Category: Bibliology and Bible Interpretation (Hermeneutics)

Dr. Tim Keller on The Girl Nobody Wanted: A Christo-centric Gem

The Girl Nobody Wanted by Tim Keller (Genesis 29:15-35)

[15] Then Laban said to Jacob, “Because you are my kinsman [relative], should you therefore serve me for nothing? Tell me, what shall your wages be?” [16] Now Laban had two daughters. The name of the older was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. [17] Leah’s eyes were weak, but Rachel was beautiful in form and appearance. [18] Jacob loved Rachel. And he said, “I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel.” [19] Laban said, “It is better that I give her to you than that I should give her to any other man; stay with me.” [20] So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.

[21] Then Jacob said to Laban, “Give me my wife that I may go in to her, for my time is completed.” [22] So Laban gathered together all the people of the place and made a feast. [23] But in the evening he took his daughter Leah and brought her to Jacob, and he went in to her. [24] (Laban gave his female servant Zilpah to his daughter Leah to be her servant.) [25] And in the morning, behold, it was Leah! And Jacob said to Laban, “What is this you have done to me? Did I not serve with you for Rachel? Why then have you deceived me?” [26] Laban said, “It is not so done in our country, to give the younger before the firstborn. [27] Complete the week of this one, and we will give you the other also in return for serving me another seven years.” [28] Jacob did so, and completed her week. Then Laban gave him his daughter Rachel to be his wife. [29] (Laban gave his female servant Bilhah to his daughter Rachel to be her servant.) [30] So Jacob went in to Rachel also, and he loved Rachel more than Leah, and served Laban for another seven years. [31] When the LORD saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren. [32] And Leah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Reuben, for she said, “Because the LORD has looked upon my affliction; for now my husband will love me.” [33] She conceived again and bore a son, and said, “Because the LORD has heard that I am hated, he has given me this son also.” And she called his name Simeon. [34] Again she conceived and bore a son, and said, “Now this time my husband will be attached to me, because I have borne him three sons.” Therefore his name was called Levi. [35] And she conceived again and bore a son, and said, “This time I will praise the LORD.” Therefore she called his name Judah. Then she ceased bearing. Gen. 29:15-35

There is no book, I believe, less sentimental about marriage and the family then the Bible. It is utterly realistic about how hard it is not to be married; and it is utterly realistic about how hard it is to be married. Out in the world, especially in the culture outside the church, there are a lot of people who are cynical about marriage. They don’t trust marriage, so they avoid it altogether or give themselves an easy escape by living together. Then there are people inside the church who are very much the opposite. They think, “Marriage, family, white picket fences—that is what family values are all about. That’s how you find fulfillment. That is what human life is all about.”

The Bible shows us marriage and the family, with all of its joys and all of its difficulties, and points us to Jesus and says, “This is who you need, this is what you need, to have a fulfilled life.” What the Bible says is so nuanced, so different, so off the spectrum. One of the places you see this is in this fascinating story—the account of Jacob’s search for his one true love. I would like you to notice three things in the story:

First, this overpowering human drive to find one true love [Key Theme – a hope];

Secondly, the devastation and disillusionment that ordinarily accompanies the search for true love;

[Third], and finally, what we can do about this longing – what will fulfill it.

 1) THE HUMAN DRIVE TO FIND ONE TRUE LOVE

At the beginning of the passage, Laban says to Jacob, “Just because you are a kinsmen [relative] of mine, should you work for me for nothing? Tell me what your wages should be” (v. 15). Before continuing, let me give you the back-story.

Two generations earlier, God had come to Abraham, Jacob’s grandfather, and said, “Abraham, look at the misery, the death, and the brokenness. I am going to do something about it. I am going to redeem this world, and I am going to do it through your family, through one of your descendents. And therefore, in every generation of your descendents, one child will bear the Messianic line. That child will walk before me and be the head of the clan and pass the true faith on to the next generation. Then there will be another child that bears the Messianic line [seed] and another, until one day, one of your descendents will be the Messiah himself, the King of kings.”

Abraham fathered Isaac, the first in the line Messianic forebears, and when Isaac’s wife, Rebekah, became pregnant with twins, God spoke to Rebekah through and said, “The elder will serve the younger.” That was God’s way of saying that the second twin born would be the chosen one, to carry on the Messianic hope. Esau is born first and then Jacob, but in spite of the prophecy, Isaac set his heart on the oldest son. He set his heart on Esau and favored him all through his life. As a result, he distorted his entire family. Esau grew up proud, spoiled, willful, and impulsive; Jacob grew up rejected and resentful and turned into a schemer; Rebekah favored her younger son and became alienated from her husband Isaac.

Finally, the time came for the aged Isaac to give the blessing to the head of the clan, which was to be Esau; but Jacob dressed up as Esau, went in, and got the blessing. When Esau found out about it, he became determined to kill Jacob, and Jacob had to flee into the wilderness. Now everything was ruined. Jacob’s life was ruined. Not only did he no longer have a family to be the head of; he no longer had a family or an inheritance at all, and he had to flee for his life. Jacob did not know whether Esau messed up or he messed up or Isaac or maybe even God, but now his life was in ruins and he would never fulfill his destiny. Just to survive, he was forced to flee to the other side of the Fertile Crescent.

Jacob escaped to his mother’s family, and they took him in as a kind of charity case. Laban, his uncle, allowed him to be a shepherd. Laban realized that Jacob had tremendous ability as a shepherd and a manager. He figured out that he could make a lot of money if Jacob were in charge of his flocks. That is how we get to this question: “How much can I pay you to be in charge of my flocks?”

Jacob’s answer [vv. 16-18] is basically one word: Rachel.  He wanted Rachel as his bride, and was willing to work seven years for her. What do we know about Rachel? The text comes right out and says that Rachel was lovely in form and beautiful. The Hebrew word translated “form” is quite literal it means exactly what you think. It is talking about her figure. Rachel had a great figure. She had a beautiful face and was absolutely gorgeous. I want to give credit where credit is due and say that Robert Alter, the great Hebrew literature scholar at Berkeley, has helped me understand this text a lot. Alter says there are all sorts of signals in the text about how over-the-top, intensely lovesick and overwhelmed Jacob is with Rachel. There is the poignant but telling statement where the text says, “Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her (v.20).”

More interesting is the next verse: “Then Jacob said to Laban, “Give me my wife that I may go in to her, for my time is completed.” Of course that means he wants to have sex with her. Alter says that this statement is so blunt, so graphic, so sexual, so over-the-top and inappropriate and non-customary that, over the centuries, Jewish commentators have had to do all kinds of backpedaling to explain it. But he says it is not that hard to explain the meaning. He says that the narrator is showing us a man driven by and overwhelmed with emotional and sexual longing for one woman.

What is going on here? Jacob’s life was empty. He never had his father’s love. Now he didn’t even have his mother’s love, and he certainly had no sense of God’s love. He had lost everything—no family, no inheritance, no nothing. And then he saw Rachel, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, the most beautiful woman for miles around, and he said to himself, “If I had her, finally, something would be right in my lousy life. If I had her, life would have meaning. If I had her, it would fix things.” If he found his one true love, life would finally be okay.

All the longings of the human heart for significance, for security, and for meaning—he had no other object for them—they were all fixed on Rachel.

Jacob was somewhat unusual for his time. Cultural historians will tell you that in ancient times people didn’t generally marry for love (that is actually a relatively recent phenomenon). They married for status. Nevertheless, he is not rare today.

Ernest Becker was a secular man, an atheist, who won the Pulitzer Prize in the 1970’s for his book The Denial of Death. In the book, he talks about how secular people deal with the fact that they don’t believe in God. He says that one of the main ways secular culture has dealt with the God vacuum is through apocalyptic sex and romance. Our secular culture has loaded its desire for transcendence into romance and love. Talking about the modern secular person, he says:

He still needed to feel heroic, to know that his life mattered in the scheme of things…He still had to merge himself with some higher, self-absorbing meaning, in trust and gratitude…If he no longer had God, how was he to do this? One of the first ways that occurred to him, as [Otto] Rank saw, was the “romantic solution.” …The self-glorification that he needed in the innermost nature he now looked for in the love partner. The love partner becomes the divine ideal within which to fulfill one’s life…

After all, what is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to the position of God? We want redemption—nothing less. We want to be rid of our faults, of our feelings of nothingness. We want to be justified, to know that our creation has not been in vain. … That is exactly what Jacob did. And that is what people are doing all over the place. That is what our culture is begging us to do—to load all of the deepest needs of our hearts for significance, security, and transcendence into romance and love, into finding that one true love. That will fix my lousy life!

Let me tell you something you notice when you live in New York City. It is a tough town; everybody looks so cool and pulled together. But the amount of money people spend on their appearance shows they are desperate. They cannot imagine living without apocalyptic romance and love. The human longing for one true love has always been around, but in our culture now, it has been magnified to an astounding degree. But where does it lead?

 2) The Disillusionment That Comes

Secondly, let’s look at the disillusionment and devastation that almost always accompanies a search for that one true love. We begin with Laban’s plot. Laban knew that Jacob offered to serve seven years for Rachel. He knew what that meant. At that time, when you wanted to marry someone, you paid the father a bride price, and it was somewhere around thirty to forty-five shekels. Robert Alter says that a month’s wages was equal to one and a half shekels, and therefore, you can see that Jacob, right out of the box is absolutely lovesick. He is a horrible bargainer; he is immediately offered three to four times the normal bride price. Laban knew he had him. He knew this man was vulnerable.

Commentators say there are indicators in the text that Laban immediately came up with a plan, realizing he could get even more out of this deal. Notice the conversation between Jacob and Laban. The text says, “Jacob loved Rachel. And he said, “I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel.” (v.18). Look at how Laban responds. He never says, “Yes”! He does not say, “Yes, seven years. It is a deal.” No! Laban said, “It is better that I give her to you than that I should give her to any other man; stay with me” (v.19).

Jacob wants it to be a yes, so he hears a yes. But it is not a yes. Laban is just saying, “Yea, okay, if you want to marry Rachel, it is a good idea.”

Seven years pass; now Jacob says, “Give me my wife.” As customary, there is a great feast. In the middle of the feast, the bride is brought heavily veiled to the groom. She was given to him, and he took her into the tent. He was inebriated, as was also the custom; and in that dark tent, Jacob lay with her. The text tells us, “When morning came, there was Leah!” (v. 25). Jacob looked and discovered that he had married Leah, and had had sex with Leah, and he had consummated the marriage with Leah. Jacob, rightfully angry, goes to Laban and says, “What is this you have done to me? I served you for Rachel, didn’t I? Why have you deceived me? (v. 25). Laban replies that it is customary for the older girl to be married before the younger girl.

I must say I have read this text for thirty years or more and I have never understood why Jacob basically says, “Oh, okay.” I have never figured it out. He is obviously angry and the situation is absolutely ridiculous. Why doesn’t Jacob kill him? Why doesn’t he throttle him? Again, Robert Alter is very helpful here. He suggests something that I think is rather profound.

First of all, what Laban literally says is: “It is not the custom here to put the younger before the older.”

Second, Alter points out that when Jacob said, “Why have you deceived me?” the word translated “deceived” is the same Hebrew word that was used in chapter 27 to describe what Jacob did to Isaac. [What goes around comes around; sowing…and reaping]

Alter says (this is surmise, but what surmise!) that it must have occurred to Jacob that Laban had only done to him what he had done to his father. In the dark, he thought he was touching Rachel, as his father in the dark of his blindness had thought he was touching Esau. Alter then quotes an ancient rabbinical commentator who imagines the conversation the next day between Jacob and Leah. Jacob says to Leah: “I called out ‘Rachel’ in the dark and you answered. Why did you do that to me?” And Leah says to him, “Your father called out ‘Esau’ in the dark and you answered. Why did you do that to him?” Fury dies on his lips. Cut to the quick. Suddenly the evil he has done has come to Jacob. And he sees what it is like to be manipulated and deceived, and meekly he picks up and works another seven years.

We leave Jacob in his devastation (I don’t have a better word for it), and then we see what it has done to Leah. Now, who is Leah? We are told that Leah is the older daughter, but the only detail we are given about her is that she has weak eyes. Nobody quite knows what “weak eyes” means; some commentators have assumed it means she has bad eyesight. But the text does not say that Leah had weak eyes, but Rachel could see a long way. Weakness probably means cross-eyed; it could mean something unsightly. But here is the point: Leah was particularly unattractive, and she had to live all of her life in the shadow of her sister who was absolutely stunning.

As a result, Laban knew no one was ever going to marry her or offer any money for her. He wondered how he was going to get rid of her, how was he going to unload her. And then he saw his chance, he saw an opening and he did it. And now the girl that Laban, her father, did not want has been given to a husband who doesn’t want her either. She is the girl nobody wants. Leah has a hollow in her heart every bit as the hollow in Jacob’s heart. Now she begins to do to Jacob what Jacob had done to Rachel and what Isaac had done to Esau. She set her heart on Jacob. You see the evil and the pathology in these families just ricocheting around again and again from generation to generation.

The last verses here are some of the most plaintive [sad] I have ever read in the Bible (most English translations tell you a little about what the words actually mean). [she uses Hebrew words that express her longing for Jacob] Leah gave birth to her first child, a boy and she named him Reuben. Reuben means, “to see” and she thought, “Now maybe my husband will see me; maybe I won’t be invisible anymore.” But she had a second son, and she named him Simeon, which has to do with hearing: “Now maybe my husband will finally listen to me.” But he didn’t. She had a third son and named him Levi, which means “to be attached,” and she said, “Maybe finally my husband’s heart will be attached to me.”

What was she doing? She was trying to get an identity through traditional family values. Having sons, especially in those days, was the best way to do that; but it was not working. She had set her heart, all of her hopes and dreams, on her husband. She thought, “If I have babies and if I have sons and my husband loves me, then finally something will be fixed in my lousy life.” Instead, she was just going down into hell. And the text says—it is sort of like the summary statement—Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah. That meant she was condemned every single day. This is what I mean by hell—every single day she was condemned to see the man she most longed for in the arms of the one in whose shadow she had lived all her life. Every day was like another knife in the heart.

All we see here is devastation, right? No, that is actually not the way the text ends. But before we look at how the text ends, let me field two objections and draw two lessons.

The first objection has to do with all these ancient practices. Some people who read the text or listen to a sermon on it are thinking, Why are you telling me this story—men buying and selling women, primogeniture [pry-mo-gen-i-turr], sexual slavery—what is this about? I am offended by this kind of old primitive culture. I know they existed, but thank goodness we don’t live in a culture like that anymore. Why do we have to know about it?

First, it is important to see (and this comes from what Robert Alter says), if you read the book of Genesis, and you think it is condoning primogeniture [the right of succession belonging to the firstborn child], polygamy, and bride purchase—if you think it is condoning these things, you have not yet learned how to read. Because in absolutely every single place where you see polygamy or primogeniture, it always wreaks devastation. It never works out. All you ever see is the misery these patriarchal institutions cause in families. Alter says if you think the book of Genesis is promoting those things, you have no idea what is being said. He says these stories are subversive [seeking or intended to subvert an established system or institution] to all those ancient patriarchal institutions. Just read!

You might also be thinking, Thank goodness we don’t live in a culture in which a woman’s value is based on her looks. Thank goodness we don’t live in a culture where a woman looks in a mirror and says, “Look at me I am a size 4, I can get a rich husband.” Hundreds of years ago, people used to do that but nobody does that anymore. Really?

I am sorry, I shouldn’t be sarcastic, but what in the world makes you think that we are in a less brutal culture? We are and we aren’t. Besides that, what the Bible says about the human heart is always true, it is always abiding. If anything, what we are saying is truer today than it was before.

The second objection people have has to do with the moral of the story. They ask, “Where are all the spiritual heroes in this text? Who am I supposed to be emulating? Who is the good guy? What is the moral of the story? I don’t see any! What is going on here?

The answer is: That is absolutely correct. You are starting to get it. You are starting to get the point of the Bible. What do I mean? The Bible doesn’t give us a god at the top of a moral ladder saying, “Look at the people who have found God through their great performance and their moral record. Be like them!” Of course not! Instead, over and over again, the Bible gives us absolutely weak people who don’t seek the grace they need and who don’t deserve the grace they get.

They don’t appreciate it after they get it, and continue to screw up and abuse it even after they have it. And yet, the grace keeps coming! The Bible is not about a god who gives us accounts or moral heroes. It is about grace, and that is what this story is about. So what do we learn from this story? Is there any moral? I wouldn’t put it that way, but here are two things I would want you to see?

First, we learn that through all of life there runs a ground note of cosmic disappointment. You are never going to lead a wise life, no matter who you are, unless you understand that. Here is Jacob, and he says, “If I can just get Rachel, everything will be okay.” And he goes to bed with someone whom he thinks is Rachel, and then, literally, the Hebrew says, “But in the morning, behold, it was Leah.” What does this show us? Listen, I love Leah; I really do. I have been thinking about this text for a long time, and I love her and I want to protect her, so I hope you don’t think I am being mean to her in what I am trying to say. But I want you to know that—  when you get married, no matter how great you think that marriage is going to be; when you get a career, no matter how great you think your career is going to be; when you go off to seminary, no matter how much you think it is going to make you into a man or a woman of God—in the morning, it is always Leah!You think you are going to bed with Rachel, and it in the morning, it is always Leah. Nobody has ever said this better than C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity:

Most people, if they have really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy. I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking of the best possible ones. There was something we have grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality. I think everyone knows what I mean. The souse may be a good spouse, and the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and chemistry may be a very interesting job: but something has evaded us.

You have got to understand that it is always Leah! Why? Because if you get married, if you have families, if you go into the ministry, and say that “finally this is going to fix my life” (you don’t really think you are doing it until you do it)—those things will never do what you think they will do. In the morning, it is always Leah.

If you get married, and in any way do as Jacob does and put that kind of weight on the person you are marrying, you are going to crush him or her. You are going to kill each other. You are going to think you have gone to bed with Rachel, but you get up and it is Leah. As time goes on, eventually you are going to know that this is the case; that everything disappoints, that there is a note of cosmic disappointment and disillusionment in everything, in all things into which we most put our hopes. When you finally find that out, there are four things you can do.

One, you can blame the things and drop them and go try new ones, better ones. That is the fool’s way.

The second thing you can do is blame yourself and beat yourself up and say, “I have been a failure. I see everybody else happy. I don’t know why I’m not happy. There is something wrong with me.” So you blame yourself and you become a self-hater.

Third, you can blame the world and get cynical and hard. You say, “Curses on the entire opposite sex” or whatever, in which case you dehumanize yourself.

Lastly, you can, as C. S. Lewis says at the end of his great chapter on hope, change the entire focus of your life. He concludes, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world [something supernatural and eternal].

We see that both the liberal mindset and the conservative mindset are wrong when it comes to romance, sex, and love.

Neither serves us well. In fact, you can almost see it in Jacob and Leah. Jacob, with a liberal mindset, is after an apocalyptic hookup. He says, “Give me my wife! I want sex!” he actually says that. On the other hand, here is Leah, and what is she doing? She is the conservative. She is having babies. She is not out having a career. She is trying to find her identity in being a wife—“Now my husband will love me.”

Guess what? They are both wrong. They are not going anywhere. Their lives are a mess. That is the reason why Ernest Becker says so beautifully, “No human relationship can bear the burden of godhood… However much we idolize him [the love partner], he inevitably reflects earthly decay and imperfection. And as he is our ideal measure of value, this imperfection falls back upon us. If your partner is you “All’ then any shortcoming in him becomes a major threat to you.” – Becker, Denial of Death, 166. As Becker said, what we want when we elevate the love partner to the position of God is to be rid of our faults, to be justified to know our existence has not been in vain. We are after redemption. He then adds, “Needless to say, human partners can’t do this.” You might think that is pretty obvious; but we done believe it. We thought the Bible was a source of family values. Well, it is, in a sense, but how realistic it is! So what are we going to do? We are all creatures of our culture. We have this drive in us for one true love. What are we going to do with it? Here is the answer.

3) What We Can Do about This Longing

I want you to see what God does in Leah and for Leah. Leah is the first person to get it; she does begin to see what you are supposed to do.

Look first at what God does in her. As we have said, every time she has a child, she puts all of her hopes in her husband now loving her. And yet, one of the things scholars notice that is very curious is that even though she is clearly making a functional idol out of her husband and her family, she is calling on the Lord. She doesn’t talk about God in some general way or invoke the name of Elohim. She  uses the name Yahweh. In verse 32, it says, “And Leah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Reuben, for she said, “Because the LORD [Yahweh] has looked upon my affliction.” How does she know about Yahweh?

