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On June 25, 2022 By In Culture, Pro-Life

God’s Mercy and the Spirit of the Age

Guest Post by Samuel Parkison

As I write this, it is mid-morning in the Middle East. I am looking over a balcony at the ocean, with the Arabian Gulf just a two-minute walk across the street, getting used to the sights and smells and tastes (and heat) of my family’s new home. Some of you know that for the better part of the past year, we have been working to move here for a career transition of sorts. I have come here to be a professor of theology at the first ever evangelical seminary in the Arabian Peninsula. There will be other occasions for me to share more about this particular venture; I’m simply pointing out that this is my new home. I am, geographically speaking, about the furthest away from the United States as I can be. And yet, never have I felt more of a bond with my “kinsmen according to the flesh” (cf., Rom 9:1-2), my fellow Americans, than last night while walking around a giant mall in the UAE when I received a notification on my phone that the Supreme Court ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Gratitude for God’s Mercy

The news stopped me dead in my tracks. My knees got weak, I felt woozy and had to sit down to concentrate just to keep the tears from coming out. So much gratitude. I never thought I would see this day. Of course, I have prayed for it. Hoped for it. Spoken and written about the need for it. But even when the now infamous draft-leak of Justice Alito’s opinion filled me with great hope, I confess it was difficult to keep my cynicism at bay. I have learned to brace myself for disappointment. But last night was real. So, while I am settling into my new home in the Middle East, I continue to rejoice with my countrymen.

No matter how you cut it, yesterday was a win for justice, which means it was a win for America, a people who have been incurring a mind-boggling amount of blood-guilt since 1973. We have been polluting the land with our wickedness and have been begging for the wrath of God Almighty. Think I’m exaggerating? Listen to how Psalm 106 describes child-sacrifice:

[Israel] served [pagan nations’] idols,

            which became a snare to them.

They sacrificed their sons

            and their daughters to the demons;

they poured out innocent blood,

            the blood of their sons and daughters,

whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan,

            and the land was polluted with blood.

Thus they became unclean by their acts,

            and played the whore in their deeds. (Psalm 106:36-39)

The blood of innocent children idolatrously sacrificed in demon-worship (which, I would remind you, does not require the conscious awareness of its worshipers for it to qualify as demon-worship, per 1 Cor. 10:20), pollutes the land. My beloved nation has been doing this very thing on a nation-wide scale since 1973, with the body count of some 67 million deaths. The blood of our innocent has been crying out from the earth, calling for the just wrath of God which makes yesterday so great a mercy I can hardly bear it. What do we deserve? We deserve for God’s holiness to be vindicated by a swift and decisive judgment. We deserve to be destroyed like Sodom and Gomorrah. We deserve to be decimated like Egypt was when God delivered Israel from captivity. We deserve for our walls to crumble like Jericho. And yet, what did we receive yesterday? Mercy. An invitation to repent.

Reactions from the Opposition

Now, as a reminder, we should keep in mind how modest of a ruling came down yesterday. This is important because I have seen a lot of curious reactions. There are two general reactions I want to call attention to here.

Reaction One: “You Aren’t Really Pro-Life Because You Don’t Care for the Vulnerable”

This reaction is represented in the memes and tweets that effectively deride pro-lifers like myself for not really caring about the babies, because if we did we would put our money where our mouths are, stop being so fiscally conservative, and get on board with big government policies that support women in need with medical care, adoption, foster care, etc. My favorite taunt along these lines is, “If you really care about the babies, would you support mandatory child-support for the fathers in every situation? Huh?” To which I reply with a hearty, “Yes! Absolutely! I am pro-expecting fathers to take responsibility for their offspring!”

To the challenge for pro-lifers to support the care of those in our society who are in desperate need of help, I simply agree. The question is, what is the best method for taking care of those in need in our society? My skepticism that big-government policies are the solution for taking care of the needy and vulnerable in our society does not come from my penny-pinching conservativism, it comes from the conviction that the government is intrinsically incompetent to do that work. I say “intrinsically” to emphasize that this is not a deficiency on the government’s part. That’s not what the government is supposed to do, and so it should not be surprising that it’s bad at it.

