For the sake of the Gospel

God’s Purposes

Wed, 11 May 2011 00:34:43 -0700

Throughout my life, I have seen God’s faithfulness in my life time and again. He has never failed, and I know He never will. Even with that knowledge, though, I must confess that in some situations, anxiety creeps into my heart, stress weighs me down, and worry fills my mind. And then, when I see what God was doing, I feel like such a person of little faith (probably because, in those moments, I was). But it’s always amazing to see God work.

We just moved to Phoenix, AZ, because I accepted the call as senior pastor of Desert Hills Evangelical Free Church. The whole process was amazingly smooth, and it was evident that God was working out all of the details to bring us to this place and this ministry. Since we arrived, we have seen God’s hand again and again, confirming this was His direction. For example, the house we are renting in Phoenix is within walking distance of the church. What I mean by that is this: It takes longer to drive to the church than to walk there. We couldn’t have asked for a more perfect provision for our needs at this time! God is so amazing in His care for us!

But, there was just one hitch in the whole process. One huge hitch. Our house in Louisville was up for sale, and no one was buying. We have had a number of showings, but no offers, not even a crazy-lowball offer. Over three months have passed now, and while that might not seem like a long time for a house to be for sale in this economy, my bank account is starting to say otherwise. Why was this happening? God had worked out every single detail perfectly, except this (huge) one. Or so we thought.

I have a class coming up in Louisville in a few weeks, and much to my chagrin, my house was where I was planning on staying. Until this week. Randi and I began to entertain the idea of renting it when our realtor said we would probably have to reduce our asking price. Monday, a friend of mine called and asked if our house was still available and if we would consider renting it. A family at the seminary needed a place to live. The house they wanted? Exactly the specs of our house. I called them and sent them a link to see pictures of the house. They were ecstatic about it. They are planning to move in come June. And that just so happens to be right around when I will be in Louisville for my class. The timing couldn’t be more perfect.

Randi and I have wondered and asked aloud many times in the past few months, “God, why won’t You allow our house to sell?” God just answered: “I was holding it for your brother and sister in Christ and their family.” I love it when a plan comes together. God is so incredibly amazing and good and wise.

Of course, this side of eternity, not everything comes together in our understanding like this did for us, but I relish the thought that one day we are going to see the whole plan come together, and we’re going to marvel for all eternity at this infinitely good and wise God who loves us with an everlasting love.

Questions About Your Friends

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 22:43:54 -0700

Lately, 1 Corinthians 15:33 has been on my mind: “Do not be deceived: bad company corrupts good morals.” This verse is all the more interesting when the truth that Jesus was a friend of sinners is brought alongside it. Are we called to imitate Jesus in being friends of sinners, or are we to keep away from bad company because they will inevitably corrupt our virtue? It’s not an easy question to answer. In fact, I think the only way it can be answered is with other probing questions that we must put to ourselves. Let me suggest five questions we should ask when we think about the people with whom we are friends (or with whom we otherwise spend a large portion of our time):

1. Do the people with whom I am friends tend to entice me to sin or do they provoke me to love and good deeds?

1. What are my motives in sustaining my various friendships?

1. Are my closest friends the people with whom I have covenanted in a local church?

1. What do godly people I trust and respect think about my friends and their influence upon me?

1. If my friends are not believers, or are believers who are immature in their faith, do I have the strength of character to stand for what is righteous and holy before them, or am I myself too immature in my faith to stand by the courage of my convictions before my friends?

While everyone should think through these questions in regard to various relationships in their lives, I think they are especially relevant for young people who spend the majority of time with friends rather than with their immediate family.

So, should we avoid bad company, or should we be friends of sinners? The answer will be nuanced differently for every person, depending on spiritual maturity. Those who have the strength of character to stand for what is right before their friends regardless of the consequences can be effective friends of sinners; but, if a person is constantly capitulating to sin when in bad company, he or she is probably not ready to imitate Jesus in this respect, because he or she has not learned to imitate Jesus in other necessary respects. And, in truth, compromising Christians are not true friends of sinners anyways, since they are only bringing disrepute on Christ’s name before the watching world.

Choose the people you spend time with wisely. Aim to make your core group of friends people with whom you have covenanted in a local church, if at all possible. Seek people out who will spur you on to godliness. Be a friend of sinners as much as you can without compromising your integrity. Because, when you compromise your integrity, you cease to love everyone.

What Governs Our Understanding of God?

Tue, 8 Feb 2011 22:23:33 -0700

What is your paradigm for understanding God? Every person has certain foundations for how they think God, for how they understand Him. And, I think that too many people in the church never ask themselves this rather basic question. They think God in some innate way without ever examining what it is that is directing their thinking. This is eminently dangerous, teetering perilously on the edge of idolatry, and perhaps falling over the edge, if their paradigm is incorrect.