Elohim was the generic word for God back then. All creatures at that time had some general idea of God or gods; they were gods at the top of a ladder, and you had to get up to the top through rituals or through transformations of consciousness or moral performance. Everyone understood God in that sense, but Yahweh was different. Yahweh was the God who came down the ladder, the one who entered into a personal covenantal relationship and intervened to save. Certainly they didn’t know all he was going to do, but Abraham and Isaac knew something about it, and Jacob would have known about it as well. It is interesting that Leah must have learned about Yahweh from Jacob. Even though she is still in the grip of her functional idolatry, somehow she is trying, she is calling out, she is reaching out to a God of grace. She has grasped the concept.

You might say that she has got a theology of sorts, as advanced as it was at the time, but she is having trouble connecting it. She is calling him the Lord, and yet she is treating him like a “god.” Do you follow me?

She is saying, “God can help me save myself through childbearing. God can help me save myself by getting my husband’s love. So she is using God, and yet she not call him God [Elohim]; she calls him Lord [Yahweh]. She is beginning to get it, and what is intriguing is that, at the very end, something happens. The first time she gives birth she says, ‘Now maybe my husband will see me. Now maybe my husband will love me.” And when she gives birth to her third son, she says, “Now maybe my husband will be attached to me.”

Finally, it says that she conceived for the fourth time, and when she gave birth to Judah, she said, “This time!” Isn’t that defiant? It is totally different; no mention of husband, no mention of child. There is some kind of breakthrough. She says, “This time I will praise the LORD.”

At that point, she has finally taken her heart’s deepest hopes off of the old way, off of her husband and her children, and she has put them in the Lord.

Here is what I believe is going on. Jacob and Laban had stolen Leah’s life, but when she stopped giving her heart to a good thing that she had turned into an ultimate thing and gave it to the Lord, she got her life back.

May I respectfully ask you: What good thing in your life are you treating as an ultimate thing?

What do you need to stop giving your heart to if you are going to get your life back?

There are a lot of things I am certain about, but I am absolutely certain that everybody in this room has got something.

Do you know what it is?

If you have no idea, you need to think about it. Something happened to Leah; God did something in her. There was a breakthrough. She began to understand what you are supposed to do with your desire for one true love. She turned her heart toward the only real beauty, the only real lover who can satisfy those cosmic needs.

But we shouldn’t just look at what God did in her. We have to also look for what God has done for her—because God has done something for her. I believe that she had some consciousness, although it might have been semi-consciousness or just intuition, that there was something special about this last child. It would probably be reading too much into the text to say she understood, but I believe she sensed that God had done something for her. And he had.

The writer of Genesis knows what God has done. This child is Judah, and who is Judah? The writer of Genesis tells us in chapter 49 that it is through Judah that Shiloh will come, and it is through Shiloh that the King will come. This is the line! This is the Messianic line! God has come to the girl that nobody wanted, the unloved, and made her the mother of Jesus—not beautiful Rachel, but the homely one, the unwanted one, the unloved one.

Why did God do that? Does he just like the underdog? He did it because of his person and because of his work.

First, because of his person. It says that when the Lord saw Leah was not loved, he loved her. God is saying, “I am the real bridegroom. I am the husband of the husbandless. I am the father of the fatherless.” What does that  mean?

He is attracted to the people that the world is not attracted to. He loves the unwanted. He loves the unattractive. He loves the weak, the ones the world doesn’t want to be like. God says, “If nobody else is going to be the spouse of Leah, I will be her spouse.”

Guess what? It is not just those of you without spouses who need to see God as your ultimate spouse, but those of us with spouses have got to see God as our ultimate spouse as well. You have to demote the person you are married to out of first place in your heart to second place behind God or you will end up killing each other. You will put all of your freight, all the weight of all your hopes, on that person. And of course, they are human beings, they are sinners, just like you are. God says you must see him as what he is: the great bridegroom, the spouse for the spouseless. He is not just a king and we are the subjects; he is not just a shepherd and we are the sheep. He is a husband and we are his lovers. He loves us! He is ravished with us—even those of us whom no one else is ravished with; especially those of us whom no one else is ravished with. That is his person. But that is not all.

The second reason why he goes after Leah and not Rachel, why he makes the girl who nobody wanted into the mother of Jesus, the bearer of the Messianic line, the bearer of salvation to the world, is not just that he likes the underdog, but because that it the gospel.

When God came to earth in Jesus Christ, he was the son of Leah. Oh yes, he was! He became the man nobody wanted. He was born in a manger. He had no beauty that we should desire him. He came to his own and his own received him not. And at the end, nobody wanted him. Everybody abandoned him. Even his Father in heaven didn’t want him. Jesus cried out on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Why did he become Leah’s son? Why did he become the man nobody wanted? For you and for me! Here is the gospel: God did not save us in spite of the weakness that he experienced as a human being but through it.  And you don’t actually get that salvation into your life through strength; it is only for those who admit they are weak. And if you cannot admit that you are a hopeless moral failure and a sinner and that you are absolutely lost and have no hope apart from the sheer grace of God, then you are not weak enough for Leah and her son and the great salvation that God has brought into the world.

God chose Leah because he is saying, “This is how salvation works. This is the upside-down way that my people will live, at least in relationship to the world, when they receive my salvation.”

Now the way up is down. The way to become rich is to give your money away. The way to become rich is to give your money away. The way to power is to serve God, when he came to earth, as the son of Leah. God made Leah, the girl nobody wanted into the mother of Jesus. Why?

Because he chooses the foolish things to shame the wise; he chooses the weak things to shame the strong; he chooses even the things that are not to bring to nothing the things that are, so that no one will boast in his presence (1 Cor. 1:27-29).

In conclusion, let me give you a few practical applications.

First, if there is anyone with a Laban in their life right now, don’t be bitter and don’t beat them up. Don’t let them take advantage of you either if you can; but remember, God can use that person in your life to make you a better person in your life if you don’t become bitter.

Second, are you somebody who has been rejected, betrayed, maybe recently divorced, and you didn’t want to be? Are you a Leah? Remember, God knows what it is like to be rejected. He didn’t just love Leah, but he actually became Leah. He became the son of Leah. He came to his own and his own received him not.

He understands rejection, and if anything, he is, from what we can tell in the Scripture, attracted to people in your condition. It is his nature, so don’t worry. He knows and he cares.

Third, please don’t let marriage throw you. I have been saying this all along: in the morning, it will always be Leah. And if you understand that, it will make some of you less desperate in your marriage-seeking, and it will make some of you less angry at your spouse for his imperfections.

Last, you may believe you have messed up your life; that your life is on plan B. You should have done this or that, and now it is too late. Think about it:

Should Jacob have deceived Isaac and Esau? No.

Should Isaac have shown the favoritism that turned Jacob into a liar? No.

Everybody sinned. There are no excuses. They shouldn’t have done what they did. They blew up their lives. But if those things hadn’t happened, would Jacob have met the love of his life, Rachel?

Jesus Christ, who is a result of Jacob’s having to flee to the other side of the Fertile Crescent, isn’t plan B! You can’t mess up your life. You can’t mess up God’s plan for you. You will find that no matter how much you do to mess it up, all you are doing is fulfilling his destiny for you.

That does not mean what they did was okay. The devastation and the unhappiness and the misery that happens in your life because of your sins are your fault. You are responsible, you shouldn’t do them; and yet, God is going to work through you. Those two things are together. It is an antinomy, a paradox.

Remember, it is never too late for God to work in your life! Never! You can’t put yourself on plan B. Go to him. Start over now. Say it: “This time, no matter what else I have done, I will praise the Lord!”

*[Delight yourself in the LORD, and He will give you the desires of your heart – Psalm 37:4]

The sermon manuscript by Dr. Timothy Keller above was adapted and excerpted in parts from the original sermon and from the printed manuscript that can be found in the excellent book of sermons edited by Dr. Dennis E. Johnson entitled: Heralds of the King: Christ-Centered Sermons in the Tradition of Edmund P. Clowney. Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2009.

 About The Author/Preacher:

In 1989 Dr. Timothy J. Keller, his wife and three young sons moved to New York City to begin Redeemer Presbyterian Church. In 20 years it has grown to meeting for five services at three sites with a weekly attendance of over 5,000. Redeemer is notable not only for winning skeptical New Yorkers to faith, but also for partnering with other churches to do both mercy ministry and church planting.  Redeemer City to City is working to help establish hundreds of new multi-ethnic congregations throughout the city and other global cities in the next decades.

Dr. Tim Keller is the author of several phenomenal books including:

Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Plan for the World. New York, Penguin Publishing, November, 2012.

Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, September, 2012.

The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness. New York: 10 Publishing, April 2012.

Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just. New York: Riverhead Trade, August, 2012.

The Gospel As Center: Renewing Our Faith and Reforming Our Ministry Practices (editor and contributor). Wheaton: Crossway, 2012.

The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God. New York, Dutton, 2011.

The Prodigal God. New York, Dutton, 2011.

King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus. New York, Dutton, 2011.

Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Priorities of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters. New York, Riverhead Trade, 2011.

The Reason For God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. New York, Dutton, 2009.

Worship By The Book (contributor). Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002.

Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road. Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 1997.

Dr. Tim Keller on The Bible and Homosexuality – What’s The Big Deal?

How Should Christians Handle Objections from the Media?

[The article below is a masterful presentation by Tim Keller in helping Christians understand how the Old Testament laws need to be understood today – I am reposting this article under a different title from my June 12 posting –  because it’s so helpful Christians in answering the argument that is continually posed by the left concerning contemporary issues like homosexuality – Last night I was watching Fox News with a discussion of Chick-Fil-A and the boycott from many on the left – the liberal commentator made this statement “Dan Truett is a hypocrite for his statements” and then she proceeded to say that “Christians pick and choose what they adhere to from the Bible, and that we are against homosexuality but that we eat what we want and wear materials outlawed in the Old Testament – Christians are full of inconsistencies.” Is this true? Tim Keller wisely demonstrates how to handle the Scriptures in dealing with issues like homosexuality and why the Bible teaches what it does in both the OT and NT consistently – DPC]

Are Christians Consistent With the Biblical Message in the OT and NT?

I find it frustrating when I read or hear columnists, pundits, or journalists dismiss Christians as inconsistent because “they pick and choose which of the rules in the Bible to obey.” What I hear most often is “Christians ignore lots of Old Testament texts—about not eating raw meat or pork or shellfish, not executing people for breaking the Sabbath, not wearing garments woven with two kinds of material and so on. Then they condemn homosexuality. Aren’t you just picking and choosing what they want to believe from the Bible?”

It is not that I expect everyone to have the capability of understanding that the whole Bible is about Jesus and God’s plan to redeem his people, but I vainly hope that one day someone will access their common sense (or at least talk to an informed theological advisor) before leveling the charge of inconsistency.

First of all, let’s be clear that it’s not only the Old Testament that has prescriptions about homosexuality. The New Testament has plenty to say about it, as well. Even Jesus says, in his discussion of divorce in Matthew 19:3-12 that the original design of God was for one man and one woman to be united as one flesh, and failing that, (v. 12) persons should abstain from marriage and from sex:

(3) And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” (4) He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, (5) and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? (6) So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” (7) They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” (8) He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. (9) And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”

(10) The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” (11) But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. (12) For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”

However, let’s get back to considering the larger issue of inconsistency regarding things mentioned in the OT that are no longer practiced by the New Testament people of God. Most Christians don’t know what to say when confronted about this. Here’s a short course on the relationship of the Old Testament to the New Testament:

The Old Testament devotes a good amount of space to describing the various sacrifices that were to be offered in the tabernacle (and later temple) to atone for sin so that worshippers could approach a holy God. As part of that sacrificial system there was also a complex set of rules for ceremonial purity and cleanness. You could only approach God in worship if you ate certain foods and not others, wore certain forms of dress, refrained from touching a variety of objects, and so on. This vividly conveyed, over and over, that human beings are spiritually unclean and can’t go into God’s presence without purification.

But even in the Old Testament, many writers hinted that the sacrifices and the temple worship regulations pointed forward to something beyond them:

1 Samuel 15:21-22 – But the people took of the spoil, sheep and oxen, the best of the things devoted to destruction, to sacrifice to the Lord your God in Gilgal.” And Samuel said,

“Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices,

as in obeying the voice of the Lord?

Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice,

and to listen than the fat of rams.”

Psalm 50:12-15 – “If I were hungry, I would not tell you,

for the world and its fullness are mine. Do I eat the flesh of bulls

or drink the blood of goats? Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving,

and perform your vows to the Most High, and call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.”

Psalm 51:17 – “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;

a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”

Hosea 6:6 – “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,

the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”

When Christ appeared he declared all foods ‘clean’ (Mark 7:19) and he ignored the Old Testament clean laws in other ways, touching lepers and dead bodies.

But the reason is made clear. When he died on the cross the veil in the temple was ripped through, showing that the need for the entire sacrificial system with all its clean laws had been done away with. Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice for sin, and now Jesus makes us “clean.”

The entire book of Hebrews explains that the Old Testament ceremonial laws were not so much abolished as fulfilled by Christ. Whenever we pray ‘in Jesus name’, we ‘have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus’ (Hebrews 10:19). It would, therefore, be deeply inconsistent with the teaching of the Bible as a whole if we were to continue to follow the ceremonial laws.

The New Testament gives us further guidance about how to read the Old Testament. Paul makes it clear in places like Romans 13:8ff that the apostles understood the Old Testament moral law to still be binding on us. In short, the coming of Christ changed how we worship but not how we live. The moral law is an outline of God’s own character—his integrity, love, and faithfulness. And so all the Old Testament says about loving our neighbor, caring for the poor, generosity with our possessions, social relationships, and commitment to our family is still in force. The New Testament continues to forbid killing or committing adultery, and all the sex ethic of the Old Testament is re-stated throughout the New Testament:

Matthew 5:27-30 – “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’  But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.”

1 Corinthians 6:9-20 – Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything. “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food”—and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power.

Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never!

Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.” But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

1 Timothy 1:8-11 – Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine, in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted.

If the New Testament has reaffirmed a commandment, then it is still in force for us today.

Further, the New Testament explains another change between the Testaments. Sins continue to be sins—but the penalties change. In the Old Testament things like adultery or incest were punishable with civil sanctions like execution. This is because at that time God’s people existed in the form of a nation-state and so all sins had civil penalties.

But in the New Testament the people of God are an assembly of churches all over the world, living under many different governments. The church is not a civil government, and so sins are dealt with by exhortation and, at worst, exclusion from membership. This is how a case of incest in the Corinthian church is dealt with by Paul:

1 Corinthians 5:1ff. and 2 Corinthians 2:7-11: “It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father’s wife…so you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. So I beg you to reaffirm your love for him. For this is why I wrote, that I might test you and know whether you are obedient in everything. Anyone whom you forgive, I also forgive. Indeed, what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for your sake in the presence of Christ, so that we would not be outwitted by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his designs.”

Why this change? Under Christ, the gospel is not confined to a single nation—it has been released to go into all cultures and peoples.

Once you grant the main premise of the Bible—about the surpassing significance of Christ and his salvation—then all the various parts of the Bible make sense. Because of Christ, the ceremonial law is repealed. Because of Christ the church is no longer a nation-state imposing civil penalties. It all falls into place. However, if you reject the idea of Christ as Son of God and Savior, then, of course, the Bible is at best a mish-mash containing some inspiration and wisdom, but most of it would have to be rejected as foolish or erroneous.

So where does this leave us? There are only two possibilities.

(1)  If Christ is God, then this way of reading the Bible makes sense and is perfectly consistent with its premise.

(2)  The other possibility is that you reject Christianity’s basic thesis—you don’t believe Jesus was the resurrected Son of God—and then the Bible is no sure guide for you about much of anything. But the one thing you can’t really say in fairness is that Christians are being inconsistent with their beliefs to accept the moral statements in the Old Testament while not practicing other ones.

One way to respond to the charge of inconsistency may be to ask a counter-question—“Are you asking me to deny the very heart of my Christian beliefs?” If you are asked, “Why do you say that?” you could respond, “If I believe Jesus is the resurrected Son of God, I can’t follow all the ‘clean laws’ of diet and practice, and I can’t offer animal sacrifices. All that would be to deny the power of Christ’s death on the cross. And so those who really believe in Christ must follow some Old Testament texts and not others.”

About the Author: In 1989 Dr. Timothy J. Keller, his wife and three young sons moved to New York City to begin Redeemer Presbyterian Church. In 20 years it has grown to meeting for five services at three sites with a weekly attendance of over 5,000. Redeemer is notable not only for winning skeptical New Yorkers to faith, but also for partnering with other churches to do both mercy ministry and church planting.  Redeemer City to City is working to help establish hundreds of new multi-ethnic congregations throughout the city and other global cities in the next decades.

Dr. Tim Keller is the author of several phenomenal books including:

Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Plan for the World. New York, Penguin Publishing, November, 2012.

Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, September, 2012.

The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness. New York: 10 Publishing, April 2012.

Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just. New York: Riverhead Trade, August, 2012.

The Gospel As Center: Renewing Our Faith and Reforming Our Ministry Practices (editor and contributor). Wheaton: Crossway, 2012.

The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God. New York, Dutton, 2011.

King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus. New York, Dutton, 2011.

Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Priorities of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters. New York, Riverhead Trade, 2011.

The Reason For God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. New York, Dutton, 2009.

The Prodigal God. New York, Dutton, 2008.

Worship By The Book (contributor). Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002.

Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road. Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 1997.

 

Dr. R.C. Sproul on Why Study the Bible?

Compelling Reasons For Studying the Bible by Dr. R.C. Sproul

Why study the Bible? It may seem odd and foolish to raise this question since you probably would not be reading this book unless you were already convinced that Bible study is necessary. Our best intentions, however, are often weakened by our moods and caprice. Bible study often falls by the way. So, before we examine the practical guidelines for Bible study, let’s review some of the compelling reasons for studying the Bible at all.

TWO MYTHS

First, we will look at some of the reasons people give for not studying the Bible. These “reasons” often contain myths that are passed off as truisms through much repetition. The myth that claims first place in our hall of excuses is the idea that the Bible is too difficult for the ordinary person to understand.

Myth 1—The Bible is so difficult to understand that only highly skilled theologians with technical training can deal with the Scriptures.

This myth has been repeated many times by sincere people: “I know I can’t study the Bible, because every time I try to read it, I can’t understand it.” When some people say this, they may want to hear, “That’s all right. I understand. It’s really a difficult book, and unless you’ve had seminary training, maybe you shouldn’t try to tackle it.” Or perhaps they want to hear, “I know, it’s too heavy, too deep, too profound. I commend you for your tireless efforts, your strenuous labors in trying to solve the mystifying riddle of God’s Word. It is sad that God has chosen to speak to us in such obscure and esoteric language that only scholars can grasp it.” This, I am afraid, is what many of us want to hear. We feel guilty and want to quiet our consciences for neglecting our duty as Christians.

When we express this myth, we do it with astonishing ease. The myth is so often repeated that we do not expect it to be challenged. Yet we know that as mature, educated adults we can understand the basic message of the Bible. Indeed, the scholars who drafted and signed the Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics (1982) affirm “that a person is not dependent for understanding of Scripture on the expertise of biblical scholars.” If we can read the newspaper or blogs, we can read the Bible. In fact, I would venture to guess that more difficult words and concepts are expressed on the front page of a newspaper than on most pages of the Bible.

Myth 2—The Bible is boring.

If we press people for an explanation for what they mean when they express the first myth, usually they respond by saying, “Well, I guess I can understand it, but frankly the book bores me to death.” This statement reflects not so much an inability to understand what is read as a taste and preference for what we find interesting and exciting.

The preponderance of boredom that people experience with the Bible came home to me when I was hired to teach the Scriptures in required Bible courses at a Christian college. The president of the institution phoned me and said, “We need someone young and exciting, someone with a dynamic method who will be able to ‘make the Bible come alive.’ ” While I knew what the president was getting at, I nevertheless wanted to say, “You want me to make the Bible come alive? I didn’t know that it had died. In fact, I never even heard that it was ill. Who was the attending physician at the Bible’s demise?” No, I can’t make the Bible come alive for anyone. The Bible is already alive. It makes me come alive.

When people say the Bible is dull, it makes me wonder why. Biblical characters are full of life. There is a unique quality of passion about them. Their lives reveal drama, pathos, lust, crime, devotion and every conceivable aspect of human existence. There is rebuke, remorse, contrition, consolation, practical wisdom, philosophical reflection and, most of all, truth. Perhaps the dullness some experience is due to the antiquity and cultural distance of the material. How does the life of Abraham or of Timothy—lived so long ago and so far away—relate to us? But the characters of biblical history are real. Though their life settings are different from ours, their struggles and concerns are very much like ours.

