelled me to publish for general consumption a tract that is an excerpt from the upcoming book.
The discussion is titled "The Gospel within the Gospel" and culminates in a description of what 'Bread of Life" really means.
You can find the article here.
[URL = http://www.biblicalheresy.com/GospelNGospel.pdf ]
Additionally, I have recently modified and hacked my blog's template to show a few new buttons. Some of these now appear below every post [including the del.icio.us link] There are also Digg It and Technorati Favorite voting button thingymajjigs in the sidebar. If you find any individual blogs interesting, I invite you to click these links. Doing so is a "vote" of sorts that suggests to others there might be something worthwhile here. This helps other people find this blog.
The discussion is titled "The Gospel within the Gospel" and culminates in a description of what 'Bread of Life" really means.
You can find the article here.
[URL = http://www.biblicalheresy.com/GospelNGospel.pdf ]
Additionally, I have recently modified and hacked my blog's template to show a few new buttons. Some of these now appear below every post [including the del.icio.us link] There are also Digg It and Technorati Favorite voting button thingymajjigs in the sidebar. If you find any individual blogs interesting, I invite you to click these links. Doing so is a "vote" of sorts that suggests to others there might be something worthwhile here. This helps other people find this blog.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Christians Need to be More Honest about the Gospel
Think about "the Gospel" for a moment. Whatever that means to you.
Now, remove anything related to Christ's death and resurrection. [[Note, this is a thought experiment, I'm not actually advocating that we remove such things from the gospel. Just work with me a bit...]
Now, remove anything related to Jesus being the Messiah.
What do you have left?
I think for most Christians the answer is "not much."
I'd like to challenge those Christians and everyone else to ponder a bit the gospel message of Jesus and His apostles.
The Bible indicates a wide variety of instances where Jesus and others spread "the Gospel" prior to His death. This includes John the Baptist preaching "the Gospel" before Jesus' public ministry. It includes Jesus preaching the Gospel throughout His three years of ministry on Earth [the word "Gospel' is not used in John's account, but "Word" is more or less his equivalent.] The disciples are sent out partway through Jesus' third year of ministry to preach the gospel to the surrounding areas.
What were these people preaching...and why is it called "The Gospel"?
At this point you might be looking at me like I have a third eye or a "I love Twisted Sister" tattoo on my forehead. But I'm serious...what do you think Jesus and His disciples preached as "The Gospel" during that time?
The reason why this is an interesting question is that no one knew Jesus was going to Die. Of course Jesus knew He was going to die, but the disciples didn't. Luke 24:26-27 and John 20:9 makes very clear that none of His disciples had realized that He was going to die, so what kind of Gospel were they preaching if no one had figured this out?
Note, I'm not saying Jesus never alluded to His coming death. It's sad I have to write this disclaimer, but you would not believe how many people read the last two paragraphs and immediately attack me for saying that Jesus never said He was going to die. I'm not saying Jesus never alluded to this event, I'm saying that it could not have played a role in the Gospel He and His disciples taught because no one understood His teaching.
We are told of many people who "believed" the message Jesus gave, and the apostles took that message to everyone else...which means whatever that message was, it couldn't have anything to do with Jesus' death. It would be hard for disciples to take a message to everyone that they themselves did not know!
Furthermore, whatever this message, this "Gospel" was, it couldn't have anything to do with Jesus being the Messiah either. It was not until rather late that even His own disciples identified Him as the Messiah, and that was not due to Jesus' instruction but by divine intervention [as Matthew 16:17 makes clear.] Furthermore, after Jesus verifies this, He tells them not to tell anyone!!
And that brings up another great question. It's easy to see why the gospel the modern Christian church preaches counts as "good news." But that message more or less disappears once you remove any reference to Jesus' death...that means that not only do we have to wonder what the message Jesus and His disciples taught was, but we have to wonder why it was good news (which as most know, is what "gospel" means)!
To add to the bizarre state of things, we see that even the message Jesus tells His apostles to take to "all nations" is not at all like the gospel Christians teach today. If you read Matthew 28:18-20 carefully, you'll note that Jesus is not saying "Go tell everyone about me in order to save them from Hell."
Instead Jesus says "Go teach them to obey the commands I have already given you, because I have been made Lord over Heaven and Earth."
It is worth pointing out here that these apostles that were told to make disciples of all nations only went to the Jews. No one preached to the Gentiles until nearly ten years after Jesus' resurrection. Anyone who believes the original Gospel was about "saving souls" is instantly making villains out of Peter, John, and the other apostles. Do we really think these holy men of God desired to abandon all gentiles to Hell? That is the logical deduction one is led to if we believe the early Gospel was about "saving souls from Hell."