In John 14:27, Jesus made a radical statement. He told His disciples, “Not as the world gives do I give to you.” Jesus’ fundamental design in this statement was to explode the disciples’ innate paradigm for thinking about Him and His Father. His assumption was that the disciples would think Jesus like they thought sinful humanity. They would think Jesus’ gift like they thought gift from anyone else. They would approach Jesus and His giving from their innate perspective, which Jesus assumes is a natural, human perspective.

But Jesus will not have His disciples understand Him the way they understand the world. He demands a radical re-orientation of the way they conceive Him; He demands they abandon conceiving Him in purely human ways. If they are to have the correct understanding of Jesus, what they know from “the world” will never do. They must instead submit to His Word and what His Word teaches. His Word must become their paradigm for understanding Him. His Word, His promises, must be definitive and govern all of their thoughts.

Thinking from the world to God will never yield a proper conception of God. But thinking from God’s Word to the world will always yield a proper conception of both God and the world. When you think God, what are your underlying presuppositions? What innately governs your understanding of God? Is it your own “common sense,” your own “real world experience,” or your own “wisdom?” Or have you learned this lesson from Jesus, that He doesn’t give as the world gives, and we will never understand Him or His gifts if we start with the world and work our way to Him? Unless our fundamental conception of God is shaped by His Word, our fundamental conception is wrong.

God in New Testament Theology (Review)

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 20:11:28 -0700

Hurtado, Larry W. God in New Testament Theology. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010. Kindle Electronic Edition. $9.99.

One area that has been neglected in New Testament Theology (NTT) is the doctrine of God. Larry Hurtado’s monograph God in New Testament Theology (a contribution to the Library of Biblical Theology series) seeks to fill this gap and spur a conversation about the nature of God in the New Testament. Hurtado divides his volume into five chapters, and his discussion is largely oriented around a Trinitarian structure (chapters two through four focus on God, Jesus, and the Spirit respectively). At the outset, Hurtado recognizes the difficulty of his subject, given that none of the NT writers sets out to explain a thoroughgoing doctrine of God. In fact, as Hurtado notes, references to God are mostly of an “occasional” nature, usually with the underlying assumption that the writer and his readers share a common understanding of God. Nevertheless, even though the NT writers did not compose an explicit treatise on the topic, their understanding of God permeates everything they wrote and is foundational for their theology. It is therefore crucial that contemporary readers of the NT discern what the biblical writers believed about God.

Hurtado begins by discussing the concept of “God” in the NT and in NTT. The discussion is organized around the key NT writers and their concepts of God. Hurtado argues persuasively that the God of the NT writers is the same God to which the OT attests and in whom they believed as Jews prior to their conversion to Christianity. However, there is one key difference between their former Jewish understanding and their Christian viewpoint. For Jewish readers of the OT, the central and defining revelation of God was the Torah; for the NT writers, especially Paul, the defining revelation of God was Jesus (secs. 351-366). Such a change represented a radical discontinuity between a Jewish and a Christian understanding of the OT. It also is a challenge to any hermeneutic that gives priority of interpretation to the OT rather than the NT. If the locus of revelation and the unveiling of God are centered in Jesus, then the OT must be read in the light of Jesus and the Christ-event and not read as if these watershed, eschatological events never occurred. Hurtado’s discussion is also helpful in that he gives evidence to a unity of understanding among the NT writers concerning God. Scholars have often sought to find diversity, even contradiction, among the NT corpus; Hurtado demonstrates that, while there are differences in emphases, there is unity of thought.

In the second chapter, Hurtado sets the context of the NT writings, discussing the various and manifold gods that existed in the Roman Empire. The claim of Christianity was not that their God was one among the pantheon of gods, but that the God in whom they believed was the supreme Deity, alone deserving of worship and honor. Despite a few fringe groups, like the Gnostics, who rejected the OT as Christian Scripture, Christians largely inherited and kept intact the exclusivist monotheism of Second Temple Judaism. The continuity with Judaism was also present in the NT writers’ understanding of how a person can know God. God is not understood primarily through metaphysical cogitation or intellectual discourse; to the contrary, God is known by what He does. God is “the God who acts” (906-921). Furthermore, God is revealed consistently throughout the NT as the “Father.” Hurtado’s discussion is helpful until it becomes decidedly egalitarian. After affirming the reality of God as Father, Hurtado neuters the meaning of the Fatherhood of God by reducing it to merely a Christological statement. While there can be no doubt that it is a Christological statement at one level, it also does say something about God’s character, nature, and purposes. For example, Hurtado does not address why God is then called Father to Jesus (and believers) but not Mother. While rejecting that God is a male, Hurtado does not grapple enough with the implications for our understanding of God given that Jesus, the locus of God’s self-revelation, was a male. The way God has manifested Himself most clearly to humanity is in the person of a male human, but Hurtado seems too quick to dismiss this aspect of both theology and Christology in an attempt to dispel any patriarchal notions readers might glean from the nature of God as Father. Some rather deep theological issues are at stake in this discussion, and Hurtado, unfortunately, passes by them too easily.