THE CLARITY OF SCRIPTURE

In the sixteenth century the Reformers declared their total confidence in what they called the perspicuity of Scripture. What they meant by that technical term was the clarity of Scripture. They maintained that the Bible is basically clear and lucid. It is simple enough for any literate person to understand its basic message. This is not to say that all parts of the Bible are equally clear or that there are no difficult passages or sections to be found in it. Laypeople unskilled in the ancient languages and the fine points of exegesis may have difficulty with parts of Scripture, but the essential content is clear enough to be understood easily. Martin Luther, for example, was convinced that what was obscure and difficult in one part of Scripture was stated more clearly and simply in other parts of Scripture.

Some parts of the Bible are so clear and simple that they are offensive to those suffering from intellectual arrogance. I once was lecturing about how Christ’s death on the cross fulfilled the curse motif of the Old Testament. In the middle of my lecture a man in the audience interrupted me, saying loudly, “That’s primitive and obscene.” I asked him to repeat his comment so that everyone present could hear his complaint. When he repeated it, I said, “You are exactly right. I particularly like your choice of words, primitive and obscene.” The entire history of redemption is communicated in primitive terms, from the episode of the encounter of Adam and Eve with the serpent to the devastating destruction that God visits on the chariots of Egypt in the exodus to the crass and brutal murder of Jesus of Nazareth. The Bible reveals that God hears the groans of all of his people, from the peasant to the philosopher, from the dull-witted to the sophisticated scholar. His message is simple enough for the most simplistic of his fallen creatures to understand. What kind of a God would reveal his love and redemption in terms so technical and concepts so profound that only an elite corps of professional scholars could understand them?

God does speak in primitive terms because he is addressing himself to primitives. At the same time, there is enough profundity contained in Scripture to keep the most astute and erudite scholars busily engaged in their theological inquiries for a lifetime.

If primitive is an appropriate word to describe the content of Scripture, obscene is even more so. All of the obscenities of sin are recorded with clear and forthright language in the Scripture. And what is more obscene than the cross? Here we have obscenity on a cosmic scale. On the cross Christ takes upon himself human obscenities in order to redeem them.

If you have been one of those who have clung to the myths of dullness or difficulty, perhaps it is because you have attributed to the whole of Scripture what you have found in some of its parts. Maybe some passages have been peculiarly difficult and obscure. Other passages may have left you bewildered and baffled. Perhaps those should be left for the scholars to unravel. If you find certain portions of the Scripture difficult and complex, need you insist that the whole of Scripture is boring and dull?

Biblical Christianity is not an esoteric religion. Its content is not concealed in vague symbols that require some sort of special “insight” to grasp. There is no special intellectual prowess or spiritual gift that is necessary to under stand the basic message of Scripture. You may find that in Eastern religions where insight is limited to some guru who lives in a shanty high in the Himalayas. Maybe the guru has been thunderstruck by the gods with some profound mystery of the universe. You travel to inquire and he tells you in a hushed whisper that the meaning of life is the sound of “one hand clapping.” That’s esoteric. That’s so esoteric that even the guru does not understand it. He cannot understand it because it’s an absurdity. Absurdities often sound profound because they are incapable of being understood. When we hear things we do not understand, sometimes we think they are simply too deep or weighty for us to grasp when in fact they are merely unintelligible statements like “one hand clapping.” The Bible does not talk like that. The Bible speaks of God in meaningful patterns of speech. Some of those patterns may be more difficult than others, but they are not meant to be nonsense statements that only a guru can fathom.

 THE PROBLEM OF MOTIVATION

It is important to note that the theme of this book is not how to read the Bible but how to study the Bible. There is a great deal of difference between reading and studying. Reading is something we can do in a leisurely way, something that can be done strictly for entertainment in a casual manner. But study suggests labor, serious and diligent work.

Here then is the real problem of our negligence. We fail in our duty to study God’s Word not so much because it is difficult to understand, not so much because it is dull and boring, but because it is work. Our problem is not a lack of intelligence or a lack of passion. Our problem is that we are lazy.

Karl Barth (1886-1968), the famous Swiss theologian, once wrote that all human sin finds its roots in three basic human problems. He included pride (hubris), dishonesty and slothfulness in his list of rudimentary sins. None of these basic evils is instantly eradicated by spiritual regeneration. As Christians we must struggle against these problems through our entire pilgrimage. None of us is immune. If we are going to deal with the discipline of Bible study, we must recognize at the outset that we will need the grace of God to persevere.

The problem of slothfulness has been with us since the curse of the Fall. Our labor is now mixed with sweat. Weeds are easier to grow than grass. Newspapers are easier to read than the Bible is to study. The curse of labor is not magically removed simply because our task is the study of Scripture.

When I lecture to groups on the theme of studying the Bible, I often ask how many of the group members have been Christians for one year or more. Then I ask those people how many have read the entire Bible from cover to cover. In every instance, the overwhelming majority answer in the negative. I would venture to guess that among those who have been Christians for a year or more, at least 80 percent have never read the whole Bible. How is that possible? Only an appeal to the radical Fall of the human race could begin to answer that question. If you have read the whole Bible, you are in a small minority of Christian people.

If you have studied the Bible, you are in an even smaller minority. Isn’t it amazing that almost everyone living in the West has an opinion to offer about the Bible, and yet so few have really studied it? Sometimes it seems as though the only people who take the time to study it are those with the sharpest axes to grind against it. Many people study it to find possible loopholes so they can get out from under the weight of its authority.

Biblical ignorance is not limited to laypeople by any means. I have sat on church boards responsible for the examination of seminarians preparing for the pastoral ministry. The degree of biblical ignorance manifested by many of these students is appalling. Seminary curricula have not done much to alleviate the problem. Every year many churches ordain people who are virtually ignorant of the content of Scripture.

I was shocked when I took a test in biblical knowledge for entrance to the theological seminary from which I graduated. After I completed my exam, I was deeply embarrassed, ashamed to hand in my paper. I had taken several courses in college that I thought would prepare me for such a test, but when the test came I was not ready. I left question after question blank and was certain that I had failed. When the grades were posted, I discovered that I had received one of the highest grades in a group of seventy-five students. Even with the grades scaled, there were several students who scored less than 10 out of a possible grade of 100. My score was poor, yet it was one of the best of the bad.

Biblical illiteracy among the clergy has become so prevalent that I often find pastors getting annoyed and angry when their parishioners ask them to teach them the Bible. In many cases pastors live in mortal fear that their ignorance will be exposed by being thrust into a situation where they are expected to teach the Bible.

THE BIBLICAL BASIS FOR BIBLE STUDY

The Bible itself has much to say about the importance of studying the Bible. We will examine two passages, one from each Testament, in order to catch a glimpse of these mandates.

In Deuteronomy 6 we find a passage that was familiar to every Jew of the Old Testament. Its words were used to call the assembly together for worship. We read: “Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (vv. 4-5). Most of us are familiar with these words. But what follows them immediately? Read on:

“These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign upon your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (vv. 6-9).

Here God sovereignly commands that his Word be taught so diligently that it penetrates the heart. The content of that Word is not to be mentioned casually and infrequently. Repeated discussion is the order of the day, every day. The call to bind on the hand, the forehead, the doorpost and gate makes it clear that God is saying that the job must be done by whatever method it takes.

Looking at the New Testament we read Paul’s admonition to Timothy:

“You, however, continue in the things you have learned and become convinced of, knowing from whom you have learned them, and that from childhood you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:14-17).

This exhortation is so basic to our understanding of the importance of Bible study that it warrants a careful scrutiny.

“Continue in the things you have learned” (v. 14). This part of the admonition lays the accent on continuity. Our study of Scripture is not to be a once-for-all matter. There is no room for the proverbial once-over-lightly. Consistency is necessary for a sound basis of biblical studies.

“Sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation” (v. 15). Paul refers to the Scripture’s ability to give wisdom. When the Bible speaks of wisdom, it refers to a special kind of wisdom. The term is not used to connote an ability to be “worldly wise” or to have the cleverness necessary to write a Poor Richard’s Almanack.

In biblical terms, wisdom has to do with the practical matter of learning how to live a life that is pleasing to God. A cursory glance at the Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament makes this emphasis abundantly clear. Proverbs, for example, tells us that wisdom begins with the “fear of the LORD” (Prov 1:7; 9:10). That fear is not a servile fear but a posture of awe and reverence, which is necessary for authentic godliness. The Old Testament distinguishes between wisdom and knowledge. We are commanded to acquire knowledge, but more to acquire wisdom. Knowledge is necessary if wisdom is to be gained, but it is not identical with wisdom. A person can have knowledge without having wisdom, but he or she cannot have wisdom without having knowledge. A person without knowledge is ignorant. A person without wisdom is deemed a fool. In biblical terms foolishness is a moral matter and receives the judgment of God. Wisdom in the highest sense is being wise with respect to salvation. Thus wisdom is a theological matter. Paul is saying that through the Scriptures we can acquire that kind of wisdom that concerns our ultimate fulfillment and destiny as human beings.

“Knowing from whom you have learned them” (v. 14). Who is this “whom” Paul is talking about? Is he referring to Timothy’s grandmother? Or to Paul himself? These options are doubtful. Whom refers to the ultimate source of the knowledge Timothy has acquired, namely, God. This comes out more clearly in the statement “All Scripture is inspired by God.”

“Scripture is inspired by God” (v. 16). This passage has been the focal point of volumes of theological literature that describe and analyze theories of biblical inspiration. The crucial word in the passage is the Greek term theopneustos, which is often translated by the phrase “inspired by God.” The term more precisely means “God-breathed,” which refers not so much to God’s breathing something “in” as to his breathing something “out.” Rather than the term inspiration, we may be better advised to render the Greek by the English expiration. In that case we would see the significance of the passage not so much in providing us with a theory of inspiration—a theory of how God transmitted his Word through human authors—but rather a statement of the origin or source of Scripture. What Paul is saying to Timothy is that the Bible comes from God. He is its ultimate author. It is his word; it comes from him; it carries the weight of all that he is. Thus the injunction to remember “from whom you have learned them [these things].”

“Scripture is profitable for teaching” (v. 16). One of the most important priorities Paul mentions is the preeminent way in which the Bible profits us. The first and indeed foremost profit is the profit of teaching or instruction. We may pick up the Bible and be “inspired” or moved to tears or other poignant emotions. But our greatest profit is in being instructed. Again, our instruction is not in matters of how to build a house or how to multiply and divide or how to employ the science of differential equations; rather we are instructed in the things of God. This instruction is called “profitable” because God himself places an extremely high value on it. The instruction is assigned worth and significance.

Countless times I have heard Christians say, “Why do I need to study doctrine or theology when all I need to know is Jesus?” My immediate reply is, “Who is Jesus?” As soon as we begin to answer this question, we are involved in doctrine and theology. No Christian can avoid theology. Every Christian is a theologian. Perhaps not a theologian in the technical or professional sense, but a theologian nevertheless. The issue for Christians is not whether we are going to be theologians but whether we are going to be good theologians. A good theologian is one who is instructed by God.

“Scripture is profitable for reproof, correction, and training in righteousness” (v. 16). In these words Paul articulates the practical value of Bible study. As fallen creatures we sin, we err, and we are inherently out of shape with respect to righteousness. When we sin, we need to be reproved. When we err, we need to be corrected. When we are out of shape, we need to go into training. The Scriptures function as our chief reprover, our chief corrector and our chief trainer. The bookstores of this world are filled with books on training methods to acquire excellence in sports, to lose weight and get our physical figures into shape, and to acquire skills in all areas. Libraries have stacks of books written to teach us financial management and the nuances of wise investment policies. We can find many books that will teach us how to turn our losses into profits, our liabilities into assets. But where are the books that will train us in righteousness? The question still remains, “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” (Mt 16:26).

“That the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work” (v. 17). The Christian who is not diligently involved in a serious study of Scripture is simply inadequate as a disciple of Christ. To be an adequate Christian and competent in the things of God we must do more than attend “sharing sessions” and “bless me parties.” We cannot learn competency by osmosis. Biblically illiterate Christians are not only inadequate but unequipped. In fact, they are inadequate because they are not equipped. An NFL star may be able to run barefoot, but when playing a league opponent he will be sure to wear cleats.

THE BIBLE AS REVELATION

One of the most important advantages the Bible gives us is that it provides information that is not available anywhere else. Our universities provide us with a wealth of knowledge acquired by human investigation of the natural world. We learn by observation, analysis and abstract speculation. We compare and contrast varied opinions from notable scholars. But with all the skills of knowledge that we have at our disposal in this world, there is no one who can speak to us from a transcendent perspective, no one who can reason with us, as the philosophers say, sub species aeternitatis (from the eternal perspective).

Only God can provide us with an eternal perspective and speak to us with absolute and final authority. The advantage of the equipment provided by Scripture is that knowledge is made available to us that can be learned from no other source. The Scripture does, of course, talk of matters that can be learned by other means. We are not utterly dependent on the New Testament to learn who Caesar Augustus was or how far it is from Jerusalem to Bethany. But the world’s best geographer cannot show us the way to God, and the world’s best psychiatrist cannot give us a final answer to the problem of our guilt. There are matters contained in Holy Writ that “unveil” for us that which is not exposed to the natural course of human investigation.

Though much can be learned about God from a study of nature, it is his self-revelation in Scripture that is most complete and most valuable for us. There is an analogy between how we get to know people in this world and how we become acquainted with God. If we want to learn something about a human being, let’s say Bill Monroe, there are many ways we can go about it. We could do a search on the Internet, perhaps first Googling his name. If we had the right connections, we might ask the FBI or the CIA for their files on him. We could send for his high school and college transcripts. Through such records we might discover his basic biographical history, medical record, academic and athletic achievement records. We could then interview his friends to get a more personal evaluation. But all these methods are indirect, and many of Bill’s intangible qualities will remain obscured to our scrutiny. All these methods are but secondary sources of information.

If we want more accurate knowledge of Bill Monroe, we should meet him personally, observe his outward appearance, see how he behaves, what mannerisms he employs. We may even be able to guess how he is feeling, what he is thinking, what he values and what displeases him. But if we want to gain intimate knowledge of him we have to engage in some kind of verbal communication with him. No one can express more clearly or more accurately what he believes, feels or thinks than Bill himself. Unless Bill chooses to reveal those things verbally, our knowledge will be limited to guesswork and speculation. Only words will enlighten us.

Likewise, when we speak about the concept of revelation, we are talking about the basic principle of self-disclosure. The Scriptures come to us as divine self-disclosure. Here the mind of God is laid bare on many matters. With a knowledge of Scripture we do not have to rely on secondhand information or bare speculation to learn who God is and what he values. In the Bible he reveals himself.

THEORY AND PRACTICE

Like the Christian who shuns theology, there are those who despise any kind of quest for theoretical knowledge of God, insisting instead on being “practical.” The spirit of America has been defined as the spirit of pragmatism. This spirit is manifested nowhere more clearly than in the arena of politics and in the public school system, which has been informed by the principles and methods of education set down by John Dewey.

Pragmatism may be defined simply as the approach to reality that defines truth as “that which works.” The pragmatist is concerned about results, and the results determine the truth. The problem with this kind of thinking, if left uninformed by the eternal perspective, is that the results tend to be judged in terms of short-range goals.

I experienced this dilemma when my daughter enrolled in kindergarten. She attended a very progressive public school outside of Boston. After a few weeks we received notification from the school that the principal was holding an open meeting for parents in order to explain the program and procedures employed in the kindergarten. At the meeting the principal carefully explained the daily schedule. He said, “Don’t be alarmed if your child comes home and tells you that he was playing with puzzles or modeling clay in school. I can assure you that everything in the daily routine is done with a purpose. From 9:00 to 9:17 a.m. the children play with puzzles that are carefully designed by orthopedic experts to develop the motor muscles of the last three fingers of the left hand.” He went on to explain how every minute of the child’s day was planned with skilled precision to insure that everything was done with a purpose. I was duly impressed.

At the end of his presentation the principal asked for questions. I raised my hand and said, “I am deeply impressed by the careful planning that has gone into this program. I can see that everything is done with a purpose in view. My question is, How do you decide which ‘purposes’ to employ? What final purpose do you use to decide the individual purposes? What is the overall purpose of your purposes? In other words, what kind of a child are you trying to produce?”

The man turned white and then scarlet, and in stumbling terms he replied, “I don’t know; no one ever asked me that question.” I appreciated the candor of his reply and the genuine humility it displayed, yet at the same time, his answer terrified me.

In Your Mind Matters John Stott writes: The modern world breeds pragmatists, whose first question about any idea is not “Is it true?” but “Does it work?” Young people tend to be activists, dedicated supporters of a cause, though without always inquiring too closely whether their cause is a good end to pursue or whether their action is the best means by which to pursue it.

How can we have purposes without purpose? Where can we go to discover the ultimate test for our pragmatism? Here is where transcendent revelation is most critical to our lives. Here is where the content of Scripture is most relevant for our practice. God alone can give us the final evaluation of wisdom and value of our practices.

People who despise theory and call themselves practical are not wise. Those who concern themselves only with short-term goals may have big trouble when it comes to the very long run of eternity. It must also be added that there is no practice without some underlying theory. We do what we do because we have a theory, even if only implicit, about the value of doing it. Nothing betrays our deepest theories more eloquently than our practice. We may never think seriously about our theories or subject them to rigorous critical analysis, but we all have them. As in the case of the Christian who wants Christ without theology, so the person who wants practice without theory will usually wind up with bad theories that lead to bad practice.

Because the theories found in Scripture proceed from God, the Bible is eminently practical. Nothing could be more practical than God’s Word because it proceeds from a theory that is established from the eternal perspective. The fatal weakness of pragmatism is overcome by revelation.

THE SENSUOUS CHRISTIAN

The last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed the public embrace of the “sensuous.” The Sensuous Woman, The Sensuous Man, The Sensuous Couple and The Sensuous Divorcee became bestsellers, and some remain in print decades later! One dictionary defines sensuous as, “pertaining to the senses or sensible objects: highly susceptible to influence through the senses.” In other words, sensuous people live by their feelings rather than through their understanding. Today on television we can see this sensuality prominently displayed. Famous TV talk-show hosts often encourage their guests to “vent,” exposing their private feelings and emotions to millions of viewers.

Sadly, this kind of sensuality has also wormed its way into the church. Many of us have become sensuous Christians, living by our feelings rather than through our understanding of the Word of God. Sensuous Christians cannot be moved to service, prayer or study unless they “feel like it.” Their Christian life is only as effective as the intensity of present feelings. When they experience spiritual euphoria, they are a whirlwind of godly activity; when they are depressed, they are a spiritual incompetent. They constantly seek new and fresh spiritual experiences, and use them to determine the Word of God. Their “inner feelings” become the ultimate test of truth.

Sensuous Christians don’t need to study the Word of God because they already know the will of God by their feelings. They don’t want to know God; they want to experience him. Sensuous Christians equate “childlike faith” with ignorance. They think that when the Bible calls us to childlike faith, it means a faith without content, a faith without understanding. They don’t know the Bible says, “In evil be infants, but in your thinking be mature” (1 Cor. 14:20). They don’t realize that Paul tells us again and again, “My beloved brethren, I would not have you ignorant” (Romans 11:25).

Sensuous Christians go their merry way until they encounter the pain of life that is not so merry—and they fold. They usually end up embracing a kind of “relational theology” (a curse on modern Christianity) where personal relationships and experience take precedence over the Word of God. If the Scripture calls us to action that may jeopardize a personal relationship, then the Scripture must be compromised. The highest law of sensuous Christians is that bad feelings must be avoided at all cost.

The Bible is addressed primarily, though not exclusively, to our understanding. That means the mind. This is difficult to communicate to modern Christians who are living in what may be the most anti-intellectual period of Western civilization. Notice, I did not say anti-academic or anti-technological or anti-scholarly. I said anti-intellectual. There is a strong current of antipathy to the function of the mind in the Christian life.

To be sure, there are historical reasons for this kind of reaction. Many laypeople have felt the result of what one theologian has called “the treason of the intellectual.” So much skepticism, cynicism and negative criticism have spewed forth from the intellectual world of theologians that laypeople have lost their trust in intellectual enterprises. In many cases there is the fear that faith will not hold up under intellectual scrutiny, so the defense becomes the denigration of the human mind. We turn to feelings rather than to our minds to establish and preserve our faith. This is a very serious problem we face in the twenty-first-century church.

Christianity is supremely intellectual though not intellectualistic. That is, Scripture is addressed to the intellect without at the same time embracing a spirit of intellectualism. The Christian life is not to be a life of bare conjecture or cold rationalism but one of vibrant passion. Strong feelings of joy, love and exaltation are called for again and again. But those passionate feelings are a response to what we understand with our minds to be true. When we red in Scripture, “Take courage; I have overcome the world” (Jn. 16:33), “ho hum” is not an appropriate response. We can be of good cheer because we understand that Christ has indeed overcome the world. That thrills our souls and sets our feet to dancing. What is more precious than to experience the sweetness of the presence of Christ or the nearness of the Holy Spirit?