But even if you disagree with that position, we should point out that it is not as if pro-lifers have been neglecting care for the needy and vulnerable in our society. We have been accepting the challenge to care “holistically” with our dollars and time for decades. On every meaningful metric, it is the religious and pro-life demographics that are the most generous with their time and resources to non-profit organizations that do the work of caring for the orphan and widow without compulsion from their neighbors or government. This is the demographic overwhelmingly represented in foster care and adoption. This is the demographic that starts and funds and operates crisis pregnancy centers whose agenda are not simply to “end abortion,” but rather to care for families in general and needy and vulnerable mothers in particular. However, even if that were not the case, this reaction is a poor argument in favor of abortion. In my recent book, Thinking Christianly: Bringing Sundry Thoughts Captive to Christ, I interact briefly with this line of thinking. Here’s an excerpt from that section:

Let it be known that there is no necessary social prerequisite for getting to speak out against abortion. We should decisively put to death that foolish notion that says before objecting to murdering babies under the banner of “pro-life,” one must satisfactorily establish “pro-life” status by being on the forefront of orphan care, adoption, refugee ministries, homeless ministries, etc. These things are clearly consistent with being “pro-life,” but the increasingly common dichotomy of “pro-life” vs. “pro-birth” should be laughed out of the room. How, pray tell, is it possible to be “pro-life” without first being “pro-birth?”

This is a smokescreen, and to put the matter plainly, Christians who play along are suckers. The goal-post will always change for what constitutes as caring for enough issues to get to care about abortion. Hating “baby-hacking” requires no credentials, especially if those credentials are handed out by those who have no objection to “baby-hacking.” Frankly, I’m quite sure I do not want the approval of such individuals anyway. They can keep it.[1]

Reaction Two: “The Government Has No Right to Control the Bodies of Women“

This reaction seems to assume that what happened on June 24 is the making of a law to illegalize all abortion. But the Supreme Court did not outlaw abortion. All they did was deny that it was a “constitutional right,” which means that if a state chooses to enact legislation that prohibits abortion, that state is not being unconstitutional in doing so. States are not infringing on constitutionally recognized rights by enacting pro-life legislation.

Now, I actually do think abortion should be nationally prohibited, and not only for moral and theological reasons. There is a strong legal argument for the abolition of all abortion on the grounds of, at least, the 14th amendment (this has bearing on the “my body, my choice” argument. Abortion is not merely about a pregnant woman’s body, but also the body of her infant). But the point is that yesterday’s ruling did not force any state to stop performing abortions.

So, think about the mindset that lies behind, for example, protestors in California marching the streets with signs demanding the right to abortion. What exactly are they mad about? What are they protesting? They are mad about the fact that not every state must make abortion legal. That the citizens of a state like Oklahoma maintains the right to elect the representatives they want to reflect their values, which includes a high value for the unborn, is intolerable for these protestors. They do not want Oklahomans to have the ability to establish representatives who will establish and elect those laws. Protestors in California have lost literally nothing by way of “ability.” Their state has enshrined abortion with legislation in anticipation of the reversal of Roe v. Wade. But they are so passionate about mothers having the “right” to kill their pre-born babies that they are protesting other states having the ability to prohibit pre-born-baby-killing. Their own state protecting their ability to kill their babies isn’t enough: they demand that every state everywhere be obligated to do the same. Such a response, frankly, is madness.

Behind the Veil: What’s Really Going On

As a Christian theologian, I have to also point out that this is not only irrational, it is demonic. I’m not calling people on the other side of this issue demons, mind you. No, they are not demons or sub-humans, they are image-bearers of God himself, having more dignity and worth, and value than they themselves could possibly imagine. I am saying, rather, that the spirit that possesses a group to take to the streets in angry opposition to the verdict, “baby-killing is not a constitutional right,” is not a spirit of love and goodness and justice, but rather a spirit that arises from the domain of darkness (cf., Col 1:13). I am quite certain that most of the individuals vehemently opposed to yesterday’s ruling “do not know what spirit they are of,” but that does not make their clamor for abortion any less demonic. The crowd that boils over with rage over the prospect of mothers losing the ability to kill their children is possessed by a dark mindset indeed. What we see (and will continue to see in the coming days) with violent threats and attacks on churches and crisis pregnancy centers is the removing of the veil. The veneer of love and gentleness and justice is being peeled back and the darkness of the culture of death is showing its true colors. It is losing all motivation to be seen as loving and is perfectly content with showing its rage.