But that isn't what the early Gospel was about. In fact, the word "hell" doesn't even appear in all of Acts. Not one time. Acts is the most abundant repository of early teachings to new believers by the original apostles, and the word Hell never even comes up in the nearly 20 passages describing their teachings in Acts.
So, regardless of what we teach as the Gospel today, we owe it to all Christians and anyone else to point out the original apostles never thought they were "saving souls" in the way the Gospel is described today. While we're at it, it might prove worthwhile to consider what the Gospel Jesus and His apostles preached really comprised.
Now, remove anything related to Christ's death and resurrection. [[Note, this is a thought experiment, I'm not actually advocating that we remove such things from the gospel. Just work with me a bit...]
Now, remove anything related to Jesus being the Messiah.
What do you have left?
I think for most Christians the answer is "not much."
I'd like to challenge those Christians and everyone else to ponder a bit the gospel message of Jesus and His apostles.
The Bible indicates a wide variety of instances where Jesus and others spread "the Gospel" prior to His death. This includes John the Baptist preaching "the Gospel" before Jesus' public ministry. It includes Jesus preaching the Gospel throughout His three years of ministry on Earth [the word "Gospel' is not used in John's account, but "Word" is more or less his equivalent.] The disciples are sent out partway through Jesus' third year of ministry to preach the gospel to the surrounding areas.
What were these people preaching...and why is it called "The Gospel"?
At this point you might be looking at me like I have a third eye or a "I love Twisted Sister" tattoo on my forehead. But I'm serious...what do you think Jesus and His disciples preached as "The Gospel" during that time?
The reason why this is an interesting question is that no one knew Jesus was going to Die. Of course Jesus knew He was going to die, but the disciples didn't. Luke 24:26-27 and John 20:9 makes very clear that none of His disciples had realized that He was going to die, so what kind of Gospel were they preaching if no one had figured this out?
Note, I'm not saying Jesus never alluded to His coming death. It's sad I have to write this disclaimer, but you would not believe how many people read the last two paragraphs and immediately attack me for saying that Jesus never said He was going to die. I'm not saying Jesus never alluded to this event, I'm saying that it could not have played a role in the Gospel He and His disciples taught because no one understood His teaching.
We are told of many people who "believed" the message Jesus gave, and the apostles took that message to everyone else...which means whatever that message was, it couldn't have anything to do with Jesus' death. It would be hard for disciples to take a message to everyone that they themselves did not know!
Furthermore, whatever this message, this "Gospel" was, it couldn't have anything to do with Jesus being the Messiah either. It was not until rather late that even His own disciples identified Him as the Messiah, and that was not due to Jesus' instruction but by divine intervention [as Matthew 16:17 makes clear.] Furthermore, after Jesus verifies this, He tells them not to tell anyone!!
And that brings up another great question. It's easy to see why the gospel the modern Christian church preaches counts as "good news." But that message more or less disappears once you remove any reference to Jesus' death...that means that not only do we have to wonder what the message Jesus and His disciples taught was, but we have to wonder why it was good news (which as most know, is what "gospel" means)!
To add to the bizarre state of things, we see that even the message Jesus tells His apostles to take to "all nations" is not at all like the gospel Christians teach today. If you read Matthew 28:18-20 carefully, you'll note that Jesus is not saying "Go tell everyone about me in order to save them from Hell."
Instead Jesus says "Go teach them to obey the commands I have already given you, because I have been made Lord over Heaven and Earth."
It is worth pointing out here that these apostles that were told to make disciples of all nations only went to the Jews. No one preached to the Gentiles until nearly ten years after Jesus' resurrection. Anyone who believes the original Gospel was about "saving souls" is instantly making villains out of Peter, John, and the other apostles. Do we really think these holy men of God desired to abandon all gentiles to Hell? That is the logical deduction one is led to if we believe the early Gospel was about "saving souls from Hell."
But that isn't what the early Gospel was about. In fact, the word "hell" doesn't even appear in all of Acts. Not one time. Acts is the most abundant repository of early teachings to new believers by the original apostles, and the word Hell never even comes up in the nearly 20 passages describing their teachings in Acts.
So, regardless of what we teach as the Gospel today, we owe it to all Christians and anyone else to point out the original apostles never thought they were "saving souls" in the way the Gospel is described today. While we're at it, it might prove worthwhile to consider what the Gospel Jesus and His apostles preached really comprised.
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