God forbid that we should lose our passion or go through the Christian pilgrimage without any experience of Christ. But what happens when there is a conflict between what God says and what I feel? We must do what God says, like it or not. That is what Christianity is all about.

Reflect for a moment. What happens in your own life when you act according to what you feel like doing rather than what you know and understand God says you should do? Here we encounter the ruthless reality of the difference between happiness and pleasure. How easy it is to confuse the two! The pursuit of happiness is regarded as our “unalienable right.” But happiness and pleasure are not the same thing. Both of them feel good, but only one endures. Sin can bring pleasure, but never happiness. If sin were not so pleasurable, it would hardly represent a temptation. Yet, while sin often “feels good,” it does not produce happiness. If we do not know the difference or, worse yet, do not care about the difference, we have made great strides to becoming the ultimate sensuous Christian.

It is precisely at the point of discerning the difference between pleasure and happiness that knowledge of Scripture is so vital. There is a remarkable relationship between God’s will and human happiness. The fundamental deception of Satan is the lie that obedience can never bring happiness. From the primordial temptation of Adam and Eve to last night’s satanic seduction, the lie has been the same. “If you do what God says, you will not be happy. If you do what I say, you will be ‘liberated’ and know happiness.”

What would have to be true for Satan’s argument to be true? It would seem that God would have to be one of three things: ignorant, malevolent or deceptive. It could be that God’s Word will not work for us because it proceeds from his divine blunderings. God simply doesn’t know enough to tell us what we need to do to achieve happiness. Perhaps he desires our well-being, but simply does not know enough to instruct us properly. He would like to help us out, but the complexities of human life and human situations just boggle his mind.

Perhaps God is infinitely wise and knows what is good for us better than we do. Perhaps he does understand human complexities better than the philosophers, moralists, politicians, school teachers, pastors and psychiatrists, but he hates us. He knows the truth but leads us astray so he can remain the only happy being in the cosmos. Perhaps his law is an expression of his desire to take gleeful delight in our misery. Thus his malevolence toward us leads to the role of great Deceiver. Nonsense! If that were true, then the only conclusion we could come to is that God is the devil and devil is God, and Holy Scripture is really the manual of Satan.

Absurd? Unthinkable? I wish it were. In literally thousands of pastors’ studies, people are being counseled to act against Scripture because the pastor wants them to be happy. “Yes, Mrs. Jones, go ahead and divorce your husband (despite the fact that she is without biblical warrant), for I am sure you will never find happiness married to a man like that.”

If there is a secret, a carefully guarded secret, to human happiness, it is that one expressed in a seventeenth-century catechism that says, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.” The secret to happiness is found in obedience to God. How can we be happy if we are not obedient? How can we be obedient if we do not know what it is we are to obey? Thus the top and the tail of it is that happiness cannot be fully discovered as long as we remain ignorant of God’s Word.

To be sure, knowledge of God’s Word does not guarantee that we will do what it says, but at least we will know what we are supposed to be doing in our quest for human fulfillment. The issue of faith is not so much whether we believe in God, but whether we believe the God we believe in.

A MATTER OF DUTY

Why should we study the Bible? I have mentioned briefly the practical value, the ethical importance and the way of happiness. We have looked at some of the myths that are given why people do not study the Bible. We have examined something of the spirit of pragmatism and the anti-intellectual climate of our day. There are many facets to the question and countless reasons why we ought to study the Bible.

I could plead with you to study the Bible for personal edification; I could try the art of persuasion to stimulate your quest for happiness. I could say that the study of the Bible would probably be the most fulfilling and rewarding educational experience of your life. I could cite numerous reasons why you would benefit from a serious study of Scripture. But ultimately the main reason why we should study the Bible is because it is our duty.

If the Bible were the most boring book in the world—dull, uninteresting and seemingly irrelevant—it would still be our duty to study it. If its literary style were awkward and confusing, the duty would remain. We live as human beings under an obligation by divine mandate to study diligently God’s Word. He is our Sovereign, it is his Word, and He commands that we study it. A duty is not an option. If you have not yet begun to respond to that duty, then you need to ask God to forgive you and to resolve to do your duty from this day forth.

About the Author: Dr. R.C. Sproul (Founder of Ligonier Ministries; Seminary Professor; and Teaching Pastor at Saint Andrews in Sanford, Florida) is an amazingly gifted communicator. Whether he is teaching, preaching, or writing – he has the ability to make the complex easy to understand. He has been used more than any other person in my life to deepen my walk with Christ and help me to be more God-centered than man-centered. His book the Holiness of God has been the most influential book in my life – outside of the Bible. The article above is adapted from Chapter One in another one of his excellent books: Knowing Scripture. Downers Grove: IVP, 2009. Knowing Scripture is an excellent introductory book on how to read, study, and interpret the Bible.

Dwelling In The Gospel by Dr. Tim Keller

There Is Only One Gospel – But Several Ways of Expressing It

There is one gospel that we can outline; but it exists in several forms.

Colossians 1:11-17, “11 Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all. 12 Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, 13 bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14 And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. 15 And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. 16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. 17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”

There is a gospel outline that you see in John, Synoptics, & in Paul.

1 Corinthians 15:1ff – Paul is emphatic that the gospel he presents is the same as the one preached by the Jerusalem apostles. “Whether it was I or they,” Paul says, referring to Peter and the others, “so we preached and so you believed” (1 Cor. 15:10-11). This statement assumes a single body of gospel content.

1)   There is one gospel – Galatians 1:8; compare Mark 10:17, 23-34 with Matthew 25 and John 3:5, 6, 17 identical language is used for entering the kingdom of God – you have to be born again to see the kingdom; also Matthew 18:3 with Mark 10:13-16 and compare it with John 3 it’s the same language.

2)   There are several forms of the gospel – There are different perspectives on the one gospel. After insisting there is only one gospel (Gal. 1:8), he then speaks of being entrusted with “the gospel of the uncircumcised” as opposed to the “gospel of the circumcised” (Gal. 2:7). 
When Paul spoke to Greeks, he confronted their culture’s idol of speculation and philosophy with the “foolishness” of the cross, and then presented Christ’s salvation as true wisdom. When he spoke to Jews, he confronted their culture’s idol of power and accomplishment with the “weakness” of the cross, and then presented the gospel as true power (1 Cor. 1:22-25).

 Paul’s good news was:

First, that Jesus was the promised Messianic King and Son of God come to earth as a servant, in human form. (Rom. 1:3-4; Phil. 2:4ff.)

Second, by his death and resurrection, Jesus atoned for our sin and secured our justification by grace, not by our works (1 Cor. 15:3ff.)

Third, on the cross Jesus broke the dominion of sin and evil over us (Col. 2:13-15) and at his return he will complete what he began by the renewal of the entire material creation and the resurrection of our bodies (Rom 8:18ff.)

 In the Synoptic Gospels:

First, Jesus, the Messiah, is the divine Son of God (Mark 1:1)

Second, who died as a substitutionary ransom for the many (Mark 10:45),

Third, who has conquered the demonic present age with its sin and evil (Mark 1:14-2:10) and will return to regenerate the material world (Matt. 19:28.)

If I had to put this outline in a single statement, I might do it like this:

Through the person and work of Jesus Christ, God fully accomplishes salvation for us, rescuing us from judgment for sin into fellowship with him, and then restores the creation in which we can enjoy our new life together with him forever.

What is the Gospel?

3 Key Points: Manger/Cross/Crown

1) God emptied Himself (incarnation)

2) God substituted Himself  (cross, atonement, propitiation, justification)

3) God is returning to restore this world (restoration)

 Kingdom – the administration or order of how things work:

The upside down kingdom – God emptied Himself of His glory and came down (a reversal of the way of thinking – a church that works this part will put a great emphasis on justice and servanthood and avoiding class superiority and generosity and giving). He saves us not be taking power but by giving away power.

The inside out kingdom – salvation is a regenerated heart – the inner nature/ (legalism is outside in not inside out); the gospel is inside out.

Forward back kingdom – the idea of the already and not yet of the kingdom (John Stott talks about this in his book on the Contemporary Christian – and the dangers of an over realized or underealized eschatology).

How does this influence preaching?

People with religious backgrounds (Catholic, Jewish, Islamic) need the form of the gospel for the circumcised (they have a concept of sin, righteousness, and moral absolutes)

People with non-religious backgrounds who are the uncircumcised (draw on the texts that deal with idolatry; they are moral relativists – you have to treat them as idolater’s and address this idolatry – what they want is typically good, but they put it before God and make an idol out of it)

Kingdom and Eternal Life Gospel – Younger listeners are struggling with identity – speak in terms of the overarching biblical gospel in terms of creation, fall, redemption, resurrection and restoration.

About the Author: Dr. Tim Keller is the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, New York, and the author of numerous books including The Reason for God: Belief in an age of Skepticism (In my opinion the best book to date on apologetics for a postmodern culture—I think this book will do for post moderns what Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis did for moderns); and The Prodigal God (in my opinion the most clear presentation of the gospel for a post modern culture based on Luke 15).

Dr. Steven J. Lawson on What To Do, When You’d Rather Die Than Live!

[The article below is adapted from the fantastic book of sermons on the Book of Job by Steven J. Lawson entitled When All Hell Breaks Loose: You May Be Doing Something Right – Surprising insights from the life of Job. Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1993, pp. 57-70]

 

“I Just Want To Lie Down and Die”

 [Based on The Book of Job Chapters 1-3]

 Have you ever had a time in your life when you wished that you could die? I sure have.

For me, one of those times occurred when I graduated from college. I was twenty-two years old and had just moved back home for the summer. While away at college, I had become used to coming in late at night. There would be many nights—now, I never got in any trouble, mind you—that I would just drive around late with my buddies. We would go to a drive-through, order food, cruise around town, and listen to music.

So when I moved back home, it was a difficult adjustment to live under the same roof with Mom and Dad again. Very likely an adjustment for them, as well!

I remember one night. I was on a date. Not just any date. A very special date. This girl was a knockout. (Can I say that in a Christian book [article]) She had been our homecoming queen in high school and our head cheerleader. I had waited five or six years to have a date with this girl, just waiting for the competition to kill itself off. Finally, the opportunity was there to go out with her and, needless to say, I was walking on clouds. So it was late at night—well past midnight—and we went to her parents’ house. We were just talking, listening to music, and sitting on the sofa I her den with the lights down low. (Honest, we were just talking!)

As we were sitting on the sofa together. I heard a rustling in the bushes outside. Hmmmm. It stopped, so I didn’t think anything about it. Probably just the wind blowing. We kept talking, but, in a little bit, I heard some more rustling in the bushes. I thought. I think there’s something in the bushes.

In a few seconds, I heard a knock on the pane-glass window. “Tap, tap, tap.” Like someone knocking on it. “Tap, tap, tap.” There it was again. “Hey,” I said, “Somebody is knocking on your window.”

So I turned around, pulled back the curtains, and looked through the large, plate-glass window over the sofa. There, to my total astonishment, was the head of a man peering through the hedges and looking right at me. It was . . . my father! And he was pointing to his watch.

Here it is after midnight and this grown man—a professor in medical school mind you—looking like a camouflaged “tree man” with his head peering out of the hedge. He is motioning in the direction of our house, “informing” me of the lateness of the hour and that I needed to head home!

I can’t tell you how embarrassed I was. Humiliated! (For some reason, it’s funnier now then it was then.) I could have just died. If I could have been raptured to Heaven at that moment, I would have gladly gone. “Beam me up, Scottie!”

I remember turning back around to my date, shrugging my shoulders and saying, “I’ve never seen that man before in my life!”

Well, I think that is something of how Job is now feeling. He just wants to die. Not out of embarrassment. But out of deep pain and acute suffering. In a far greater way than my embarrassment—in a way that’s really not funny—Job felt as if he wanted to die.

For Job, his life has gone up in smoke. Satan has burned him. Well-done and crisp. The Devil has inflicted him with adversity that few of us can fully fathom. In one fell swoop, his family has been stripped away, his possessions reduced to rubble, and his fortune decimated. Then—as if that were not enough—Satan, with permission from God, has ravaged his skin from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet. The man is devastated financially, physically, and emotionally.

When the first onslaught occurred, Job responded with faith. ‘The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”

But, with blast after blast, his strength has been eroded and his soul eaten away. All his suffering has not been without profound impact. Job is down; he is discouraged; he is ready to throw in the towel.

Have you ever felt that way? Have you ever hurt so bad that you simply wished you could go to Heaven? I have.

Every person has a breaking point. A point at which he or she can become deeply discouraged. Even depressed. Such despair can cause a person to want to give up on life. Either we want Jesus to come back right now and take us home, or we want to give up on life and die. Either way, we just want to graduate to glory to escape life’s pain.

Maybe this is where you are. Maybe you are tired of the constant pain and suffering. Maybe you are worn down by the heaviness of trials. It just won’t go away.

That is precisely where Job is. He is longing for relief. Any kind of relief. He just wants to get out of this life and into the next. Job doesn’t want to take his own life. Instead, he wants God to take his life.

Job has no life left in him. Except pain, torment, suffering, and misery. No reason to live.

He is looking for immediate relief.

I WISH I WAS NEVER BORN!

In Job 3 we now see what it’s like for a person who loves God to go through the dark night of his soul. The downward spiral begins when Job says, “I wish I had never been born.”

It has been a period of time since we last saw Job. Perhaps weeks. Maybe months. But sufficient time for his faith to begin to erode. Remember, his three friends have been sitting there with him, silently observing, waiting for Job to break his silence:

Afterward Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth.

And Job said,

“Let the day perish on which I was to be born,

And the night which said,

‘A boy is conceived.’” (Job 3:1-3)

Job is undergoing the darkest of miseries in his innermost heart. He literally thinks, I wish I had never been born so I wouldn’t have to experience the suffering that I am going through. He wants to give up on life. For him, the day he was conceived should never have existed.

Job wishes to eradicate his very conception. Erase his beginning. If God would take that date off the calendar, it would be all right with him. For Job, that day should be annihilated. Obliterated. If only that day had never existed, all this misery would go away.

Then Job’s mood takes a step into the abyss of despair. Notice the rejoicing in hell. The evil prince and his hideous hordes think they have him.

Let that day be darkness!

May God above not seek it,

nor light shine upon it.

Let gloom and deep darkness claim it.

Let clouds dwell upon it;

let the blackness of the day terrify it.

That night—let thick darkness seize it!

Let it not rejoice among the days of the year;

let it not come into the number of the months. (Job 3:4-6)

Five times in this brief comment Job speaks of darkness, black gloom, or blackness. That precisely reflects his feelings on the inside. Who can blame him? To have never been born would have been fine with Job. God should have just skipped that day and gone on to the next. Ripped it out of the eternal calendar.

Behold, let that night be barren;

let no joyful cry enter it.

Let those curse it who curse the day,

who are ready to rouse up Leviathan. (Job 3:7-8)

Job summons the ancient soothsayers to curse his birthday. I don’t believe Job personally believed in their mystical power, nor was he committing himself to them. Rather, he is simply communicating vividly: “I wish I could call upon those who make their living pronouncing curses to put a curse on the day I was born. I wish they would rouse Leviathan [a monster that devoured great objects in the sea]. I want a sorcerer to conjure up a sea monster that would gobble up that day from the past so that I could have not been born.”

Have you ever been that low? So low that you are ready for any way out, desperately grabbing for any relief?

Let the stars of its dawn be dark;

let it hope for light, but have none,

nor see the eyelids of the morning, (Job 3:9)

Job wishes that the day on which he was born had just waited and waited and waited. He wishes the sin had never come up. That the light of day had never broken. Why?

because it did not shut the doors of my mother’s womb,

nor hide trouble from my eyes. (Job 3:10)

Job’s reaction is not uncommon. Pain, tragedy, and suffering can cause us to lose perspective on life. We make exaggerated comments we don’t really mean, but we feel: “Nobody loves me. This isn’t worth it. Nobody cares about me. If I died, nobody would come to my funeral.” Job’s emotional state has now come to acute depression.

I WISH I HAD DIED AT BIRTH!

Job now goes a step further.

First, he says, I wish I had never been born.” Now, he says, “All right, I was conceived. Since I had to be born, that day is on God’s calendar. But I wish I had died at birth. If I had to born, then I wish I had died at birth.”

“Why did I not die at birth,

come out from the womb and expire? (Job 3:11)

Job now shifts gears and asks God why. Have you ever asked God why? Job did.

It’s not wrong to ask the Lord why. It’s only wrong to demand that God answer you. God may choose to reveal His reason. Or He may not. But he doesn’t owe you an answer.

Jesus Himself asked God why. When He died on the cross, He asked the Father why. “My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).

Why is a very natural question to ask the Lord—especially in a time of heartache. But it is a question that must be asked humbly, without a demanding spirit toward God. It’s a request for hope. Not a demand for relief.

The amazing thing throughout Job’s entire experience is that God never does give him an explanation. All God does is reveal Himself. He shows Job who, not why. Knowing God is what we need to endure the crunch. Not why.

Let me illustrate. When you break a leg and they rush you into the emergency room of the hospital, they take an x-ray of your broken limb. There you are, lying in one of those cubicles, in deep pain. The doctor brings the x-ray of your broken limb. There you are, lying in one of those cubicles in deep pain. The doctor brings the x-ray and puts it up on the screen. He flicks on the light and shows you why the break occurred. Does knowing why really take away the pain? No, not really. But so often, we think if we just knew why, our heart would be healed. But really, we need to know who and not why.

As Warren Wiersbe says, “We don’t live our Christian lives on explanations; we live them on promises.”

Job continues,

“Why did the knees receive me?

Or why the breasts, that I should nurse?” (Job 3:12)

It was common practice during Job’s time to take a little child, just from the womb, and put him on his father’s knee. “Why did that ever happen to me?” Job asks. “Why dod my mother continue to give me nourishment and life only for this to happen to me? I’ve been set up for a fall.”

Job gives us his multifaceted view of death. A profound thinker. Job views death as a rest (verse 13), a reunion (verse 14-15), a relief (verses 17-19), and a reward (verse 21). You know what? Job is right. Death is each of these realities.

First, Job begins by picturing death as a rest.

“For then I would have lain down and been quiet;

I would have slept; then I would have been at rest,” (Job 3:13)

He is saying, “If I could have just died when I was born, I could have lain down and gone to sleep and found rest. But instead of rest, I get only misery, affliction, and torment. Death would have an afternoon nap.”

Second, he pictures death as a reunion. With whom?

“with kings and counselors of the earth

who rebuilt ruins for themselves,

or with princes who had gold,

who filled their houses with silver.” (Job 3:14-15)

Job reasons, “If I could have just died at birth, I would have graduated to glory. I would have been promoted to glory. I would have been promoted onto the same level with kings and princes in the next world. There would have been a reunion in Heaven with all the mighty kings, counselors, and princes.

Third, Job views death as a relief.

“Or why was I not as a hidden stillborn child,

as infants who never see the light?

There the wicked cease from troubling,

and there the weary are at rest.

There the prisoners are at ease together;

they hear not the voice of the taskmaster.

The small and the great are there,

and the slave is free from his master.” (Job 3:16-19)

Job wishes he had been stillborn at birth. He says death would have brought him relief from the pain and the torment of this life. The wicked cease from raging in death. In death man ceases from sinning. That’s true. In Heaven, our sin nature will be eradicated. And we will be like our true image in Christ.

In death, the Job says there will be relief from punishment because then “the prisoners are at ease together.” In other words, death is like a jailbreak from the imprisonment of suffering. Right now, we are imprisoned in our circumstances. Only death will free us from this prison house. Only in death will we have relief.

Death blots out the voice of the slave driver. We hear pain’s voice no longer. In death, we prisoners no longer hear the voice of our cruel taskmaster. Only in death do we have relief from pain. We will be no longer enslaved to life’s torment. Both the small and the great will have the relief of death one day. We will be free from the affliction of this life. If we can just escape, we will have relief from life’s pain.

But Job has not yet hit the bottom. First he says, “I wish I had never been born.” Next, he says, “I wish that I had died at birth.” Since neither of those has happened, he wishes for today—“I wish I could die right now.”

I WISH I COULD DIE NOW!

I don’t believe Job is saying, “I want to commit suicide.” Not at all. He doesn’t want to take his own life. He wants God to take his life. There is a vast difference.

Have you ever felt such despair? Have you ever thought, I just wish Jesus would come back today and rapture me out of this dilemma? I have. You may have thought that this morning. I think that’s where Job is. He’s not contemplating suicide. He just wants to check out of this life. This world is full of misery, suffering, and heartache. The longer we live, the more pain we suffer. That is what Job is saying. That’s what most of us feel at one time or another.