Still, I can’t help but suspect that many of the most passionate men and women clamoring for more death are driven by shame and guilt. They shout for abortion as an effort to shout down their own consciences. They have the blood of abortion on their own hands, they know it deep down, and they wish to silence that part of them that accuses. So they stop their ears and cry out that the evil they participated in is “good,” and the good that would have protected their children from execution is “evil.” Rather than applying the balm of grace to their sinful self-inflicted wound, they ignore the wound and try to convince themselves that there is no sin to repent of. They may be throwing rocks at the windows of crisis pregnancy centers, but they are aiming at that part of their souls that knows what evil they have committed. To those, I would simply say, “Give up trying to silence your conscience. It won’t work. You know what you have done. So go ahead and let your conscience speak. Let it call the sin, sin. Then, and only then, will you be in a position to hear a better word, spoken by the blood of Christ. He does not silence the accusation by pretending like it’s not there, he silences the accusation by answering it with his own blood. He does not invite you to ignore your sin. He invites you to let him deal with it in a decisive way. You are not beyond redemption and forgiveness and healing. But it is only those who know themselves to be sick who will seek out a Doctor. So, seek him out; he is not far.”

Concluding Prayers

What now? Well for starters, we should unflinchingly celebrate this surprising mercy that God has shown us. We should praise God that at least some states in this country will slow down on racking up the unfathomable debt of blood-guilt they have been incurring since 1973. We should praise God for the lives that this will save. We should thank God for the gift of sacrificial saints who have worked tirelessly for decades to see this ground made (while many of us cynically doubted that their efforts would succeed). We should thank them for their faithful endurance, and say, “You were right; God bless you and your longsuffering work!” We should thank God for the common grace of a justice system that does some good (even if it is imperfect).

And we should pray for revival. We should pray that our culture of death would disintegrate and that righteousness be established. We should pray that the hearts of those possessed by the spirit of rage and bloodthirstiness would be turned. We should pray that such individuals would have ears to hear their cries for death afresh, and that they would be shocked by the revelation of what their own voice sounds like; shocked into repentance. We should pray that they receive the cleansing blood of Christ for the forgiveness of their sins (both the sin of abortion and the sin of celebrating abortion). We should pray that God would hallow his name, and make his Kingdom come and his will be done here on earth as it is in heaven.

He could do it, you know.

Don’t forget that Nineveh was converted with a five-word sermon. I can’t think of a better invitation to pray for big things like this than the (previously) unthinkable reversal of Roe v. Wade.

[1] Samuel G. Parkison, Thinking Christianly: Bringing Sundry Thoughts Captive to Christ (H&E Publishing, 2022), 105.

*The image for this post is a depiction of Pharaoh demanding the death of Hebrew babies in Exodus 1. It seemed fitting.

Samuel Parkison received his Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from @MBTS). He is the Associate Professor of Theology (Gulf Theological Seminary in the UAE). You can find him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/samuel_parkison

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On June 2, 2022 By In Culture, Theology, Worship

Holy Priest, Holy Warrior: Reflections on Psalm 110

Reading through Psalm 110, one cannot but help notice that by the end of the psalm, the dead bodies are piling up. In verse 1, Christ’s enemies are made into a footstool for his feet. In verse 2, he rules in the midst of his enemies — and has a scepter to smite them. In verse 5, he shatters kings on the day of his wrath. In verse 6, he executes nations and fills them with corpses. 

And yet right in the middle of this “messiah on the warpath” imagery, we have a reference to Christ being an eternal priest after the order of Melchizedek. It is perhaps easier for us to see how the battle imagery of the psalm fits with Jesus’ kingship. After all, we expect kings — especially Davidic kings — to be battlefield heroes. Jesus does not disappoint in that way. He strikes and smashes his enemies from the beginning to the end of this psalm. The psalm paints the portrait of an utterly victorious king.

But since the psalm also pays homage to Jesus’ priesthood, an astute reader might wonder where priestly imagery shows up in the psalm. I would contend that the battlefield imagery fits not only with the motif of Jesus as reigning king but also with him as everlasting priest. In the Bible, priests are warriors just as much as kings. Waging holy war has been a priestly calling from the beginning.

