The incarnation of God in the Christian faith is unique among the religions of the world. The Greeks had myths about the gods who dwelt on Mt. Olympus coming down and taking the form of men to play around with humans. The Hindus have a version of this as Vishnu takes the form of men, fish, or animals in what they call avatars to restore order in the universe but then returns to his original form. The Jews reject the idea that God can become man. Other religions have gods appearing as man or temporarily taking the form of a man, but no other religion has God permanently uniting himself with creation by taking on the form of a man.
(more…)An Encouragement For Family Worship
From the beginning of our history, the family has had a mission. That mission involves being fruitful, multiplying, filling the earth, and subduing every square inch of creation so that God’s kingdom will come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven (Gen 1.26-28; Matt 6.10). That’s a rather large mission for any one of us or any one family to think about! Thankfully, God hasn’t given the entire mission to one particular household. The original family–Adam and Eve–was fruitful and multiplied so that the family became families that began to spread out throughout the earth. Some of these families were united together in their rebellion against God, while other families were united together in their loyalty to God. The rebellious families worked against God’s original purpose, and the loyal families worked for God’s purpose for them and for the entire creation. We, the church of Jesus Christ, are now the family of God made up of families who seek to fulfill God’s original purpose of fruitfulness, multiplication, filling the earth, and subduing the creation to the lordship of Jesus Christ. Your Christian family is integral to this larger mission of the church.
In order for your family to fulfill its God-given mission, the first thing that must be done is for you and your family to be subdued to the lordship of Jesus. This begins in fulfilling our mission to enter into the presence of God to hear from and speak to him. This is prayer. God’s plan is for the world to take a certain shape, to look like heaven. We won’t know what that is unless we first hear from him. This is where family worship or family prayer comes in. Family worship is time dedicated to prayer and the Scriptures in the context of daily life. It is focused and purposeful reading and meditation on Scripture and responding to God in confession, praise, thanksgiving, and supplication. One of the goals of family worship is to shape your family as a whole and each individual more into the image of Christ.
(more…)John’s “World”
“The world” is a prominent theme in John’s Gospel. Probably the most well-known verse in all of Scripture is John 3:16 in which Jesus tells Nicodemus, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” What is the world that God loves?
John sets the stage for how we are to understand “the world” in his introduction. Introducing John the Witness (he is not called “John the Baptizer” in the Gospel), the Apostle John says that the Witness was not the Light coming into the world (Jn 1:9). The Word who is the Light “was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world did not know him” (Jn 1:10). The true Light, the Word, made the world, but this same world did not know him. The word translated “world” is kosmos. Kosmos emphasizes order or how things are arranged. At the time to which the Apostle is referring, the world is the created order organized under the rule of the devil. He is “the ruler of this world” that must be cast out (Jn 12:31; cf. also 14:30; 16:11).
(more…)God Has A Name
Many Christians become practically giddy when they hear celebrities or politicians talk about God. We will fight to maintain our motto “in God we trust” and our allegiance to being “one nation under God.” At the founding of our country, God was understood to be the God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ. Freedom of religion meant that you were free to practice the Christian faith no matter what your Christian denomination. The original colonies had established Christian churches. A requirement for many governments was to be a professing Christian. “God” had a name.
(more…)Jesus the Temple
John’s Gospel is a literary trek through the new Tabernacle or Temple that is Jesus’ body. His allusions to Jesus as the new Temple are evident from the beginning. “The Word” calls up the construction of Solomon’s Temple in 1 Kings. What is translated as “the inner sanctuary” by the ESV is a Hebrew word that seems to be associated with the word “to speak” or its noun form, “word” (1 Kg 6:5, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 31; 7:49). This is another name for the Holy of Holies. In John 1:14, the Word becomes flesh and “dwells” among us. The verb “dwells” speaks of pitching a tent or dwelling in a tent. Some have translated it, “tabernacled.” Seeing his glory, the glory that dwells in the Holy of Holies, only fortifies the image.
If these images aren’t clear enough, when Jesus cleanses the Temple in chapter 2, he tells the Jews, “Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (Jn 2:19). He was speaking about the Temple that is his body (Jn 2:21).
(more…)The Gospel of John: Christ the Creator
John’s Gospel opens with the unmistakable echo of Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning … God.” He fills that out a bit more than Moses, but there is no doubt that John intends to write a new Genesis. The clear allusion in John’s opening words invites us to look for patterns that parallel and retell the story of creation around the Word made flesh. John makes it fairly easy for us.
In the first eleven chapters of his Gospel, John records seven signs Jesus performed. He records these signs so that the reader or hearer might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and believing might have life in his name (Jn 20:30-31). John shapes his telling of the story of Jesus around these signs.
Signs are not inert pointers to something else. They are not like our road signs, for instance, that tell us the law but have no power to enforce it. Signs in Scripture are what we call miracles, God’s extraordinary providence; that is, this isn’t the way God works ordinarily on a day-to-day basis. Signs are God’s acts to save his people and destroy his enemies. When Moses was sent to Pharaoh, he was sent to perform signs and wonders that would lead to the deliverance of the children of Israel and the destruction of Egypt.
Jesus’ signs are for the same purpose, but the scale of his work is greater than that of Moses. What God did through Moses in North Africa, Jesus is doing for the entire created order.
As the world begins in water, so John’s new Genesis begins in water with the Spirit hovering and the first light driving back the darkness. After the Prologue (Jn 1:1-18), water is everywhere, surrounding the first sign of Jesus turning water to wine (Jn 2:1-11). John the Baptizer is baptizing. Jesus is baptized, and the Spirit hovers over him. Jesus tells Nicodemus that the new birth is through water and Spirit (Jn 3:1-21). Baptisms appear again at the end of chapter 3, and Jesus speaks with a woman at a well in chapter 4.