Maybe you heard about the man who went to his doctor for a checkup. He came back the next day to get the results from the tests.

“Doc, how do I look?”

The doctor said, “I have good news and bad news and bad news. Which do you want first?”

The man said, “Let me hear the good news first.”

The doctor said, “Well, the good news is, you have twenty-four hours to live.”

“Good grief! That’s the good news?” The man gasped. “I’ve got twenty-four hours to live? Then, what’s the bad news?”

The doctor replied, “The bad news is I was supposed to tell you yesterday.”

That’s where Job is. This is bad news to Job. Why? Because Job wants to die today. He has sunk so low as to say,

“Why is light given to him who is in misery,

and life to the bitter in soul,

who long for death, but it comes not,

and dig for it more than for hidden treasures,

who rejoice exceedingly

and are glad when they find the grave?” (Job 3:20-22)

Again, Job asks God why. “Why does God continue to give light to the one who suffers?” To give extended life to one who suffers seems cruel and pointless.

Job is a candidate for Dr. Doom’s Death Machine. Death would be a welcome release. If it could be found, it would be better than discovering a valuable treasure chest in the ground. That’s why Job is aggressively pursuing death. If he could just find it, there would be riches of relief for him.

A casket in the ground would be like a treasure chest buried beneath the surface. Death is that treasure chest—that welcomed reward.

Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden,

whom God has hedged in? (Job 3:23)

Why does God continue to give life to a man who can’t even see his way to navigate through his affliction? He’s trapped in an intricate maze with no way out. Whichever way he turns, he runs into a wall. No way out. Why does God hedge him in? To Job, it seems that God is cruel to keep him alive in this inescapable maze.

Before Job’s catastrophes, Satan said, “God, no wonder Job serves You. You’ve built a hedge, a wall of protection, around him. I can’t get to him.” God said, “All right, I’ll remove the hedge. You can come at him. You can do anything except take his life.”

As Satan invaded Job’s life and brought great harm, God had built another hedge around Job’s life. But this hedge is to keep Job from escaping his trials. He is now locked in. Instead of a wall of protection to keep Satan out, now there is a wall of affliction that keeps Job in.

Have you ever wanted your problems to just go away? Surely you have. So did Job. But God had hedged Job into his problems and he couldn’t get out.

“For my sighing comes instead of my bread,

and my groanings are poured out like water.” (Job 3:24)

Job’s stomach is in such a knot, he can’t even eat. He has lost his appetite and food is repulsive. He can’t eat, he is so eaten up with despair. He “cries” like a lion (Job 4:10). He sounds like a roaring lion in the jungle as he groans in the night and pours out his anguished heart to God. The anguish pours out.

“For the thing that I fear comes upon me,

and what I dread befalls me.” (Job 3:25)

Job fears that there is “no escape” from his misery. “I wake up in the morning hoping that this was just a nightmare, and I wake up to the grim reality that, yes, my children were taken. Yes, my fortune was taken. Yes, my health has been taken. Yes, I am hurting very deeply. And there is no end in sight and no way out of my problems. My worst fears have become a reality.”

“I am not at ease, nor am I quiet;

I have no rest, but trouble comes.” (Job 3:26)

In the aching of his heart, Job says, “I have no peace and I have no rest. All I have are problems and heartaches and despair.”

Have you ever been there?

Maybe that’s where you are right now. Or, perhaps somebody you know. Take heart, all is not lost. I want to give you some steps to overcome such despair. I don’t want to leave you here.

OVERCOMING DESPAIR: GOD’S WAY

Despair is very real. I’ve been there and so have you. How can we overcome deep discouragement? Let me give you some steps.

First, realize that even the strongest believer can become discouraged. Not one of us is Superman. Nor the Bionic Woman. None of us is exempt from such discouragement.

Remember, Job was the most righteous man on the earth when God said to Satan, “Have you considered Job? There is no one like him.” I think He was saying, “Listen, Job is my Mount Everest. He stands taller than anyone else on the earth in his love and devotion to Me.”

Job has sunk into a dark, black pit of depression. Despite being strong in his faith, he bears all the marks of someone who is depressed: gloom, anger, anxiety, bitterness, confusion, fatigue, cynicism, fear, hopelessness, insomnia, dejection, sadness, pessimism.

Can a believer be depressed? Yes. Most of us have been or will be depressed.

The Apostle Paul experienced it. In 2 Corinthians 1, he says, “We were burdened excessively, beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life; indeed, we had the sentence of death within [us]” (verses 8-9). King David of Israel enjoyed the heights of worship. But he also hit the valleys of despair.

Warren Wiersbe, who has written some great biographical books on walking and talking with giants of the faith, points to a clear theme woven through the lives of many devout servants of God. At times they all were overcome with oppression and discouragement and even depression in their ministry and service for God.

Even such a stalwart of the Christian faith as Martin Luther experienced such deep depression. He wrote of his grief: “For more than a week I was close to the gates of death and hell. I trembled in all my members. Christ was wholly lost. I was shaken by desperation and blasphemy of God” (Roland Bainton. Here I Stand. Nashville: Abingdon, 1950, page 36).

Second, we can suffer deeply on many levels at one time. I see Job suffering on four different levels simultaneously. He’s suffering physically. We know that from the end of the previous chapter. Added to that, Job says, “I can’t eat and I’m crying. I’m knotted up, physically, on the inside.”

He is suffering intellectually as his mind is flooded with “Why? Why?, Why, God?” He is confused and bewildered.

He is suffering emotionally. He says in verse 26, “I am not at ease, I am not at rest, I am not quiet in my heart, I am full in turmoil.”

Job is suffering spiritually as well. He is realizing that God has hedged him in, and he wishes God had never allowed him to be born.

There are times in our lives when we will go through the dark night of adversity in which we suffer physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually all at the same time—and this will touch the deepest recesses of our souls.

Third, discouragement can cause us to lose perspective. That’s what is happening to Job here. He is losing his perspective of God. He is overreacting and making exaggerated statements. He is jumping to wrong conclusions and he has lost sound judgment.

Depression affects your whole view of life. It gives a twisted perception of reality. It produces a distorted view of God and self, often yielding an inaccurate and unhealthy negative self-image.

When you and I become discouraged over an extended period of time, we can lose perspective on life and we, too, can begin to draw wrong conclusions, to make exaggerated statements, and to see life in an irrational perspective that is not right.

Often when people are discouraged they say, “I’m going to quit and go to another church” or “I’m going to divorce my wife” or “We’re just going to leave town.” In the midst of your discouragement when you have lost perspective, you’ll make your worst decisions.

Fourth, don’t keep your deep pain to yourself. Share your hurt with someone else.

One of the things that crushed Job’s spirit as he and his friends sat in the garbage dump was his own silence. All they have done so far is simply to stare at one another. All the while, Job could have been pouring out his heart and sharing his burdens with them. But he kept it on the inside. And Job became like a teakettle on a stove and the pressure built up and up and up so that when finally released, it came spewing out. Eruption. Gusher. Explosion. Job could have prevented this by exposing his heart all along. We need our friends to help us bear our heavy loads.

Galatians says, “Bear one another’s burdens.” Romans says, “Weep with those who weep.”

Job should have freely shared what he was going through. So should you.

Fifth, remember that God always has a purpose behind suffering.

As long as you are alive, God has a purpose for your being here on the earth. And until the moment we die, we are still in the process of fulfilling that purpose. Therefore, we need to stay here upon the earth until God determines our time is over. God will not take us home until we have fulfilled our purpose.

Jesus said, “We must work the works of Him who sent Me, as long as it is day; night is coming, when no man can work” (John 9:4). While we have life and while we have opportunity, we need to do what God has called us to do.

Sixth, when discouraged, take proper steps to avoid depression.

May I give you several things that I share with counselees who are deeply afflicted and discouraged and even depressed? These are practical steps on how to overcome deep discouragement.

Memorize and meditate on Scripture. The Word of God can be a soothing balm to a breaking heart.

Listen to Christian music. God inhabits the praises of His people (so try some praise music). And God has designed us so that praise should lift our hearts to God. One of the greatest things you can do is listen to Christian music that elevates God and Christ with celebration. David played the heart for Saul. It softened, if only for a time, Saul’s bitter soul. I’d wager David also played his heart for himself. And it was a soothing comfort.

Stay plugged in to Christian fellowship. You need the strength that others provide. Don’t isolate yourselves from others. You need to allow others to affirm you and to communicate value to you. We all need to be around others as they laugh and enjoy life. Charles Swindoll has said that the Christian life should include some outrageous joy. Look for that kind of contagious fellowship.

Find someone else to encourage. One way to work through problems is take your focus off yourself and put it onto others. Begin to serve others who are in need, and it will help heal your own heart.

Have a prayer partner. Find someone you can pour your heart out to and share your needs with. Someone who will pray for you and with you. Someone who is truly trustworthy. There is something powerful about hearing another person’s voice pray for you and offer your requests up to God, perhaps at a time when you are so weak you can barely even bring your heart before God’s throne. To hear someone else pray on your behalf can lift your battered spirit.

Remember that God is sovereign. He is in control. As we see in Job’s life, God was in control of Satan and He had a master plan. He allows our suffering for a greater purpose to help weave that marvelous tapestry that He will one day reveal and that will bring glory to Himself. Remember that nothing will come into your life except that which is either allowed or sent by a sovereign God.

Maintain physical exercise. You need to walk, you need to jog, you need to ride a bike, you need to plant a garden, you need to go walk the golf course (then again, that may be why you’re depressed—that back none). Physical exercise is critical.

HELP IS ON THE WAY

Long ago, in the very days of sailing ships, a terrible storm arose and a ship was lost in a very deserted area. Only one crewman survived, washed up on a small, uninhabited island. In his desperation, the castaway daily prayed to God for help and deliverance from his lonely existence.

Each day, he looked for a passing ship and saw nothing. Eventually, he managed to build a very crude hut in which he stored the few things he had recovered from the wreck, and those things he was able to make to help him.

One day, as the sailor was returning from his daily search for food, he saw a column of smoke. As he ran to it, he saw that it was arising from his hut, which was in flames.

All was lost.

Now, not only was he alone, but he had nothing to help him in his struggle for survival. He was stunned and overcome with grief and despair. He fell into a deep depression and spent many a sleepless night wondering what was to become of him and questioning whether life itself was even worth the effort.

Then one morning, he arose early and went down to the sea. There to his amazement, he saw a ship lying offshore, and a small rowboat coming toward him.

When this once-marooned man met the ship’s captain, he asked him, “How did you know to send help? How did you know I was here?

The captain replied, “Why, we saw your smoke signal last week. But, by the time we could turn our ship around and sail against the wind, it had taken us several days to get to you. But here we are.”

Calamity may strike, but we must remember that God can use that calamity as means to bring greater blessing to our lives.

Right now, you may feel as if your life has gone up in smoke. You may feel as if your heart is going through fiery trials. I want you to know that your trial may be used by God as the very instrument that will bring you closer to Him and bring blessing from His hand.

That reality would eventually become true in Job’s life. God drew Job closer to Himself than ever before.

God will use our times of testing and trials to bring us even closer to Himself.

About the Author: Dr. Steven J. Lawson is the Senior Pastor of Christ Fellowship Baptist Church in Mobile, Alabama, having served as a pastor in Arkansas and Alabama for the past twenty-nine years. He is a graduate of Texas Tech University (B.B.A.), Dallas Theological Seminary (Th.M.), and Reformed Theological Seminary (D. Min.).

The focus of Dr. Lawson’s ministry is the verse-by-verse exposition of God’s Word. The overflow of this study and preaching has led to his authoring fifteen books, his newest being The Unwavering Resolve of Jonathan Edwards. His other recent books include The Expository Genius of John Calvin, Foundations of Grace 1400 BC-AD 100, volume one of a multi-volume series, and three volumes in the Holman Old Testament Commentary Series, Job, Psalms Volume I (Psalms 1-75), and Volume II (Psalms 76-150).

He has contributed to John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, work celebrating the 500 year anniversary of the birth of John Calvin. He is the Series Editor for A Long Line of Godly Men Profile, a series of biographies of noted Christian leaders.

Dr. Lawson has also authored Famine in the Land: A Passionate Call to Expository Preaching, Made In Our Image, Absolutely Sure, The Legacy, When All Hell Breaks Loose, and Faith Under Fire. His books have been translated into various languages around the world, including Russian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Albanian, Korean, Dutch, and the Indonesian language.

He has contributed several articles to Bibliotheca Sacra, The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, The Faith and Mission, Decision Magazine, and Discipleship Magazine, among other journals and magazines.

Dr. Lawson’s pulpit ministry takes him around the world, preaching in such places as Russia, the Ukraine, Scotland, Wales, England, Ireland, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland, Italy and many conferences in the United States, including The Shepherd’s Conference and the Resolved Conference at Grace Community Church, Sun Valley, California, the Ligonier National and Pastor’s Conference, and the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology.

He is president of New Reformation, a ministry designed to bring about biblical reformation in the church today. He serves on the Executive Board of The Master’s Seminary and College and is a Teaching Fellow with Ligonier Ministries and a Visiting Professor at the Ligonier Academy, teaching Expository Preaching and Evangelism and Missions in the Doctor of Ministry program. Dr. Lawson taught in the Distinguished Scholars Lecture Series at The Master’s Seminary, lecturing in 2004 on “Expository Preaching of the Psalms.” He also serves on the Advisory Council for Samara Preachers’ Institute & Theological Seminary, Samara, Russia.

Steve and his wife Anne have three sons, Andrew, James, and John, and a daughter, Grace Anne.

55 Reasons The Literal Bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ Matters

55 Resurrection Theses for the Third Millennium

We (Ross Clifford and Philip Johnson in The Cross Is Not Enough – pictured above) have traversed a lot of material about the resurrection in this book. We began by alluding to Luther’s famous ninety-five theses, and although we do not presume to put ourselves on the same level as Luther, in the spirit of his call for church renewal and reform we conclude this book with our 55 “theses.”

(1)  The resurrection is the lynchpin of Christianity. No other dogma provides the glue that holds faith, life, and practice altogether.

(2)  The church must recover a balanced understanding of both the cross and the resurrection.

(3)  The resurrection does not exist just to validate the cross.

(4)  The resurrection defense is about the truth of the Easter event, but the traditional defense must extend into showing its relevance to all areas of life.

(5)  Without the resurrection of Christ there can be no future resurrection of the dead.

(6)  Christian hope without the resurrection of the dead is an everlasting pie-in-the-sky existence.

(7)  Resurrection is holistic and therefore more empowering than reincarnation.

(8)  To deny the resurrection of Jesus is to deny the resurrection of the dead and to deny hope.

(9)  The resurrection is not a New Testament “surprise.” It is found in the Law, Prophets, and Writings of the Old Testament.

(10) The risen Jesus gives confidence about the authenticity of the Bible; he affirms the Old Testament and the Spirit guiding the writers of the New Testament.

(11) The answer to the question, what does God look like? can be found in the resurrection of Jesus.

(12) The resurrection confirms the hope that Jesus is indeed coming again.

(13) The first Easter showed that the women were the most faithful followers of Jesus through his death, burial, and resurrection. They are rewarded with the first-day-of-the-week appearances.

(14) The resurrection brings divine meaning to the total agony and suffering of Christ on the cross.

(15) Without the resurrection the call to mission in Acts would be empty nonsense.

(16) Mission that focuses only on the death of Christ is not the good news.

(17) It is the resurrected Christ who empowers, guides, and gives strength to the church in mission.

(18) The resurrection is not hidden from humankind. We are without excuse. It is found in both special revelation and the modes of general revelation in nature, culture, and history.

(19) Those who proclaim the resurrection of Christ and the resurrection of the dead should expect to be mocked and rejected in parts of the church and by scoffers in the marketplace.

(20) The resurrection speaks to the post-Christendom seeker, the modernist follower, and those who are both/and in worldview.

(21) Jesus’s resurrection is the lynchpin and the glue of every authentic evangelistic utterance.

(22) Jesus’s resurrection is about evangelizing and ministering to whole people; it is not about rescuing disembodied souls to float on ethereal clouds in heaven.

(23) Jesus’s resurrection and the resurrection of the dead show that we must care for the whole person.

(24) When the resurrection is upheld as the lynchpin, the binary view of evangelism versus social justice evaporates.

(25) Looking for Aslan and Gandalf in myth and fairy tale can help point us toward the fulfillment of resurrection in Jesus.

(26) Preaching that does not at least make the cross and resurrection equal is counter to the true gospel.

(27) The resurrection brings us to our knees before the one who is both judge and king.

(28) The resurrection is countercultural because it goes against the grain and transforms our way of life. It overturns all idolatrous and disempowering paradigms.

(29) Jesus’s resurrection is the critical sign of the coming kingdom.

(30) Without the resurrection that brings divine judgment there will be no justice, leaving all the atrocities of history unanswered.

(31) Ethics needs the fulcrum of the resurrection: it validates the message and shows the cosmic dimension of God’s ethical concern for the world, for the environment, and for us.

(32) The resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of the dead do not involve planet earth ending up in a cosmic dustbin. The resurrection, to the contrary, shows that there is to be both a new heaven and a new earth that are our eternal home.

(33) The resurrection of Jesus means that God loves all creation.

(34) The resurrection is radical discipleship as it claims to empower, equip, and strengthen us to love our neighbor as ourselves. It is about living by the Great Commandment and the Great Commission.

(35) Radical discipleship is taking up my cross and following the risen Christ.

(36) The way of Jesus is only complete by way of there being a resurrection.

(37) The resurrection asks: If you claim to be a resurrectionist would there be enough evidence to convict you?

(38) Anyone who believes in the resurrected Christ will, like doubting Thomas, confess of Jesus, “My Lord and my God.”

(39) The resurrection declares that God cares for the whole of me.

(40) The resurrection is as essential for the justification of the sinner as is the cross.

(41) Jesus’s resurrection is God’s divine yes: I am forgiven.

(42) When life falls apart and God seems utterly remote, the resurrection makes it clear that God is indeed with us.

(43) It is because of the resurrection of Jesus that we can truly have a powerful prayer life that connects us to the one who has already walked in our journey.

(44) In the resurrection of Christ I can become an effective self.

(45) The resurrection of Christ must lead to a transformed personality.

(46) The resurrection of Christ enables me to operate within a godly framework of a boundless self.

(47) The resurrection shows Jesus as the firstborn of a new community that commenced on the first day of the week.

(48) A dead, nonresurrected Messiah is as useful to the church as was Samson after his haircut.

(49) If the church truly believes in the resurrection, why then are there only Stations of the Cross? This anomaly is true of much of both the evangelical and Roman Catholic worlds.

(50) The resurrection declares there is neither Jew nor Greek and neither male or female, and there are no class distinctions.

(51) Jesus’s resurrection speaks against all nonperson abuse and, in particular, sexual abuse in the church.

(52) The resurrection of Christ calls the whole church to repent.

(53) In different eras the resurrection has been the heartbeat for the church’s theology and mission. To our great shame the resurrection’s importance and influence in church history has become a forgotten truth.

(54) Wholehearted worship is a passionate way of resurrection living.

(55) The resurrection is true and it works!

The “Theses for the Third Millennium” has been adapted from the Outstanding book by Aussies – Clifford, Ross; Johnson, Philip. The Cross Is Not Enough, The: Living as Witnesses to the Resurrection. Grand Rapids: Baker. Kindle Edition, 2011 (Kindle Locations 6561-6580).

Dr. Aubrey Malphurs on The Meaning of Going and Making Disciples

WHAT DID JESUS MEAN IN MATTHEW 28:19-20 WHEN HE COMMANDED HIS CHURCH TO MAKE DISCIPLES?

Perhaps the most important questions that a church and its leadership can ask are: What does God want us to do? What is our mandate or mission? What are our marching orders? The answer to all three questions isn’t hard to find. More than two thousand years ago, the Savior predetermined the church’s mission-it’s the Great Commission, as found in such texts as Mark 16:15; Luke 24:46-49; John 20:21; and Matthew 28:19-20, where he says, “Make disciples.” This commission raises several important questions, such as what is a disciple and what does it mean to make disciples?

If you asked ten different people in the church (including the pastoral staff) what a disciple is, you might get ten different answers. The same is true at a seminary. If the church is not clear on what Jesus meant, then it will be difficult for it to comply with his expressed will. For the church to understand what the Savior meant in Matthew 28:19-20, we must examine the main verb and its object “make disciples” and then the two participles that follow- “baptizing” and “teaching.” What does all this mean?