There is a lot of biblical evidence for this truth, and we will only survey a fraction of it here. Start with Adam. Adam was a priest, serving in the sanctuary of Eden. We know this because the verbs used to describe Adam’s task in Eden, “tend and keep,” or “serve and guard” (Gen. 2:15), are used later to describe the tasks of the priests at the tabernacle, e.g., Num. 3:7-8. A priestly vocabulary is used for Adam’s task from the very beginning; he is to guard and keep Eden, just as the later priests would guard and keep the tabernacle. Of course, this also came to mean that he was to guard and keep the woman (the embodiment of Eden) after she was created, just as the priests were to guard and keep the people of Israel (the living tabernacle).

When Adam was told to guard the Garden, he should have deduced that there would be an invader. And sure enough, an intruder shows up. As soon as the serpent started questioning God’s Word to the woman, Adam should have stepped between the serpent and the woman to protect her. He should have silenced the lying serpent by crushing its head. That was his priestly task, and because he failed at that priestly task, he lost both his priesthood and his sanctuary. Adam should have piled up at least one corpse in Eden; he should have made the serpent a footstool for his feet. He should have ruled in the midst of his enemy (the serpent) by shattering and executing the serpent in a show of righteous wrath. Unfortunately, he did none of those things. What should have been the day of his power became a day of weakness and failure. He failed as a priest because he failed to fight. He refused to exercise holy violence and so he lost his holy status and access to the holy place.

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On May 31, 2022 By In History, Theology

Messianic Prophecies and Covenant Renewal

“When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt: And was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son.”  

St. Matthew ii:14-15
Image by Robert Cheaib

The prophetic witness of the Old Testament is a central theme of the gospel writers and appears throughout St. Matthew’s work as evidence of Jesus’s status as the Messiah. Through textual quotations, allusions, and implicit references St. Matthew offers his Hebrew audience dozens of examples of how Jesus fits the messianic qualifications of their own Scriptural tradition. Yet, St. Matthew often handles these references in ways that seem out of context with their original narratives. Established stories and characters are recast from their historical plots to take on symbolic or even typological meaning in the life of Jesus. While St. Matthew’s interpretation of the Old Testament is under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, it is unlikely that his contemporaries or even the prophets themselves always understood how their words pointed to a future Messiah.  One example is the fulfillment of “Out of Egypt have I called my son” cited by St. Matthew from the Book of Hosea. St. Matthew understood how the phrase fulfilled Scripture in terms of messianic prophecy, but also informs our interpretive lens for the Old Testament.

Prophecy and Providence

Basic to the idea of Biblical prophecy is the doctrine of providence by which we understand the divine governance of God in history. God fulfills his purposes as he unfolds the natural years of human history. Dutch-American theologian Louis Berkhof describes providence as, “whereby He rules all things so that they answer to the purpose of their existence.” a God’s sovereign orchestration of history is clearly explained in passages like Psalm 103:18 where we read, “The LORD has established His throne in heaven, And His kingdom rules over all.” The mechanism of messianic prophecy demonstrates the special promises possessed by the Hebrews as they expected the God over their history to also superintend a savior in their future. Contrast this with the writings of Sophocles and his Delphic oracles that entrap man’s future into an Oedipal tragedy.

St. Matthew’s use of messianic prophecies is therefore primarily a matter of demonstrating God’s power in time and not intended to be mere proof texts for qualifying Jesus’s own messianic candidacy. We see in the messianic prophecies God’s fingerprints of providence and signposts of his imminent work in establishing his renewed Kingdom. Dr. Edmund Clowney of Westminster Seminary explains in his popular book Preaching Christ in All of Scripture that the patterns that seem to repeat and find fulfillment in Jesus point to the magnifying work of Israel’s Messiah. “God will not merely repeat his deeds of the past; he will do greater things, climatically greater: a second exodus, involving spiritual deliverance; a new covenant, a new creation, a new people, including Jews and Gentiles; and a greater than Moses, than David, than Elijah.” b We should then expect that the interpretive methodology that St. Matthew will employ in relation to the fulfillment of the Old Testament will cast a greater weight to prophetic statements and allusions that point to the Messiah’s greater role in the destiny of the covenant People.