In Hurtado’s discussion of Jesus (chapter 3) and the Spirit (chapter 4), he goes to great lengths to show that Jesus is identified with God in multiple ways. Jesus does the works that God does. Jesus is the agent of creation (an unprecedented concept prior to the NT writings in the way the NT discusses it). Jesus is given worship, and, as Hurtado notes, “this remarkable devotion to Jesus is treated in the NT writings not as something optional but as mandatory, as obedience to ‘God’” (1523-1538). The relationship of the Spirit to Jesus and God is also revolutionary. In recognizing the connection of the Spirit to Jesus, Hurtado comments, “In comparison to the biblical and Jewish tradition of the time, it is simply remarkable for the divine Spirit to be so directly connected with a figure other than ‘God’” (1960-1975). The Spirit is given by Jesus and is identified with reference to Jesus in the NT, indicating not only the nature of the Spirit, but the identity of Jesus and His unique relationship with God.

Hurtado concludes his work with some observations, spending a large amount of time arguing for the unity of the NT in its discussion of God. He also helpfully explains the “Triadic” shape of what he calls “Goddiscourse” in the NT. While seeking to avoid reading later Trinitarian controversies back into the NT, Hurtado argues that the NT itself was the seed-bed of later thinking. Yet even that is not a helpful metaphor, because the NT is more than just the seed for later thought, but it is in itself a fully developed theology of the Triune God. This emphasis is profound and well-worth extended reflection. All too quickly, we move to Trinitarian language of the 4th century or later before reflecting on the ways the NT writers themselves articulate God’s nature as Father, Son, and Spirit. As Hurtado comments, “I urge that the NT texts deserve to be heard in their own right. I think that it is patronizing, even demeaning, to treat them as representing preliminary and immature expressions of faith” (2488-2501). Hurtado closes with some challenges to NTT and Systematics. He aims at the classic doctrine of the immutability of God, suggesting that perhaps, in light of the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus, divine immutability should be defined as moral immutability rather than absolute immutability. Since, from Jesus’ resurrection onward, God now includes a glorified human, is it proper to speak of immutability as theologians have done for centuries? Hurtado asks a valid question, although limiting divine immutability only to God’s moral character raises some significant problems, not least of which is the question, What aspects of God’s character are amoral? Hurtado, however, makes no claim to answer the question, only suggesting a more thorough examination of God in NTT could point the way forward to better, or more refined, explanations of the one true and living God.

While Hurtado’s work has flaws, and at times seems to raise more difficult questions than it purports to resolve, it is well worth a thoughtful and careful reading. At merely $9.99 for an electronic edition, it should be on anyone’s list who is interested in the subject of NTT.

Teaching Our Kids to Tell the Truth

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 20:37:12 -0700

The temptation to lie is ever-present. I don't mean big lies. I mean "white" lies. Little lies. You might even call them short-cuts. They tend to make life convenient, and often, no one would notice or maybe even care. I find the temptation the greatest with my kids.

For example, tonight after I tucked Natalie and Alexis into bed, Natalie turned and said, "Daddy, will you come up and check on me?" I said, "Yes, in a little while. Lay down and try to sleep." Natalie, ever the negotiator, asked, "In three minutes?" A thought immediately went through my head, "Say yes. She has no idea how long three minutes is. And you'll avoid dragging this conversation out." And I almost said, "Yes." Then another thought came, this one from the Holy Spirit, "Speak truth to one another." The second thought won, and I said, "Ten minutes" (that's the standard time around here for checking on them). Natalie was content with that, and I went downstairs with a clear conscience.

One area we are working hard to help Natalie understand is the importance of always telling the truth. Always. No matter what. Tell the truth. No matter the cost. The words I say to her in instructing her to speak truth are necessary, but the example I set is more powerful. What would I be teaching my daughter if I said to her, "Tell the truth," and then turned around and lied to her? Knowingly. Intentionally. Maybe she wouldn't know. At least not now. But maybe she would. And, regardless, God knows. And His Word says, "Speak truth to one another."

The example I want to set for my children is that dad tells the truth, even when no one knows but God. Because that's how I want them to live. I want them to speak truth even if no one will know that they are lying. No one, that is, but God.

Many times it seems like lying would make a situation easier, more convenient. And maybe it would (unless, of course, you were found out). But God's Word is clear. We must speak truth to one another. Out of love. No matter the cost. Even to our kids. Especially to our kids. They're learning what it means to tell the truth from our example.