 “Make Disciples”

First, let’s examine the main verb and its object: “make disciples.” A common view is that a disciple is a committed believer. Thus a disciple is a believer, but a believer isn’t necessarily a disciple. However, that’s not how the New Testament uses this term. I contend that the normative use of the term disciple is of one who is a convert to or a believer in Jesus Christ (though there are some obvious exceptions – Some exceptions are the disciples of Moses [John 9:28], the disciples of the Pharisees [Matt. 22:16; Mark 2:18], the disciples of John [Mark 2:18; John 1:35], and the disciples of Jesus who left him [John 6:60-66]). Thus the Bible teaches that a disciple isn’t necessarily a Christian who has made a deeper commitment to the Savior but simply a Christian. Committed Christians are committed disciples. Uncommitted Christians are uncommitted disciples. This is clearly how Luke uses the term disciple in the book of Acts and his Gospel. It is evident in passages such as the following: Acts 6:1-2, 7; 9:1, 26; 11:26; 14:21-22; 15:10; 18:23; 19:9. For example, Acts 6:7 tells us that God’s Word kept spreading and the number of disciples continued to increase greatly in Jerusalem. Luke isn’t telling us that the number of deeply committed believers was significantly increasing. He’s telling his readers that the church was making numerous converts to the faith. In Acts 9:1 Luke writes that Saul (Paul) was “breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples.” It’s most doubtful that Saul was threatening only the mature believers. He was persecuting as many believers as he could locate. A great example is Acts 14:21 where Luke says they “won a large number of disciples” in connection with evangelism. Here they preached the gospel and won or made a large number of disciples or converts, not mature or even growing Christians. (Note that the words “won a large number of disciples” is the one Greek word mathateusantes, the same word as in Matthew 28:19!) Disciples, then, were synonymous with believers. Virtually all scholars acknowledge this to be the case in Acts.

So is the command “make disciples” in Matthew 28:19 to be equated with evangelism? Before we can answer this question, we must also examine a second context. The first had to do with the use of the term disciple in the New Testament; the second has to do with the other Great Commission passages: Mark 16:15 and Luke 24:46-49 (with Acts 1:8). In Mark 16:15 Jesus commands the disciples, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.” Here “preach” like “make disciples” is the main verb (an aorist imperative) preceded by another circumstantial participle of attendant circumstance translated “go.” This is clearly a proactive command to do evangelism.

In Luke 24:46-48 we have much the same message with the gospel defined: “This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” Jesus presents the gospel message and the necessity that his witnesses preach that gospel to all nations. In these two Great Commission passages, the emphasis is clearly on evangelism and missions.

Finally, John gives us the least information in his statement of the commission. In John 20:21-22 Jesus tells the disciples that he’s sending them and provides them with the Holy Spirit in anticipation of Pentecost.

We must not stop here. There’s a third context. Much of Jesus’s teaching of the Twelve (who are believers, except for Judas) concerns discipleship or the need for the disciple to grow in Christ (Matt. 16:24-26; 20:26-28; Luke 9:23-25). For example, Matthew 16:24 says, “Then Jesus said to his disciples, `If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”‘

So how does this relate to the passages in Acts and the other commission passages in the Gospels? The answer is that the Great Commission has both an evangelism and an edification or spiritual growth component. To make a disciple, first one has to win a person (a nondisciple) to Christ. At that point he or she becomes a disciple. It doesn’t stop there. Now this new disciple needs to grow or mature as a disciple, hence the edification component.

“Baptizing and Teaching”

Having studied the main verb and its object, “make disciples,” we need to examine the two participles in Matthew 28:20- “baptizing” and “teaching.” The interpretation of these will address whether “make disciples” involves both evangelism and edification. While there are two feasible interpretive options, the better one is that they are circumstantial (adverbial) participles of means (The second option is to treat them as circumstantial [adverbial] participles of attendant circumstance. If this is correct, then the participles baptizing and teaching express an idea not subordinate to as above but coordinate to or on a par with the main verb [make disciples]. You would translate the main verb and the participles as a series of coordinate verbs, the mood of which is dictated by the main verb that in this case is imperative [aorist imperative]. The verse would read: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” A former Dallas Seminary Greek professor, Philip Williams, takes this view in “Grammar Notes on the Noun and the Verb and Certain Other Items” [unpublished class notes, which were used by Dr. Buist Fanning in his course Advanced Greek Grammar, 1977], 53-54. The conclusion here is that the passage addresses a series of separate, coordinate chronological acts or steps. The first is to go, which implies proactivity. The second is to make disciples. The third is to baptize those disciples, and the fourth is to teach them. However, I believe that Dan Wallace makes the better argument for these being circumstantial participles of means. While I don’t believe that baptizontes and didaskontes are circumstantial participles of attendant circumstance, I do believe that the first participle in verse 19 [poreuthentes] is. It draws its mood from or is coordinate to the main verb [mathateusate], which is imperative. Jesus is commanding them to make disciples and to be proactive about it).

The NIV has taken this interpretation: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” Dan Wallace, a Greek scholar and professor of New Testament at Dallas Seminary, writes: “Finally, the other two participles (haptizontes, didaskontes) should not be taken as attendant circumstance. First, they do not fit the normal pattern for

attendant circumstance participles (they are present tense and follow the main verb). And second, they obviously make good sense as participles of means; i.e., the means by which the disciples were to make disciples was to baptize and then to teach” (Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996, 645). If this is the case, then the two participles provide us with the means or the how for growing the new disciples. The way the church makes disciples is by baptizing and teaching its people.

But what is the significance of baptism in the life of a new disciple (believer)? Baptism is mentioned eleven times in Acts (Acts 2:38; 8:12, 16, 36, 38; 9:18; 10:48; 16:15, 33; 19:5; 22:16). In every passage except one (19:5) it’s used in close association with evangelism and immediately follows someone’s conversion to Christ. Baptism was the public means or activity that identified the new disciple with Jesus (See Wilkins, Following the Master, 189). Baptism was serious business, as it could mean rejection by one’s parents and family, even resulting in the loss of one’s life. As we have seen, it both implies or is closely associated with evangelism and was a public confession that one had become a disciple of Jesus. Thus Matthew includes evangelism in the context of disciple making.

And finally, what is the significance of teaching? Luke also addresses teaching in Acts (Acts 2:42; 5:25, 28; 15:35; 18:11; 28:31). Michael Wilkins summarizes this best when he says that “`teaching’ introduces the activities by which the new disciple grows in discipleship” (Ibid., 189-90).The object of our teaching is obedience to Jesus’s teaching. The emphasis on teaching isn’t simply for the sake of knowledge. Effective teaching results in a transformed life or a maturing disciple/believer.

The Conclusion

The conclusion from the evidence above is that the two participles are best treated and translated as circumstantial participles of means. The term make disciples (mathateusante) is a clear reference to both evangelism (baptizing) and maturation (teaching). (Note again the use of mathateusantes in Acts 14:21 in the context of evangelism.) Mark and Luke emphasize the evangelism aspect of the Great Commission (and John the sending out of the disciples). Matthew emphasizes both evangelism and the need to grow disciples in their newfound faith, as he adds the need not only to baptize but to teach these new believers as well to other passages in the New Testament, the latter would lead the new converts to spiritual maturity (1 Cor. 3:1-4; Heb. 5:11-6:3). Therefore, the goal is for them to become mature disciples in time. This would result from a combination of being taught and obeying Jesus’s commandments.

Jesus was clear about his intentions for his church. It wasn’t just to teach or preach the Word, as important as those activities are. Nor was it evangelism alone, although the latter is emphasized as much as teaching. He expects his entire church (not simply a few passionate disciple makers) to move people from prebirth (unbelief) to the new birth (belief) and then to maturity. In fact, this is so important that we can measure a church’s spiritual health and its ultimate success by its obedience to the Great Commission. It is fair to ask of every church’s ministry how many people have become disciples (believers) and how many of these disciples are growing toward maturity. In short, it’s imperative that every church make and mature disciples at home and abroad!

Note: I highly recommend Dr. Michael J. Wilkins’s Following the Master: A Biblical Theology of Discipleship (Zondervan, 1992). Wilkins is professor of New Testament language and literature and dean of the faculty at the Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. (Pictured on below)

About the Author: Aubrey Malphurs (Ph.D., Dallas Theological Seminary) is professor of pastoral ministries at Dallas Theological Seminary and president of The Malphurs Group. He engages in church consulting and training and is the author of numerous books, including Developing a Vision of Ministry in the Twenty-first Century.

The Article above was adapted from Appendix B: “Make Disciples” by Aubrey Malphurs. Strategic Disciple Making: A Practical Tool for Successful Ministry. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008 (pp. 159-160). Kindle Edition.

F.F. Bruce on The Formation of the Canon of Scripture

F.F. Bruce on The Criteria of Canonicity of the Bible 

Tests in The Apostolic Age

The earliest Christians did not trouble themselves about criteria of canonicity; they would not have readily understood the expression. They accepted the Old Testament scriptures as they had received them: the authority of those scriptures was sufficiently ratified by the teaching and example of the Lord and his apostles. The teaching and example of the Lord and his apostles, whether conveyed by word of mouth or in writing, had axiomatic authority for them.

Criteria of a kind, however, were found to be desirable quite early. When prophets, for example, claimed to speak in the Lord’s name, it became necessary to ‘discern the spirits’ by which they spoke. Some members of the church were given ‘the ability to distinguish between spirits’ (1 Cor. 12: 10). According to Paul, the decisive criterion to apply to prophets is their testimony to Christ: ‘no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit’ (1 Cor. 12:3). Somewhat later, John suggests a more specific test: ‘every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God’ (1 Jn. 4:2). Such tests anticipated the later insistence on orthodoxy as a criterion of canonicity.

Again, when Paul suspected that letters were circulating in his name which were none of his, he gave his friends a simple criterion by which his genuine letters could be recognized: although he regularly dictated his letters to amanuenses, he took the pen himself to write the final greetings—sometimes, but not necessarily, accompanied by his actual signature (cf. 1 Cor. 16:21; Gal. 6:11; Col. 4:18; 2 Thess. 3: 17; also Philemon 19). Paul’s handwriting was evidently so distinctive that it could not be easily forged. This was, of course, a temporary criterion of authenticity. No document containing Paul’s handwriting has survived to our day, and even if one had survived, the handwriting would not be recognizable as his at this late date.

Apostolic Authority

Since Jesus himself left nothing in writing, the most authoritative writings available to the church were those which came from his apostles. Among his apostles none was more active in writing (as well as otherwise) than Paul. There were some in Paul’s own day, and a few in later generations, who questioned his right to be called an apostle, but throughout the churches of the Gentiles his apostleship was generally undoubted—inevitably so, because a number of those churches would not have existed except for his apostolic ministry (See Paul’s argument in 2 Cor. 3:1-3: the existence of the church was the only letter of accreditation he needed—at Corinth). The authority of his authentic letters continued to be acknowledged after his death, not only by the churches to which they were severally addressed but by the churches as a whole. It is not surprising that Paul’s letters were among the first, if not absolutely the first, of our New Testament documents to be gathered together and to circulate as a collection.

Letters in antiquity normally began with the writer’s name, and so did Paul’s letters. But many of the New Testament documents do not contain the writers’ names: they are strictly anonymous—to us, completely anonymous. The writer to Theophilus was well enough known to Theophilus (See Lk. 1:3; Acts 1:1), but his name has not been preserved either in the Third Gospel or in Acts; to us, therefore, these two works are anonymous. Traditionally they are ascribed to Luke, but if we wish to examine the validity of this tradition, we have to consider which Luke is meant, and what the probability is of their being the work of that Luke.

Similarly, the recipients of the letter to the Hebrews no doubt were well acquainted with its author (in that sense they would not have regarded it as an anonymous communication), but since it does not bear his name, his identity was forgotten after a generation or two, and has never been certainly recovered.

From the second century onward, two of the four Gospels were ascribed to apostles—to Matthew and John. Whether Marcion knew of this ascription or not we cannot say, but if he did, that in itself would have deprived them of all Christian authority in his eyes: these two men belonged to the group which, he believed, had corrupted the pure message of Jesus. An eccentric churchman like Gaius of Rome might ascribe the Fourth Gospel to Cerinthus, but the views of eccentric churchmen have never disturbed the general consensus.

It is remarkable, when one comes to think of it, that the four canonical Gospels are anonymous, whereas the ‘Gospels’ which proliferated in the late second century and afterwards claim to have been written by apostles and other eyewitnesses. Catholic churchmen found it necessary, therefore, to defend the apostolic authenticity of the Gospels which they accepted against the claims of those which they rejected. Hence come the accounts of the origin of the canonical four which appear in the Muratorian list, in the so-called anti-Marcionite prologues, and in Irenaeus. The apostolic authorship of Matthew and John was well established in tradition.

But what of Mark and Luke? Their authorship was also well established in tradition, but it was felt desirable to buttress the authority of tradition with arguments which gave those two Gospels a measure of apostolic validation. As early as Papias, Mark is said to have set down in writing Peter’s account of the sayings and doings of the Lord, and Peter’s apostolic authority was not in doubt. As for Luke’s Gospel, its author was early identified with the man whom Paul calls ‘Luke, the beloved physician’ (Col. 4:14). This meant that he was one of Paul’s associates, and something of Paul’s apostolic authority rubbed off on him. Some, identifying Luke with the unnamed ‘brother’ of 2 Corinthians 8:18 ‘whose praise is in the gospel’, went so far as to see in these words of Paul a reference to the Gospel of Luke, if they did not indeed go farther still and see a reference to it in Paul’s mention of ‘my gospel’ (Rom. 2:16; 16:25; 2 Tim. 2:8). Fortunately, the value of Luke’s Gospel can be vindicated with stronger arguments than these; but the fact that these were the arguments used in its defence in the second and third centuries shows how important some degree of apostolic authorization seemed to be for the books which the church accepted as uniquely authoritative.

The fortunes of the letter to the Hebrews provide a further example of the importance attached to apostolic authority (if not authorship). Those who (like the church of Alexandria) accepted this letter as the work of Paul recognized it without more ado as canonical. If someone with a critical faculty like Origen’s realized that, as it stood, this document was not Paul’s work, a way round this offered itself: the Greek text indeed was not Paul’s (perhaps it was Luke’s), but a Hebrew work of Paul lay behind it. (An even better developed critical faculty might have indicated that Hebrews was not written in translation-Greek.) Those who (like well-informed members of the Roman church) knew that the work was not Paul’s, esteemed it highly as an edifying document handed down from the early age of the church, but did not accept it as apostolic. When at last, in the fourth century, the church of Rome was persuaded to fall into line with the other churches and recognize Hebrews as canonical, a natural tendency followed to treat it as Pauline also—but Pauline with a qualification. ‘I am moved rather by the prestige of the eastern churches’, said Augustine, ‘to include this epistle too among the canonical writings’; but he had reservations about its authorship.

Like his older contemporary Jerome, he distinguished between canonicity and apostolic authorship. Even at an earlier period, apostolic authorship in the direct sense was not insisted on, if some form of apostolic authority could be established. Membership of the holy family apparently carried with it near-apostolic status: Paul indeed seems to include James the Lord’s brother among the apostles (Gal. 1:19)—but so far as James was concerned there was the further consideration that to him, as to Paul himself, the Lord had appeared in resurrection (1 Cor. 15:7). If therefore the James who names himself as author of the letter addressed ‘to the twelve tribes in the Dispersion’ was identified with the Lord’s brother, that was good enough reason for accepting the letter among the apostolic writings. And if ‘Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James’ was indicated in those words to be another member of the holy family, that was sufficient to tip the balance in favour of accepting the short letter so superscribed, especially in view of the ‘words of heavenly grace’ of which (as Origen said) it was full. The early church knew several works claiming the authority of Peter’s name. Among these no difficulty was felt about 1 Peter; its attestation goes back to the first half of the second century, and it was handed down as one of the undisputed books.

There was considerable hesitation about 2 Peter, but by the time of Athanasius it was no longer a disputed book in the Alexandrian church or in western Christendom. Its explicit claim to be the work of the apostle Peter was probably felt to be supported by the fact that it contained nothing unworthy of him. Among the Johannine writings 1 John was always closely associated with the Fourth Gospel: if the Gospel was acknowledged to be apostolic and canonical, so was this epistle, although it was as anonymous as the Gospel. Those who doubted the apostolic authorship of 2 and 3 John and the Apocalypse tended to doubt their canonical status also. The disinclination to accept the Apocalypse was due not mainly to doubts about the identity of the John who wrote it with John the apostle; it was due much more to the antipathy which was widely felt in the Greek world to its millenarianism. Dionysius of Alexandria, who ascribed it on grounds of literary criticism to another John than the apostle and evangelist, acknowledged it to be a genuine work of prophecy. Two aspects of the apostolic criterion were themselves used as subsidiary criteria—antiquity and orthodoxy.

Antiquity

If a writing was the work of an apostle or of someone closely associated with an apostle, it must belong to the apostolic age. Writings of later date, whatever their merit, could not be included among the apostolic or canonical books. The compiler of the Muratorian list had a high regard for the Shepherd of Hermas; he recognized it evidently as a genuine work of prophecy. However, it had appeared too late to be included among the canonical prophets; and equally it had appeared too late to be included among the apostolic writings, for it was written only the day before yesterday, so to speak. This argument could have been employed more freely than it was in settling problems of authenticity, at a time when so many works were appearing which claimed to have been written by apostles and their associates. But perhaps most of the churchmen who concerned themselves with this problem lacked the information or the expertise to appeal confidently to the evidence for dating such documents: they preferred to judge them by their theology.

Orthodoxy

In other words, they had recourse to the criterion of orthodoxy. By ‘orthodoxy’ they meant the apostolic faith—the faith set forth in the undoubted apostolic writings and maintained in the churches which had been founded by apostles. This appeal to the testimony of the churches of apostolic foundation was developed specially by Irenaeus. Whatever differences of emphasis may be discerned by modern students within the corpus of New Testament writings, these are irrelevant to the issues which confronted churchmen of the second and third centuries. They had to defend the apostolic teaching, summed up in the rule of faith, against the docetic and gnostic presentations which were so attractive to many in the climate of opinion at that time. When previously unknown Gospels or Acts began to circulate under the authority of apostolic names, the most important question to ask about any one of them was: What does it teach about the person and work of Christ? Does it maintain the apostolic witness to him as the historical Jesus of Nazareth, crucified and raised from the dead, divinely exalted as Lord over all?

A good example of the application of this test is provided by the case of Bishop Serapion and the Gospel of Peter. When Serapion found that this document was being read in the church of Rhossus, he was not greatly disturbed; he certainly did not examine its style and vocabulary (as Dionysius of Alexandria might have done) to see if its claim to be the work of Peter or a product of the apostolic age was well founded or not. But when he discovered that its account of the Lord’s death was tinged with docetism (it implies that he did not really suffer), then he decided that he ought to pay the church of Rhossus a pastoral visit to make sure that it had not been led astray by this heterodox teaching. Other ‘Petrine’ literature circulating among the churches was equally unauthentic, but since it did not inculcate heresy, it caused no great concern. The Muratorian compiler, for example, seems to draw upon the Acts of Peter (which gave an account of the apostle’s Roman ministry and execution) and he expressly includes the Apocalypse of Peter in his list (although he concedes that some refused to let it be read in church).

But in due course the non-apostolic character of these works became sufficiently evident to ensure that they did not find a permanent place in the New Testament canon. It is doubtful if any book would have found a place in the canon if it had been known to be pseudonymous. The Acts of Paul, one of the earliest exercises in Christian novel-writing, dating from shortly after the middle of the second century, was orthodox enough, and indeed quite edifying (especially to those who believed that celibacy was a superior state of life to matrimony). It was not pseudonymous, for its author was known; but it was fictitious, and unworthy of the great apostle for love of whom it was said to have been written; the author was therefore deposed from his office as presbyter in one of the churches of Asia. Anyone who was known to have composed a work explicitly in the name of an apostle would have met with even greater disapproval.

Catholicity

A work which enjoyed only local recognition was not likely to be acknowledged as part of the canon of the catholic church. On the other hand, a work which was acknowledged by the greater part of the catholic church would probably receive universal recognition sooner or later. We have seen how the Roman church ultimately consented to receive Hebrews as canonical so as not to be out of step with the rest of orthodox Christendom. It might have been argued that the letters of Paul were too local and occasional in character to be accepted as universally and permanently authoritative. The issues to which he addressed himself in the letters to the Galatians and the Corinthians, for example, were of temporary urgency in the churches to which those letters were sent. How could their inclusion among the scriptures of the catholic church be justified? The earliest answer given to this question was one which was evidently found satisfactory at the time, although to us it seems curiously far-fetched. It was this: Paul wrote letters to seven churches, and in view of the symbolic significance of the number seven, that means that he wrote for the church universal.