Greater Fulfillment in the Gospels

The narrative employed in Matthew 2 functions to highlight God’s past faithfulness and connect it to the greater promises that come through or are fulfilled by His Son. St. Matthew’s emphasis on the holy family’s refuge in Egypt employs not only a reference to Old Testament scripture, but invokes the historic symbolism of Moses and Hosea. Harkening back to an Exodus-like story, St. Matthew introduces Herod as a new Pharaoh and Jesus as a new Moses. The Messianic prophecy itself attempts to connect or memorialize a past event in redemptive history to the life and ministry of Jesus. This method of weaving pictures of previous covenantal epochs into the successive stages of Israel’s growth matches the entire pattern described as “covenant renewal” in James B. Jordan’s book Through New Eyes. Jordan explains that, “…time is opportunity.” and the Covenant history builds in a linear-spiral fashion. c The connections between messianic prophecy and their fulfillment point to God’s work at fulfilling his promises through successive covenantal renewals with mankind (e.g. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David). With each successive Patriarch’s renewal, God reveals more of his glorious plan to be fulfilled in the future Messiah. Here St. Matthew appeals to Jesus as a new stage of covenant renewal. 

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  1. Berkhof, L. (2005). A Summary of Christian Doctrine. Part II. Ch. X. The Banner of Truth Trust.  (back)
  2. Clowney, E. P. (2003). Preaching Christ In All of Scripture. pg. 40. Crossway Books.  (back)
  3. Jordan, J. B. (1999). Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World. Wipf and Stock Publishers.  (back)

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On May 18, 2022 By In Church

Temptations for Christians Who Want to Change the World, Part 2

See Part 1

Guest post by Rev. Jeff Meyers

This is the second installment of a condensed version of the “Final Reflections & Summary” from my book Wisdom for Dissidents (full title: Ancient Wisdom for Today’s Christian Dissidents).

The third temptation is to cozy up to our enemies, thinking that we can win their favor. If we can get them to like us, maybe they will leave us alone. This is the “partiality” problem James criticizes in 2:1-13. It is not simply that they are favoring the rich over the poor. That would be bad enough. But the man who is being catered to in their assembly is the one who wears the ring of authority and the robe of office (2:20). He is explicitly identified as an oppressor, someone who drags them into court, and a blasphemer against the name of Jesus (2:6-7). To “judge” the rich oppressor as someone more deserving of special care than the poor believer is “to become judges engaging in an evil conspiracy” (2:4). That evaluation from James is not just about individual “evil thoughts” but about how the brothers have conspired together to appease their rich enemies. They have thereby dishonored those poorer disciples whom “God has chosen . . . to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom” (2:5).

The appeasement option ought not to be on the table for conscientious Christian leaders. To turn a blind eye to immorality and abuse with the hope of getting a hearing from some powerful government or academic figure would be to betray our allegiance to the Lord. Not only is such schmoozing mostly ineffective—the more you give, the more they will take—but such behavior runs counter to the examples of the prophets and of Jesus himself. The prophets denounced the rich and powerful, even, maybe especially, when they were in positions of authority in Israel. Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others did not cozy up to corrupt, immoral leaders. Neither did Jesus. 

Fourth, the most insidious temptation, according to James, is to use the power of our words to guide the church toward aggressive and violent action thinking we are acting thereby as agents of God’s justice. As we have argued, James 3:1-12 is at the heart of the letter. And the key passage that unlocks the entire letter is James 1:19-20, “Know this, my beloved brothers: let every man be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.”  Anger against their oppressors has fueled impetuous speeches with the intent to rally the disciples to make things right by means of aggressive, retributive action (3:13-16; 4:1-12). This kind of Christian “zealotry” will not make things right. Instead, such speech and behavior are not of the Spirit but demonic (3:15). These angry and violent responses have been fueled by the immature rhetoric of their teachers, the brothers responsible for leading their communities. They want freedom, but they are going about achieving liberty in the wrong ways.

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On December 1, 2021 By In Culture

My Baptist Obstacles: Did Circumcision Come from a Works-Based Religion?

Continuity Over Replacement

The waterfall above shows water moving from one level of land to another, but the water is continuous – the same water. Some things are different about the Old and New Testaments, but salvation and grace are not part of those things. Salvation and Grace are a constant – a continuity. What does this have to do with baptism?

One thing that held me back from understanding baptism was my complete misunderstanding of the Old Testament – I misunderstood salvation, I misunderstood the reason for Jewish markers like the law and circumcision – I thought circumcision was part of a works based religion. So it was hard for me to hear any connections between baptism and circumcision. But I was wrong.