Jesus’ first sign is to take the water of the old creation and bring it to maturity in the form of wine. Wine is mature water, water assimilated into the ground, vine, and grape and then extracted and aged/matured. Jesus is making a new creation that will be the mature creation God intended. This is the first light of Jesus’ glory (Jn 2:11).
On the second day of creation, God placed a firmament he called “heaven” between the waters below and the waters above. The heaven of heavens is the place of God’s throne, his rule. The firmament heaven will eventually have rulers that govern times and seasons (Gen 1:14-18). A ruler’s son is healed as the second sign (Jn 4:46-54). The sons of Adam are sin-sick and unable to rule as God intended. Jesus is healing the firmament dwellers.
The third sign follows on the heels of the second sign with a Jewish man at the Pool of Bethesda who desires to be healed by going into the pool after it has been stirred by the angel and emerging with a new life. The third day of creation is when land emerged from the water, and vegetation appeared. Jesus is the one who has the authority to raise “the land,” men, from the abyss of death into resurrection (Jn 5:19-47).
Jesus feeding the five thousand is the fourth recorded sign (Jn 6:1-15). On the fourth day of creation, God placed the sun, moon, and stars in the firmament to rule. When Jesus provides bread as Solomon did for the nations and as God did in the wilderness, the people want to make him king (Jn 6:15), a star in the firmament-heaven. He will be there, but not yet.
The fifth sign is connected to the fourth because the people’s actions cause Jesus to withdraw. The disciples get into a boat on the sea that becomes tumultuous, and Jesus comes walking on the sea. On the fifth day of creation, God created swarms of swarming sea creatures over which man was to have dominion (Gen 1:28; Ps 8). The sea of the old creation swallows up man in death, but Jesus subdues it.
On the sixth day of the week, God made man in his image to rule as God rules. The refrain of God’s judgments in Genesis 1 is, “and God saw that it was good.” The eyes are instruments of judgment, discerning between good and evil. In John 9, we meet a man born blind who declares of himself, “I am the man” (Jn 9:9). He is the old Adam left without the ability to judge. Jesus heals him so that he can judge as he was created to do.
The Sabbath day was a day of rest and rejoicing. Sin turned into a day of mourning. Lazarus dies, and Jesus weeps. Raising Lazarus from the dead is the seventh sign. Jesus will turn the mourning of death-rest into the rejoicing of life-rest.
This entire week of signs anticipates the eighth sign that is homed in on in chapters 13—20. Jesus will be glorified through the cross and resurrection. He is crucified on the sixth day of the week, lies in the tomb on the Sabbath, and then is raised on the first day of the week, which is the eighth day in relation to the first week. Jesus re-creates the world in his work.
John’s Gospel structure is the message: Jesus has not come to give men individual private spiritual experiences as one religion among many; Jesus has come as the Creator and Re-creator of the world who defines and governs every aspect of the world’s existence. Pledge your allegiance to your Creator and King.
Why Four Gospels?
Why do we have four Gospels? Wouldn’t it have been a bit more tidy for casual readers and scholars alike if we had one Gospel that would clear up any apparent discrepancies? The Holy Spirit, guiding the writers, as well as the church, obviously didn’t think so. There was a need for four Gospels to give us different perspectives on the life of Christ, all completely consistent with one another so that they can be harmonized historically, but different so as to throw a different light on the Person and work of Christ Jesus.
The early church understood the number four to be Scripturally significant. Irenaeus, the second-century bishop of Lyons, summarizes the early church’s thought about why we have four Gospels:
(more…)Maturity & Mission
One of the major themes of Scripture concerns maturity. In the beginning, the world was created infantile, something to be developed and brought to a mature condition. This story of Scripture is written into every human being conceived in the womb of a woman.
Like the creation of which we are a part and represent, we mature. We mature physiologically as our bones, muscles, and organs grow. We mature psychologically and intellectually by learning new things and growing in wisdom. Scripture’s story is written into our existence as humans.
(more…)The Covenant Story: The New Covenant
“For all the promises of God in him are ‘Yes,’ and in him ‘Amen,’….” ~2 Corinthians 1:20
“To be continued.” This is one of the most frustrating phrases ever to be used on screen. The author immerses you in the story, takes you to the point of anxiously desiring resolution, and then leaves you hanging, waiting for all the questions to be answered in the next installment … maybe. From a marketing perspective, it is brilliant because an audience is assured for the next episode (if the story is good enough). From a viewer’s perspective, the tension is unpleasant. (And this is why we now have streaming services and “binge-watching.”)
At the end of the Hebrew Scriptures (2 Chronicles in the Hebrew order), God put a big “to be continued.” The Jews are sent back to the land to rebuild the Temple and the walls of Jerusalem. God’s people are in prominent places in the empire (such as Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, Esther, and Mordecai). These were golden years in some sense.
(more…)The Covenant Story: David & Restoration
“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; And the government will be upon his shoulder … Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end.” ~Isaiah 9:6, 7
From the earliest days of history, God declared his intention for his kingdom to be established on the earth and ruled by man. The original dominion mandate in Genesis 1:28 tied dominion–the establishment and maturation of the kingdom–to seed, children, being fruitful and multiplying. Men would develop and rule over God’s kingdom on earth. “The heaven of heavens are Yahweh’s, but the earth he has given to the sons of men” (Ps 115:16).
When sin entered the world, the establishment of the kingdom would have to come through the defeat of the serpent and his seed. God promised in Genesis 3:15 that he would raise up the seed of the woman to accomplish this mission. Over the next several thousand years, the story of the seed and the kingdom unfold.
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