The same conception of seven as the number of perfection was applied to the seven churches addressed in the Apocalypse. Indeed, the compiler of the Muratorian list preposterously regards John as setting the precedent in this regard which Paul followed: in both sets of letters, what was written to seven was spoken to all. Even Paul’s letters to individuals have an ecumenical reference, says the Muratorian compiler: ‘they have been hallowed for the honour of the catholic church in the regulation of ecclesiastical discipline.’ Each individual document that was ultimately acknowledged as canonical started off with local acceptance—the various epistles in the places to which they were sent, the Apocalypse in the seven churches of Asia, even the Gospels and Acts in the constituencies for which they were first designed. But their attainment of canonical status was the result of their gaining more widespread recognition than they initially enjoyed.

Traditional Use

Catholicity has been classically defined in the fifth-century ‘Vincentian canon’ as ‘what has been believed everywhere, always, by all’. What has always been believed (or practiced) is the most potent factor in the maintenance of tradition. Suggested innovations have regularly been resisted with the argument ‘But this is what we have always been taught’ or ‘what we have always done’. It was so in the early Christian centuries with the recognition of certain books as holy scripture, and it is still so (whether this is consciously realized or not). The reading of ‘memoirs of the apostles’ in church along with the Old Testament writings (to which Justin Martyr bears witness) became an established practice which made it easy to accord to those ‘memoirs’ the same formal status as that accorded from the church’s earliest days to the law and the prophets. If any church leader came along in the third or fourth century with a previously unknown book, recommending it as genuinely apostolic, he would have found great difficulty in gaining acceptance for it: his fellow-Christians would simply have said, ‘But no one has ever heard of it!’ (We may think, for example, of the widespread hesitation in accepting 2 Peter. Cf Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 3.3. 1: ‘But the so-called second epistle [of Peter] we have not received as “intestamented”; nevertheless it has appeared useful to many, and has been studied with the other the other scriptures.”).

Or, even if the book had been known for some generations, but had never been treated as holy scripture, it would have been very difficult to win recognition for it as such. When William Whiston, in the eighteenth century, argued that the Apostolic Constitutions should be venerated among the New Testament writings, few if any took him seriously. For one thing, Whiston’s eccentricities were well known; for another thing, better judges than he had discerned its fourth-century date. But, even if Whiston had been a model of judicious sobriety, and even if strong reasons could have been adduced for dating the Apostolic Constitutions in the first century, there would have been no possibility of the work’s being added to the canon: the tradition of all the churches would have been too strong.

Inspiration

For many centuries inspiration and canonicity have been closely bound up together in Christian thinking: books were included in the canon, it is believed, because they were inspired; a book is known to be inspired because it is in the canon. How far was this so in the early church? One distinguished student of the early history of the canon has said that ‘apostolicity was the principal token of canonicicy for the west, inspiration for the east’—not indeed in a mutually exclusive sense, since ‘in the west apostolicity to a certain extent includes inspiration, while in the east apostolicity was an attendant feature of inspiration’. In Origen’s view, for example, ‘the’ crucial point … is not apostolicity but inspiration’. By inspiration in this sense is meant that operation of the Holy Spirit by which the prophets of Israel were enabled to utter the word of God. The vocabulary was theirs; the message was his. Only to certain individuals, and only occasionally to them, was this enablement granted. But in the New Testament age the situation was different.

On one occasion, when Moses was told that two men were prophesying who had not received any public commission to do so, he replied, ‘Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord would put his spirit upon them!’ (Num. 11:29). The New Testament records the answer to Moses’ prayer, telling how, on the first Christian Pentecost, God initiated the fulfilment of his promise to pour out his Spirit ‘on all flesh’ (Joel 2:28, quoted in Acts 2:17). All members of the new community of believers in Jesus received the Spirit: ‘any one who does not have the Spirit of Christ’, says Paul, ‘does not belong to him’ (Rom. 8:9). This did not mean that all of them received the specific gift of prophecy: the gift of prophecy—of declaring the mind of God in the power of the Spirit—was but one of several gifts of the Spirit distributed among members of the church.

Only one of the New Testament writers expressly bases the authority of what he says on prophetic inspiration. The Apocalypse is called ‘the book of this prophecy’ (e.g., Rev. 22:19); the author implies that his words are inspired by the same Spirit of prophecy as spoke through the prophets of earlier days: it is in their succession that he stands (Rev. 22:9). ‘The testimony of Jesus is the Spirit of prophecy’ (Rev. 19:10): the prophets of old bore witness to Jesus in advance, and the same witness is still borne, in the power of the same Spirit, not only by a prophet like John but by all the faithful confessors who overcome the enemy ‘by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony’ (Rev. 12:11). The readers of the seven letters at the outset of the book are expected to hear in them ‘what the Spirit says to the churches’ (Rev. 2:7, etc.). Whether the seer of Patmos was the son of Zebedee or not, his appeal throughout the Apocalypse is not to apostolic authority but to prophetic inspiration.

It was plain that at the beginning of the Christian era the inspiration of the prophetic oracles of the Old Testament was believed to extend to the Old Testament scriptures as a whole. The writer to the Hebrews sees the Holy Spirit as the primary author not only of the warning of Psalm 95:7—11, ‘Today, when you hear his voice…’ (Heb. 3:7—11), but also of the structure and ritual of the Mosaic tabernacle (Heb. 9:8). Timothy is reminded, with regard to the sacred writings which he has known from childhood, that ‘all scripture is inspired by God and profitable’ for a variety of purposes (2 Tim. 3:15—17). When the New Testament writings were later included with the Old Testament as part of ‘all scripture’, it was natural to conclude that they too were ‘inspired by God’. That they were (and are) so inspired is not to be denied, but most of the New Testament writers do not base their authority on divine inspiration. Paul, for example, claims to have ‘the mind of Christ’; his gospel preaching, he says, was attended by ‘demonstration of the Spirit’ (which was the secret of its effectiveness), and his instruction was imparted ‘in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit’ (1 Cor. 2:14—16).

But when he needs to assert his authority—authority ‘for building up and not for tearing down’ (2 Cor. 13:10)—he rests it on the apostolic commission which he had received from the exalted Lord. In his exercise of this authority, he told the Corinthian Christians, they would find the proof which they demanded ‘that Christ is speaking in me’ (2 Cor. 13:3). John the evangelist implies, by his report of the Lord’s promises regarding the Paraclete in the upper-room discourses, that he himself in his witness experiences the Spirit’s guidance ‘into all the truth’ as he brings to the disciples’ remembrance what the Lord had said and makes its meaning plain (Jn 14:26; 16:12—15). Luke, for his part, claims no more than to give a reliable account in his twofold work, based on eyewitness testimony and on his own participation in the course of the events which he narrates (Lk. 1:1—4).

The patristic idea that his Gospel owes something to the apostolic authority of Paul is quite unfounded. As for Mark, the tradition that his record is based (in part at least) on the preaching of Peter may have a foundation in fact, but no appeal is made to Peter’s authority in the course of the record. Neither is any appeal made to divine inspiration. ‘If the writings of Mark and Luke are to be judged canonical’, said N. B. Stonehouse, ‘it must be because these evangelists were controlled by the Spirit of the Lord in such a manner that their writings, and not merely the apostolic message which they set forth, are divine. In other words, it is Mark’s inspiration (which, to be sure, is not to be isolated from his historical qualifications), and not Peter’s inspiration, which provides the finally indispensable ground for the acceptance of that work as canonical.’ On this be it said, again, that the divine inspiration of the Gospels of Mark and Luke is not to be denied,
but these works were accepted, first as authoritative and then as canonical scripture, because they were recognized to be trustworthy witnesses to the saving events. Clement of Rome acknowledges that Paul wrote ‘with true inspiration’.

But he makes similar claims for his own letter. ‘You will give us joy and gladness’, he tells the Corinthians as he draws to a conclusion, ‘if you are obedient to the things which we have written through the Holy Spirit.’ He is far from putting himself on a level with ‘the blessed Paul the apostle’, but he and Paul had received the same Spirit. The high authority which he recognizes in Paul is his apostolic authority. Similarly Ignatius claims to speak and write by the Spirit: he, indeed, had the gift of (occasional) prophecy. ‘It is not according to the flesh that I write to you’, he tells the Roman church, ‘but according to the mind of God.’ But, as bishop of another church, he has no thought of imposing his authority on the Romans, as he might have done on the Christians of Antioch. ‘I do not command you like Peter and Paul’, he says: ‘they were apostles; I am a convict.’ Peter and Paul were also convicts at the end of their time in Rome, it might have been said; but the point is that, even as convicts in the eyes of Roman law, they were apostles in the eyes of the Roman church, and as such entitled to exercise the authority which the Lord had entrusted to them. When the Muratorian list makes Paul follow the precedent of John in writing to seven churches, it may imply further that the precedent of John’s Apocalypse, as a prophetic writing, validated the acceptance of Paul’s letters as also prophetic. This has been argued in a well-known essay by Krister Stendahl.

To those who argued that the apostles and evangelists spoke before they possessed ‘perfect knowledge’ (so that their works required gnostic amplification and interpretation) Irenaeus replied that they wrote after Pentecost: the power of the Holy Spirit with which they were invested then imparted the ‘perfect knowledge’ necessary for the execution of their commission. The evangelists were the antitype of Ezekiel’s four living creatures, animated by the same Spirit. Irenaeus in some degree, and Origen to a much greater extent, show their belief in the divine inspiration of the New Testament (as well as of the Old Testament) by their allegorical treatment of it. According to R. P. C. Hanson, ‘Irenaeus is the first writer to allegorize the New Testament’, and he feels free to do so ‘because he is among the first writers to treat the New Testament unreservedly as inspired Scripture’. Origen allegorizes both Testaments alike as liberally as his fellow-Alexandrian Philo allegorized the Old Testament two centuries earlier. This means that, instead of reading out of the
inspired text what is actually there, he often reads into it what is not there. With Origen, as with Philo, this allegorizing treatment was based on the conviction that the text under consideration was inspired word for word: only such an inspired text had a deeper meaning of a kind that allegorization alone could bring out. But at this stage inspiration is no longer a criterion of canonicity: it is a corollary of canonicity. ‘It was not until the red ribbon of the self-evident had been tied around the twenty-seven books of the New Testament that “inspiration” could serve theologians as an answer to the question: Why are these books different from all other books?’

Other Issues

There were other, more practical, corollaries of canonicity. As we have seen, it was helpful for church officials in times of persecution to distinguish between those books which might, as a last resort, be handed over to the police and those which must be preserved, if need be, at the cost of life itself. Then there was the question of those books which might properly be read in church. Those which were recognizably vested with the authority of the Lord and the apostles were prescribed for public reading; but in some churches at least other works were read which, although they lacked apostolic authority, were orthodox and edifying. Dionysius, bishop of Corinth, wrote to the bishop of Rome about AD 170 to express the thanks of his church for a letter and a gift which had been received from the Roman church. ‘Today’, he says, ‘we observed the Lord’s holy day, and we read out your letter, which we shall keep and read from time to time for our admonition, as we do also with the letter formerly written to us through Clement.’ So, between seventy and eighty years after it was sent, 1 Clement continued to be read at services of the Corinthian church. Neither it nor the more recent letter from Rome carried anything like the authority of the letters which the Corinthian church had received from Paul; but they were helpful for the building up of Christian faith and life.

An issue of high importance for theologians in the church was the distinguishing of those books which might be used for settling doctrinal questions from those which were generally edifying. Only those books which carried apostolic authority (together with the Old Testament writings as interpreted in the New) were to be appealed to either for the establishing of truths to be ‘most surely believed’ in the church or for deciding disputed points in controversies with heretics. In such controversies it was naturally most satisfactory if appeal was made to those writings which both sides acknowledged in common. Tertullian in a legalistic mood might deny the right of heretics to appeal to the holy scriptures, but when he himself engaged in controversy with them, it was on those scriptures that he based his arguments (he could do no other) and he expected his opponents to follow his arguments and admit their force. If the heretics refused to acknowledge the books to which orthodox churchmen appealed, or if they appealed to writings of their own, their error in these respects too had to be exposed; but the unique authority of the canonical writings must be preserved inviolable.

About The Author: Frederick Fyvie Bruce was born in 1910 in Elgin, Scotland, the oldest of seven children. His father was an evangelist in the Open Brethren Church, and the son maintained membership in that church throughout his own life. He describes his growing-up years as times of “plain living and high thinking.” (In Retrospect: Remembrance of Things Past)

He graduated from the University of Aberdeen and Cambridge University with degrees in Classics, and then moved on to the University of Vienna, where he intended to present himself as a Ph.D. candidate. However, in the midst of that process, he was offered a position as an assistant teacher of Greek at Edinburgh University. Wishing both to achieve a foothold on the academic teaching ladder and, even more, to marry his fiancée, Betty Davidson, he accepted the offer. He observes, “Had I been an American, the non-completion of a Ph.D. course might have been a serious handicap in my future academic career. As it was, it made not the slightest difference.” (In Retrospect)

He remained at Edinburgh from 1935-38, moving on to Leeds University as lecturer in Greek from 1928-1947. During those years, his research and teaching began to move away from the classics and toward the Greek New Testament, Hebrew, and biblical studies. Influential in this change of academic focus was [another Brethren scholar] W.E. Vine who, in 1939, asked him to help in reading the proofs of Vine’s Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words. He was appointed to the new chair of biblical studies at Sheffield University (1947-1959) and later to that of biblical criticism and exegesis at Manchester (1959-1978).

F.F. Bruce served as president of both the Society for Old Testament Study and for New Testament Study. He edited The Evangelical Quarterly (1949-1980) and Palestine Exploration Quarterly (1957-1971). He was the general editor of The New International Commentary on the New Testament, contributed volumes on Acts and Hebrews, and co-authored volumes on Ephesians and Colossians. In addition to other commentaries on most of the New Testament, his works include Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free, Israel and the Nations, and The Spreading Flame. He loved books and writing, and describes the latter condition as cacoethes scribendi, loosely translated meaning “scribbler’s itch.” (Three full chapters of In Retrospect are devoted to books—those he owned, those he wished he owned, how much he paid for them, and descriptions of favorite book shops where he bought them.)

Before his death in 1990, Bruce and Betty traveled widely, combining teaching engagements with family visits to their son Iain and his family in Newfoundland, and to Uganda and later Australia to visit their daughter Sheila and her family. Included in these tours were frequent North American stays and an on-going close association with Regent College in Vancouver. His faith in Christ was warm and vital, and of supreme importance to him in his life and ministry, as scholar, husband, and father. The article above was adapted from F.F. Bruce. The Canon of Scripture. Downers Grove, IVP, 1988, Chapter 21.

Dr. Sinclair Ferguson on 20 Resolutions on Speech that Glorifies God from the Book of James

(Scriptures are from the ESV) 

(1)  I resolve to ask God for wisdom to speak out of a single-minded devotion to Him – James 1:5, “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.”

(2)  I resolve to boast only in the exultation I receive in Jesus Christ and also in the humiliation I receive for Jesus Christ – James 1:9-10, “Let the lowly brother boast in his exaltation, and the rich in his humiliation, because like a flower of the grass he will pass away.”

(3)  I resolve to set a watch over my mouth – James 1:13, “Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.”

(4)  I resolve to be constantly quick to hear and slow to speak – James 1:19, “Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.”

(5)  I resolve to learn the gospel way of speaking to both the rich and the poor – James 2:1-4, “My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. For if a man wearing a gold ring and fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, and if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, “You sit here in a good place,” while you say to the poor man, “You stand over there,” or, “Sit down at my feet,” have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?”

(6)  I resolve to speak in the present consciousness of my final judgment – James 2:12, “So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty.”

(7)  I resolve never to stand in anyone’s face with the words I employ – James 2:16, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?

(8)  I resolve never to claim as reality in my life what I do not truly experience – James 3:14, “But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth.”

(9)  I resolve to resist quarrelsome words as evidence of a bad heart that needs to be mortified – James 4:1, “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?”

(10) I resolve never to speak decided evil against another out of a heart of antagonism – James 4:11, “Do not speak evil against one another, brothers. The one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother, speaks evil against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge.”

(11) I resolve never to boast in any thing but what I will accomplish – James 4:13, Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”

(12) I resolve to speak as one subject to the providences of God – James 4:15, “Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”

(13) I resolve never to grumble. The judge is at the door – James 5:9, “Do not grumble against one another, brothers, so that you may not be judged; behold, the Judge is standing at the door.”

(14) I resolve never to allow anything but total integrity in everything I say – James 5:12, But above all, my brothers, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your “yes” be yes and your “no” be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation.

(15)  I resolve to speak to God in prayer whenever I suffer – James 5:13a, “Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray.”

(16) I resolve to sing praises to God whenever I’m cheerful – James 5:14b, “Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise.”

(17) I resolve to ask for the prayers of others when I’m in need – James 5:14, “Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.”

(18) I resolve to confess whenever I’ve failed – James 5:15-16, “And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.”

(19) I resolve to pray with others for one another whenever I am together with them – James 5:15-16, “And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.”

(20)  I resolve to speak words of restoration when I see another wander – James 5:19-20, “My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.”

About the Author: Sinclair Ferguson (born 1948) is a Scottish theologian who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Aberdeen. He is known in Reformed Christian circles for his theologically rich and practical teaching, writing, and editorial work. He is currently a professor at Redeemer Seminary in Dallas, and the Senior Minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Columbia, South Carolina. He has written numerous books including: In Christ Alone; John Owen: The Man and His Theology; The Christian Life; Heart for God; Discovering God’s Will; Grow in Grace; The Holy Spirit; and The Big Book of Questions and Answers about Jesus.

Michael Goheen on How To Read The Bible As One Story

The Biblical Drama of Redemption

 Starting with the Gospel

In this paper I would like to address the issue of reading the Bible as one story. It would be tempting to begin with the idea of story and then argue that the Bible conforms to this idea. I think one could proceed this way, although it would run the risk of starting with a category alien to Scripture and then fitting the gospel to that category. Perhaps it would be better to begin where all our thinking should start, i.e. with the gospel.

Jesus announced good news: ‘The kingdom of God is breaking into history.’ This is not the kind of announcement that could be relegated to the religion page of a newspaper. This is world news—front page stuff! This is headline news on CNN. It was an announcement that God’s healing power was invading history in Jesus and by the Spirit to restore the whole creation to again live under the gracious rule of God.

His proclamation of good news stood as the climactic moment of a story of God’s redemptive work told in the Old Testament that stretched back to God’s promise to Adam and Eve. Jesus announced that the power of God to renew the entire creation was now present in Jesus by the Spirit. This liberating power was demonstrated in Jesus’ life and deeds, and explained by his words. At the cross he battled the power of evil and gained the decisive victory. In his resurrection he entered as the firstborn into the resurrection life of the new creation. Before his ascension he commissioned his followers to continue his mission of making the gospel known until he returned. He now reigns in power at the right hand of God over all creation and by His Spirit is making known his restoring and comprehensive rule through His people as they embody and proclaim the good news. One day every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Creator, Redeemer, and Lord. But until then the church has been taken up into the Spirit’s work of making the good news of the kingdom known.

From this brief summary of the gospel, the following observations are important for our subject.

First, the gospel is a redirecting power. It is not first of all doctrine or theology, nor is it worldview, but the renewing power of God unto salvation. The gospel is the instrument of God’s Spirit to restore all of creation.

Second, the gospel is restorative, that is, Jesus announces the restoration of the creation from sin. The most basic categories present in the gospel are creation, fall, and redemption. Jesus’ announcement declares a resounding ‘yes’ to his good creation and at the same time a definitive ‘no’ to the sin that has defiled it. The gospel is about the restoration and renewal of the creation from sin. In the history of the Western church redemption has often been misunderstood to be salvation from the creation rather than salvation of the creation. In the proclamation of the gospel Jesus announces that he is liberating the good creation from the power of sin.

Third, the gospel is comprehensive in its scope. The gospel Jesus announced was a gospel of the kingdom. Surprisingly even though this was the central category of Jesus’ proclamation and ministry it has often disappeared into obscurity. The result has been a greatly reduced scope of salvation, limited to humanity, even human souls. Scripturally, the kingdom is about God’s reign over his entire creation; the kingdom stresses the all- encompassing nature of the salvation Jesus embodied, announced, and accomplished. The gospel which forms the lens through which we look at the world is the power of God through which the exalted Christ, on the basis of his death and resurrection, restores all of life by His Spirit to again live under His authority and Word.

The fourth observation is central to our topic: Jesus and the good news that he announces is the fulfillment of a long story that unfolds in the Old Testament. Jesus’ arrival into history is into a Jewish community who was looking for the ending and climax of a long story of God’s redemptive acts. All Jews knew that this story was leading up to the grand culmination when God would act decisively and finally to redeem the world. They disagreed on who would do it, how it would be done, when it would happen, and how they were to live until it did. But they all recognized that the story of God’s redemptive acts was moving toward a consummation. Jesus announces that he is the goal of this redemptive story. So, on the one hand, if we are to understand the gospel of Jesus we must see Jesus in the context of the Old Testament story (cf. Luke 24:25-27). On the other hand, if we are to properly understand the Biblical story, we must see it through the lens of Jesus and the gospel (cf. John 5:36-57; Luke 24:44-45). But not only is Jesus the climactic moment in the story, he points forward to the end. The end has not yet come (Acts 1:6-7). Thus attending to Jesus points us back to a story told in the Old Testament, and forward to the end of the story.