This week I will discuss the gracious, non-works based salvation of the Old Testament. Next week I will discuss the salvation of Gentiles in the Old Testament and the reason circumcision was only for Jews.

So let’s find out whether circumcision came from a works based religion. Without further ado, let’s back up to my late childhood:

One year when I was youngish, after my father pen-marked my height in the paint of a hall doorway, I remember having a child’s epiphany. I remember working over a specific deep though while I looked at the ink line on the jamb up close to my eyes. It wasn’t about ink or height; it was about Christians being the true Jews. I ran to tell my parents: Jesus was a Jew. God had “started” Christianity from the truest teacher of the Jews – Jesus. That meant that our religion, Christianity was the faithful continuation of God’s true religion. We had the true Judaism, and it was they who had rejected Jesus who had left.

I admit that I was under-informed at that age about the complexities of the situation.

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On November 1, 2019 By In Theology

Why We Need All Saints’ Day

Robert Jenson argues that theology is “the church’s enterprise and the only church conceivably in question is the unique and solitary church of the creeds.”[1] That is to say, doing theology has boundaries. To study the Bible and God we must have creedal presuppositions. We affirm God is the Creator of Heaven and Earth. We believe in the Communion of Saints. If a church abandons these central ideas she is doing theology in vain. She forsakes the hermeneutic necessary to think about God properly.

This is All Saints’ Day. As we celebrate the great actors in God’s history/play, we are celebrating men and women who did theology in the context of the holy, catholic, and apostolic church. They were not isolationists, they did not drink of the wine of the individualist, but rather they discovered that studying the Scriptures happened most effectively when there was proper accountability, faithful ministers, and pure worship.

Part of this profound inability to do theology ecclesiastically stems from our evangelical distaste for anything that is old. I have often said that most evangelicals believe church history began when Billy Graham was born. I exaggerate to make the point that we are untrained in the ancient. We don’t read our forefathers. We don’t relish their words. Therefore, we keep innovating worship, adding our human ingenuity to church methodologies, always trying to outdo the next local assembly in gadgets and lights. And the church keeps losing; losing the youth, losing our identity, losing our history, and losing our Gospel.

For this reason, we need All Saints’ Day! We need it to remind us that we come from a long line of faithful travelers “tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection.” We need it to remember we come from a long line of interpreters. We need it to do theology well. Our history is not a beginning history, but one that has begun long ago. We follow in their train; a noble army of men and boys, the matron and the maid. We continue their journey to that eternal city. We do theology in unison.

Happy All Saints’ Day!

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On April 26, 2019 By In Politics

Easter: The ABC of our Faith

We need to continually return to the root of our faith, to those first historical events that propel us to move forward as a people. The Church Calendar helps us to never outgrow the life of our Lord from his birth to his Ascension.

The Resurrection is the foundation of our faith. In modern evangelicalism, we tend to view the Resurrection of Jesus merely as validation or proof that the crucifixion accomplished what it was supposed to. In other words, the Resurrection is lovely because now the death of Jesus means something, and we get to spend eternity in heaven. But the Bible ascribes more significant value to the empty tomb.

The Four Gospels navigate us through the life of Jesus and give us a glimpse into the meaning of the Resurrection. But if we simply build our thinking around the Four Gospels, we will have an incomplete view of who we are and who Jesus is. The Four Gospels are not enough. We need the entirety of God’s Revelation. In other words, “If our gospel begins and ends on Good Friday, it is impoverished.”a 

Though we glory in the cross, though we preach the cross, though we love the old rugged cross, the cross is not enough! And I make that statement very carefully. As one scholar stated, “If the story of the prodigal son was only based on cross-theology, there would have been only forgiveness, but no joy and feast.” The message of the cross is incomplete without the Resurrection. The cross and the Resurrection can never be separated.

The Resurrection not only validates the cross, but it is a sure sign that we are shadows of our future selves. We are now partly what we shall be. This reality is apparent as we enter into the Acts of the Apostles: the early Church began to live out their Resurrection among the nations. In fact, “the preaching of Jesus’ Resurrection is arguably more pervasive than the cross in the book of Acts (Acts 2:31; 3:26; 4:2; 33; 10:41). The Psalms most quoted in the New Covenant are Psalms 2 and 110, which speak directly of Jesus’ Resurrection and exaltation. Cyprian once wrote: “I confess the Cross, because I know of the Resurrection…since the Resurrection has followed the Cross, I am not ashamed to declare it.” This is back to basics! We are a cruciform people, but if we overemphasize the cross, our identity is incomplete.