There is a final observation: the church is essential to the gospel. That is, Jesus did not make provision for the communication of the good news through history and in every culture until the end of the story by writing a book as did Mohammed. Rather he formed a community to be the bearer of this good news. Their identity is bound up in their being sent by Jesus to make known the good news of the kingdom. The story of the Bible is their life.

 Human Life is Shaped by Some Story

All of human life is shaped by some story. Consider the following event: A fox compliments a crow and tells it that it has a lovely voice. He asks it to sing a song. What is the meaning of this event? It is not too difficult to see that the meaning of this event can only be understood in terms of some story. Perhaps the fox wants to eat the crow and this compliment is a ploy to get the crow to drop its guard. Perhaps the fox is a kind- hearted fox that simply wants to encourage the poor crow. Perhaps the fox is a tone-deaf choir director seeking to begin a choir among the forest animals. Clearly these three stories would give the event different meanings. In fact, this event is part of an Aesop’s fable. There is a famine in the forest and the crow sits perched in a tree with a piece of cheese in its mouth. The various animals try to get the cheese with different methods. The fox compliments the crow and the foolish bird opens its mouth to sing. The cheese falls out and the fox runs away with it. The moral of the story is don’t be deceived by flattery.

This little exercise illustrates that an event can only be understood in the context of a narrative framework. So it is with our lives. Lesslie Newbigin puts it this way: “The way we understand human life depends on what conception we have of the human story. What is the real story of which my life story is a part?” (Leslie Newbigin. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 15). What Newbigin is referring to here is not a linguistically constructed narrative world that we choose to live in. Rather it is to speak of story as the essential shape of a worldview, as an interpretation of cosmic history that gives meaning to human life. Story provides the deepest structural framework in which human life is to be understood. There is no more fundamental way in which human beings interpret their lives than through a story. N. T. Wright says that “a story . . . is . . . the best way of talking about the way the world actually is” (N.T. Wright. The New Testament and the People of God. London: SPCK, 40. Italics added). It is because the world has been created by God in a temporal way that story can help us understand the way the world is. Brian Walsh says that ‘because the world is temporal, in process, a worldview always entails a story, a myth which provides its adherents with an understanding of their own role in the global history of good and evil. Such a story tells us who we are in history and why we are here’ (Walsh, Worldviews, Modernity, and the Task of Christian College Education, in Faculty Dialogue 18, Fall 1992, 6).

If one lives in a culture shaped by the Western story there are two stories that are on offer: the Biblical and the humanist. Newbigin points out that

In our contemporary culture . . . two quite different stories are told. One is the story of evolution, of the development of species through the survival of the strong, and the story of the rise of civilization, our type of civilization, and its success in giving humankind mastery of nature. The other story is the one embodied in the Bible, the story of creation and fall, of God’s election of a people to be the bearers of his purpose for humankind, and of the coming of the one in whom that purpose is to be fulfilled. These are two different and incompatible stories (Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 15-16).

There are a number of things that can be said about both of these stories.

(1) Both of these stories claim to tell the true story of the world. They are in the language of postmodernism ‘metanarratives’ or in the language of Hegel, claims to be ‘universal history.’

(2) Consequently both of these stories are comprehensive. That is, they claim the whole of our lives—social, cultural, political, and individual.

(3) Both of these stories are embodied by a community. They are not simply the fruit of individual experience and insight but stories that shape whole communities. The Western cultural community is shaped by the humanist story. The church is the new humankind that is shaped by the Biblical story.

(4) Both of these stories are religious; they are rooted in faith commitments or ultimate assumptions. Contrary to the claim that the humanist story is ‘neutral’ or ‘secular’ while the Biblical story is ‘religious’, both stories are rooted in ultimate commitments or beliefs.

(5) As both stories claim to tell the true story of the world, they issue an invitation to all hearers to come live in the story, and pursue its goals.

The humanist and Biblical stories are to some degree incompatible; they tell two different stories. It will be evident that if the church is faithful to its story there will be to some degree a clash of stories.

The Bible Tells One Story

The Bible tells one unfolding story of redemption against the backdrop of creation and humanity’s fall into sin. As N.T. Wright has put it, the divine drama told in Scripture ‘offers a story which is the story of the whole world. It is public truth’ (Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 41-42).

When we speak of the biblical story as a narrative we are making an ontological claim. It is a claim that this is the way God created the world; the story of the Bible tells us the way the world really is. There is no more fundamental way to speak about the nature of God’s world than to speak of it in terms of a story. Nor is the biblical story to be understood simply as a local tale about a certain ethnic group or religion. It makes a comprehensive claim about the world: it is public truth. The biblical story encompasses all of reality—north, south, east, west, past, present, and future. It begins with the creation of all things and ends with the renewal of all things. In between it offers an interpretation of the meaning of cosmic history. It, therefore, makes a comprehensive claim; our stories, our reality must find a place in this story. As Loughlin has put it: The Biblical story is ‘omnivorous: it seeks to overcome our reality’ (Loughlin, G., Telling God’s Story: Bible, Church, and Narrative Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 37).

Hans Frei makes the same point when he quotes Auerbach’s striking contrast between Homer’s Odyssey and the Old Testament story. Speaking of the Biblical story he says: ‘Far from seeking, like Homer, merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours, it seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history . . . Everything else that happens in the world can only be conceived as an element in this sequence; into it everything that is known about the world . . . must be fitted as an ingredient of the divine plan’ (Frei, Hans. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974, 3).

This insight has been gaining ground in various areas of philosophy and theology. In philosophical ethics Alasdaire MacIntyre states that I can only answer the question “What am I to do?” if I can answer the prior question “Of what story do I find myself a part?” (MacIntyre, Alasdaire. After Virtue. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1981, 216) In practical theology, for example, C. V. Gerkin says ‘This sense in which practical theological thinking is grounded in narrative is, of course, rooted in the faith that the Bible provides us with an overarching narrative in which all other narratives of the world are nested. The Bible is the story of God. The story of the world is first and foremost the story of God’s activity in creating, sustaining, and redeeming the world to fulfill God’s purposes for it’ (Gerkin, C.V. 1986. Widening the Horizons: Pastoral Responses to a Fragmented Society, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 49). In theological ethics Stanley Hauerwas contends that ‘the narrative character of Christian convictions is neither incidental nor accidental to Christian belief. There is no more fundamental way to talk of God than in a story. The fact that we come to know God through the recounting of the story of Israel and the life of Jesus is decisive for our truthful understanding of the kind of God we worship as well as the world in which we exist’ (Hauerwas, Stanley. 1983. The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983, 25).

Sidney Greidanus believes it is important for preaching to hold that ‘Scripture teaches one universal kingdom history that encompasses all of created reality: past, present, and future. . . . its vision of history extends backward all the way to the beginning of time and forward all the way to the last day. . . . the biblical vision of history spans time from the first creation to the new creation, encompassing all of created reality’ (Sidney Greidanus.1988. The Modern Preacher and the Ancient Text. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 95). Newbigin states further the importance of story for preaching: ‘Preaching is the announcing of news, the telling of a narrative. In a society that has a different story to tell about itself, preaching has to be firmly and unapologetically rooted in the real story’ (In another place, Newbigin – A Word In Season, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994, 204-205 – speaks of his personal Bible reading, but his words could as easily be applied to his understanding of preaching: ‘I more and more find the precious part of each day to be the thirty or forty minutes I spend each morning before breakfast with the Bible. All the rest of the day I am bombarded with the stories that the world is telling about itself. I am more and more skeptical about these stories. As I take time to immerse myself in the story that the Bible tells, my vision is cleared and I see things in another way. I see the day that lies ahead in its place in God’s story.’).

And finally, in Biblical studies N. T. Wright wants to proceed with a method that joins ‘together the three enterprises of literary, historical and theological study of the New Testament and to do so in particular by the use of the category of “story”’ (Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 139).

And yet it is the case that often Christians do not see the Bible as one story. A Hindu scholar of the world’s religions once said to Lesslie Newbigin:

I can’t understand why you missionaries present the Bible to us in India as a book of religion. It is not a book of religion–and anyway we have plenty of books of religion in India. We don’t need any more! I find in your Bible a unique interpretation of universal history, the history of the whole of creation and the history of the human race. And therefore a unique interpretation of the human person as a responsible actor in history. That is unique. There is nothing else in the whole religious literature of the world to put alongside it (Newbigin, 1999, A Walk Through the Bible, Louisville, KY: John Knox Westminster Press, 4. See also Lesslie Newbigin, 1989, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 89).

We have fragmented the Bible into bits—moral bits, systematic-theological bits, devotional bits, historical-critical bits, narrative bits, and homiletical bits. When the Bible is broken up in this way there is no comprehensive grand narrative to withstand the power of the comprehensive humanist narrative that shapes our culture. The Bible bits are accommodated to the more comprehensive cultural story, and it becomes that story—i.e. the cultural story—that shapes our lives.

 The Bible as a Six Act Play

In The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Story of the Bible we have attempted to tell the story of the Bible in six acts [Craig G. Bartholomew and Michael W. Goheen, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Story of the Bible, Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004. We are dependant on N. T. Wright for the metaphor of a drama. He explicates the Biblical story in five acts (‘How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?’, Vox Evangelica 21 (1991) 7-32; and The New Testament and the People of God. London: SPCK, 1992, 139- 143). Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton add a sixth act (Truth is Stranger Than It Used To Be: Biblical Faith in a Postmodern Age. Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 1995, 182). We follow Walsh and Middleton, and use the latter structure. See our website http://www.biblicaltheology.ca for resources on using the book including a seven page summary of the Biblical story].

In Act One God calls into being a marvellous creation. He creates human beings in his image to live in fellowship with him and to explore and care for the riches of his creation.

In Act Two humanity refuses to live under the Creator’s word, and chooses to seek life apart from Him. It results in disaster; the whole creation is brought into the train of human rebellion.

In Act Three God chooses a people, Israel, to embody his creational and redemptive purposes for the world. Israel is formed into a people and placed on the land to shine as a light. They fail in their calling. Yet God promises through the prophets that Israel’s failure will not derail His plan.

In Act Four God sends Jesus. Jesus carries out Israel’s calling is a faithful light to the world. But he does more: He defeats the power of sin at the cross, rises from the dead inaugurating the new creation, and pours out His Spirit that his people might taste of this coming salvation. Before he takes His position of authority over the creation he gathers his disciples together and tells them: ‘As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.’

Act Five tells us the story of the church’s mission from Jerusalem to Rome in the first hundred or so years. But the story ends on an incomplete note. The story is to continue; the church’s mission is to continue in all places until Jesus returns. We are invited into this story to witness to the comprehensive rule of God in Jesus coming at the goal of history.

Act Six is a yet future act. Jesus will return and complete his restoration work.

We might ask how this story might be authoritative for our lives. N. T. Wright believes that the authority of the biblical story is tied up with its overarching narrative form. He offers a rich metaphor to explicate this authority (Wright, ‘How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?’ and The New Testament and the People of God, 139- 143).

Imagine that a Shakespearian play is discovered for the first time but most of the fifth act is missing. The decision to stage the play is made. The first four acts and the remnant of the fifth act are given to well-trained and experienced Shakespearian actors who immerse themselves both in the first part of the play and in the culture and time of Shakespeare. They are told to work out the concluding fifth act for themselves.

This conclusion must be both consistent and innovative. It must be consistent with the first part of the play. The actors must immerse themselves in full sympathy in the unfinished drama. The first four acts would contain its own cumulative forward movement that would demand that the play be concluded in a way consistent and fitting with that impetus. Yet an appropriate conclusion would not mean a simple repetition or imitation of the earlier acts. The actors would carry forward the logic of the play in a creative improvisation. Such an improvisation would be an authentic conclusion if it were coherent with the earlier acts.

This metaphor provides a specific analogy for how the biblical story might function authoritatively to shape the life of the believing community. Wright sees the biblical story as consisting of four acts – creation, fall, Israel, Jesus – plus the first scene of the fifth act that narrates the beginning of the church’s mission. Furthermore this fifth act offers hints at how the play is to end. Thus the church’s life is lived out consistent with the forward impetus of the first acts and moving toward and anticipating the intended conclusion. The first scene of act five, the church’s story, begins to draw out and implement the significance of the first four acts, especially act four. The church continues today to do the same in fresh and creative ways in new cultural situations. This requires a patient examination and thorough immersion in what act four is all about, how act four is to be understood in light of acts one through three, and how the first scene of act five faithfully carries forward act four.

This view of the authority of the Biblical story assumes a clear understanding of our place in the story. It is important not only to understand that the Bible is one cosmic story of the world but also where we are at in the story. The Old Testament looked to a time when the kingdom of God would be ushered in in fullness. This was the goal of God’s redemptive work. When Jesus emerged he announced the arrival of the kingdom yet it did not come as expected. Examining the gospels and listening to Jesus we hear that the kingdom of God is already here but not yet arrived. What can this mean? If my wife tells me that our guests from out of town are already here but not yet arrived I would wonder what on earth she is saying. How can the kingdom be already here but not yet arrived? And what is the significance of the ‘already-not yet’ time period of the coming kingdom?

First we have been given a foretaste of the kingdom. The gospels often compare the kingdom to a feast, a banquet. When the end comes we will enjoy the full banquet of the kingdom. However, the church has been given a foretaste of that kingdom banquet. A foretaste of the kingdom constitutes us as witnesses. The reason we have been offered a foretaste of the salvation of the end is so that we can witness to that salvation. Let me offer another illustration. The people of God are like a movie preview or trailer. A movie trailer gives actual footage of the movie that is coming in the future so that people will want to watch it. The people of God are a kingdom preview. We embody the salvation of the kingdom which is coming in the future so that people will see it and want it. That is what the witness is all about. We are a sign that points to the coming of the fullness of the kingdom in the future. We witness to its presence and its future consummation. A biblical witness is a witness to the kingdom, to God’s rule over all of human life.

The worldview significance of our place in the story can be illustrated by N. T. Wright’s reflection on worldview. In their popular book on worldview, Richard Middleton and Brian Walsh argue that the Bible provides a worldview by answering foundational questions that shape our lives. Those questions are: Who are we? Where are we? What’s wrong? What’s the remedy? (Walsh and Middleton, The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian World View, Downers Grove: IVP, 1984, 35). Wright follows Walsh and Middleton in his masterly discussion of the importance of worldview for New Testament studies (Wright, N. T., The New Testament and the People of God, 29-144). Four years later in his second volume he writes that there is a fifth question that needs to be added to the other four, a question that is fundamental for human life. That question is ‘what time is it?’ He says: ‘Since writing The New Testament and the People of God I have realized that ‘what time is it?’ needs adding to the four questions I started with (though at what point in the order could be discussed further). Without it, the structure collapses into timelessness which characterizes some non-Judaeo-Christian worldviews.

Heading Off Misunderstandings

Saying that the Bible is one unfolding story could lead to misunderstandings. So it would be good to say a few words to head off some of those misconceptions. First by saying that the Bible is one unfolding story I am not saying that the Bible is a nice neat novel. It is not a single volume but a ‘sprawling, capacious narrative’ (Peterson, Eugene. ‘Living into God’s Story.’ This article originally appeared on the website ‘The Ooze: Conversation for a Journey’ (www.theooze.com). It can be accessed at http://www,churchcrossing.com/articles.cfm?fuseaction=articledetail&122).

In his discussion on the Bible as a metanarrative Richard Bauckham states that the ‘Bible does not have a carefully plotted single story-line, like, for example a conventional novel. It is a sprawling collection of narratives along with much non-narrative material that stands in a variety of relationships to the narratives’ (Bauckham, Richard. Bible and Mission: Christian Witness in a Postmodern World. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003, 92).

He continues that major stretches of the main story are told more than once in divergent ways; there are a plurality of angles on the same subject matter (for example, the gospels). He points further to many ways in which there is a ‘profusion and sheer untidiness of the narrative materials’ (Ibid). He concludes that all this ‘makes any sort of finality in summarizing the biblical story inconceivable’ (Ibid, 93).

Secondly, the Bible is not only a narrative document. There are many other genres of literature in the Bible as well. Newbigin states that while the ‘Bible is essentially narrative in form’ that ‘it contains, indeed, much else: prayer, poetry, legislation, ethical teaching and so on.’ Yet, he maintains, ‘essentially it is a story’ (Lesslie Newbigin. The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995, 81).

James Barr differs radically with Newbigin (and me, i.e., Michael Goheen) on what exactly story means. Yet he too sees the overall shape of Scripture as a narrative within which other genres of Scripture fit. Here is how he puts it:

. . . in my conception all of the Bible counts as ‘story.’ A people’s story is not necessarily purely narrative: materials of many kinds may be slotted into a narrative structure, and this is done in the Hebrew Bible. Thus legal materials are inserted and appear, almost entirely, as part of the Moses story. In this case they are incorporated into the narrative. Others are more loosely attached: songs and hymns of the temple and of individuals, mostly collected in the Book of Psalms but some slotted into the narratives as in Samuel, Kings and Chronicles. . . . Wisdom books: whether . . . they came from Solomon, or because they were general lore of Israel, they are part of the story also.

In the New Testament the letters of great leaders, and an apocalyptic book like Revelation, form part of the story, along with the more strictly narrative writings. Thus in general, although not all parts of the Bible are narrative, the narrative character of the story elements provides a better framework into which the non-narrative parts may be fitted than any framework based on the non-narrative parts into which the story elements could be fitted (James Barr. The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999, 356).

A third misunderstanding is tied up with the notion of story. In some approaches to narrative theology—in fact, in Barr’s understanding above—the notion of story enables the reader to ignore questions of historicity. Story may be only a linguistically constructed narrative by a religious community, and no more than that. Yet I use story to speak of an interpretation of history. It is important that these events really happened. The Bible requires ‘a reality that corresponds to it’ (Gabriel Fackre. Narrative Theology from an Evangelical Perspective, in Yandell, K.E., ed., Faith and Narrative, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 197). The historicity of the narrative matters: ‘. . .it is of the very essence of the matter that the events and places which you read in your Bible are part of the real world and the real history–the same world in which you live . . .’ (Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 68).

 The Importance of Understanding the Bible as One Story

The importance of understanding the Bible as one story can be seen by noting Newbigin’s notion of a missionary encounter. A missionary encounter is the normal position the church assumes in its culture if it is faithful. It assumes two comprehensive yet incompatible stories. The Bible tells one story about the world and human life while another equally all-embracive story shapes out culture. Christian discipleship always takes cultural shape. So in the life of the Christian community there will be an encounter between two equally comprehensive stories. When the church really believes that its story is true and shapes their whole lives by it, the foundational idolatrous faith, assumed in the cultural story, will be challenged. As the church challenges that story it offers a credible alternative; it calls for conversion. It is an invitation to see and live in the world in the light of another story. Our place in the story is to embody the end and invite others into that true story.

If the church is to be faithful to its missionary calling, it must recover the Bible as one true story according to Newbigin: ‘I do not believe that we can speak effectively of the Gospel as a word addressed to our culture unless we recover a sense of the Scriptures as a canonical whole, as the story which provides the true context for our understanding of the meaning of our lives – both personal and public’ (Lesslie Newbigin. ‘Response to “Word of God?”’, John Coventry SJ, The Gospel and our Culture Newsletter 8, 1991, 2).

If the story of the Bible is fragmented into bits it can easily be absorbed into the reigning story of culture rather than challenging it. Newbigin’s recognition of this, and thus his passion for the importance of seeing the Bible as one story, comes from his missionary experience. In India he saw how easy it was for the Bible to be absorbed into a more comprehensive and alien worldview. The Bible as one comprehensive story in contrast to the comprehensive worldview of Hinduism was a matter of life and death in India. In the West it is equally serious. A fragmented Bible, then, can lead to a church that is unfaithful, syncretistically accommodated to the idolatry of its cultural story. Or to use the words of the Apostle Paul, a church without a comprehensive story to withstand the power of the cultural story will be ‘conformed to the world’ (Romans 12:1-2).

This article is essentially the substance of two keynote addresses given at the ‘Inhabiting the Biblical Story’ conference at the Victorian University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand, 16 July 2005.

About the Author: Dr. Michael W. Goheen teaches at Trinity Western University, Langley, B.C., Canada. He is the author of The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story; Living at the Crossroads: An Introduction to Christian Worldview; and A Light to the Nations: The Missional Church and the Biblical Story.