So, let us consider a few implications of the Resurrection, keeping in mind that the Resurrection is more than a confirmation of the cross, but it is the foundation of our faith. Paul makes this point when he says that without the Resurrection, we are of all people most to be pitied. He does not say this about any other event in the life of Jesus.

First, the Resurrection is the objective grounds of salvation. We often look at the cross as the grounds of our salvation, but God saves us by, in, and through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Paul makes this explicit when he says in Romans 4:25: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.” In I Corinthians 15:17, Paul says, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.” But aren’t we justified and forgiven on account of Jesus’ death? Of course! Romans makes that clear! For the Apostle Paul, the Resurrection is the vindication of Jesus as the Faithful Son and as the righteous sin-bearer.

It is “the creative power of God that imparts life to soul and body.” This is who we are. We are nothing more, nothing less than saints united to the Resurrected Christ. This is the objective ground of our salvation.

Secondly, the Resurrection is not only the source of our justification, our right-standing before God, but the Resurrection is also the power that drives our sanctification; that is our growth in King Jesus. Some theologians have referred to this as anastasity, from the Greek anastasio, meaning Resurrection. Anastasity is the way the Resurrection flows into our lives. I confess this is in many ways is revolutionary to Christians who have never considered the Resurrection in this light. What the cross of Jesus does for us is to bankrupt our pride, it sobers our minds when we become full of ourselves, and it pulls the plug on any naïve triumphalism. When we are tempted to be proud of any accomplishment, we need to look no further than the cross of Jesus to give us an enlightened view of what Jesus had to suffer to take our sins.

But the Resurrection is the other necessary and prominent part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus and part of God’s people. We cannot only have a theology of the cross because a spirituality that meditates only on the cross could potentially reduce us to self-loathing, spiritual insecurity. The impression, then, is that we remain, pathetic, lowly sinners, miserable wretches, unable to do one good thing for God even though we are justified by the event of the empty tomb.

I suggest this is a pietistic simplification of the Christian life? Anglican scholar Michael Bird summarizes best our status:

Some Christians might feel humble when they tell everyone how pathetic they are; a form of self-deprecation. Rightly so, we should be the first ones to share our struggles with others, but let us not think less of ourselves that how God thinks of us. “If God thinks well of his Son, He thinks well of you. If God loves His Son, He loves you, for you are partakes not just of his sufferings, but also of his glory.b

Finally, the Resurrection calls us to a new way of living. Paul says in Colossians: “Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, not on earthly things.” Some have interpreted this to mean that we are to be so heavenly minded, that we ought to abandon our earthly concerns. After all, this world is merely passing by. But I think this interpretation lacks a fundamental understanding of the role of the Resurrection in the mind of Paul. Who are we? We are resurrected saints. This is the most basic foundation of our humanity as Christians. And if we are resurrected saints, where does the resurrected Christ now abide? He abides at the right hand of the Father in heaven. Where Christ is we are. We are to act and live as if we are seated with Christ in heavenly places. We are to have a heavenly perspective on our earthly life. This reality is to have an impact on our present. Our status in Jesus Christ calls us toward the goal of faithfulness.

Easter is the most basic fact of our humanity. It is who we are. It is because of the bodily Resurrection that we live, breathe, and have our being in a Christ who shows mercy, rather than a Christ who condemns us. The Resurrection of Jesus vindicated Jesus as the bearer of the ugliness of sin, so when he looks at our Lord sees beautified saints. We can never take that for granted. Our standing before the Father causes us to love one another more fully, to serve one another more sincerely, to embrace a more robust view of hope, to feast more abundantly, and to worship the Risen Christ with greater passion. Easter is the abc of our faith. If it is anything less, we are most to be pitied, but thanks be to God, Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!

  1. Michael Bird, Evangelical Theology, 436.  (back)
  2. Michael Bird, Evangelical Theology, pg. 445  (back)

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On February 2, 2019 By In Theology

Reading Genesis with Origen

The homilies of Origen, one of the Church’s earliest and most seminal theologians, give a window into the tone of early Christian exegesis. Peering into that window can help open the eyes of 21st century expositors to the Church’s historical tradition of creative, exciting, and compelling exegesis. I want to give a brief and cursory consideration of Origen’s Bible reading from his first homily on Genesis with an eye to how we, conservative Reformed and evangelical interpreters of Scripture, can learn from his approach. This is neither meant to be a critical interaction, nor a blanket endorsement, but rather an appraisal that sifts through the at-times unhelpful and bizarre to find what might be helpful in our present context.a


Beginning in Christ

The first words of Origen’s first homily on Genesis address, appropriately, the opening verse of Scripture: “In the beginning God made heaven and earth.” How does Origen exposit Genesis 1.1?

What is the beginning of all things except our Lord and “Savior of all,”  Jesus Christ “the firstborn of every creature”? In this beginning, therefore,  that is, in his Word, “God made heaven and earth” as the evangelist John  also says in the beginning of his Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word… “

Homily 1.1

Origen’s comments on this verse reflect his hermeneutical presupposition, that the Christian reader does not come to Scripture prima facie, but rather we always read and hear the text in and through Christ. Henri de Lubac, a 20th century Catholic ressourcement theologian strongly influenced by Origen, puts it well: “For a Christian to understand the Bible means to understand it in the light of the Gospel.” (Catholicism, p. 178) God has definitively revealed Himself in the person of His Son, and there is now no going behind that.

Our conservative evangelical tendency is to look for the grammatical-historical interpretation of the text as the primary meaning, and to (maybe) go from there to types, to how the text foreshadows Christ or the life of the Church. Origen shows us, in the pattern of patristic exegesis, that for the Christian the Christological is the primary meaning of the text. Our task when reading the Old Testament is not to find or pick out what things might be pointing to Christ; Jesus has already solved that for us. All of Scripture is fulfilled in Him, in His life, death, and resurrection, and in the continuing life of His body, the Church.

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  1. Full disclosure: I am not an Origen scholar, nor am I a scholar of patristic exegesis more broadly. In fact, I’m rather new to Origen. I write this aware of my ignorance (it has to count for something when one is not ignorant of one’s ignorance, right?) of the philosophical discussions at play. Yet, this ignorance and lack of expertise notwithstanding, there are basic patterns and principles of exegesis shown by Origen that can be highly illuminating and instructive for us.  (back)

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On November 1, 2018 By In Interviews, Podcast, Theology

Episode 40, Vocation as Sacred Work, KC Podcast

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For our 40th show, Pastor Brito interviews KC contributor Pastor Dustin Messer concerning his recent piece published at the Theopolis Institute entitled Sacred Work in a Secular World. The discussion begins with a false distinction between “full-time Christian ministry” and “secular work” so mistakenly proclaimed in the evangelical church. Dustin traces the history of vocation in the work of the Reformer Martin Luther and articulates a fuller vision of vocation based on the creation account of Genesis. Messer concludes by discussing how he would encourage a young person who is uncertain about what vocation to pursue.

Additional Resources:

Sacred Work in a Secular World by Dustin Messer

Visions of Vocation by Steve Garber

Quotes from Interview:

“Most folks start in Genesis 3 to think about vocation…but if you start with the Fall explaining what’s wrong with work you can lead people to believe that work is just a necessary temporal good… We should go to Genesis 1 and ground your view of vocation in the creation of the world.”

“God is ruling over all creation through mortal humans and he has chosen a church for his mission so that what you do has real meaning and value.”

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On October 26, 2018 By In Interviews, Podcast, Theology

Episode 39 of KC Podcast: Interview with Chris Larson of Ligonier Ministries

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On this episode, we examined the recent State of the Church Theology Survey produced by Ligonier Ministries. Pastor Uri Brito interviews CEO and President of Ligonier Ministries, Chris Larson. We discuss the status of Ligonier Ministries after the death of its beloved president, R.C. Sproul, and also the state of theology survey which asks a host of questions to the evangelical population concerning the doctrine of Christ, salvation, and sexuality.

Chris Larson

Chris Larson is president and CEO of Ligonier Ministries. You can follow him on Twitter @ChrisLarson.

Additional Resources:

The State of Theology

A Renewed Mind, A Transformed Mind

Ligonier Ministries

Reflecting on the Life of R.C. Sproul

Quotes from Chris Larson in the Interview:

“The higher educated and the higher income brackets, the less orthodox people are across America.”

“Our politics and our sociology flow out of our theology.”

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