“… and through him to reconcile all things to him, making peace through the blood of his cross, through him whether things upon earth or things in the heavens.”
~Colossians 1:20
The question of the extent of the effects of the atonement has been a point of debate in the church for quite some time. Did Jesus die to make salvation possible for everyone (general or universal atonement), or did Jesus die to secure salvation for God’s elect alone (particular or limited atonement)? This debate got hot and heavy in the seventeenth century when a group called the Remonstrants developed five articles concerning salvation that included universal atonement. The Synod of Dordt responded with what has come to be known as the five points of Calvinism, which includes limited, definite, or particular atonement. (Somewhere between these two were the Amyraldians, who were “four-point Calvinists” because they couldn’t buy into the limited atonement.)
Whenever the extent of the atonement is debated, the focus is usually on individuals’ salvation. But if we only think of the atonement and its effects in terms of individual salvation, what Paul says in Colossians 1:20 is quite confusing. Within Paul’s hymnic poem of Christ, “all things” consistently refers to the cosmic order, things upon earth and things in the heavens, visible and invisible, thrones, lordships, rulers, or authorities (see 1:16). Christ makes peace with the entire created order through the blood of his cross.
“Christian Nationalism” has been a hot topic and a mixed bag over the past year or so. Intramural debates and social media wars are fought over theological foundations, hermeneutical presuppositions, implementation of Christian Nationalism, and even race concerning what constitutes a nation. While the answers to all those questions are important, I believe it is inarguable that Jesus, who has all authority in heaven and on earth and was promised the nations for his inheritance (Ps 2), not only desires but also commands that nations be Christian.
Before he ascended to heaven after his resurrection, Jesus, standing on a Galilean mountain, told his disciples that all authority in heaven and on earth had been given to him. He is Lord over all creation. The nations of the earth are to acknowledge and submit to his lordship. Kings and all those in authority are to pay him tribute as vassals; that is, they are to acknowledge his lordship through offerings that are, in effect, a tax that recognizes that he owns everything and that they exist by his sovereign grace (Ps 72:10-11; Rev 21:24).
The Christian Heritage of the United States: A Forgotten Narrative
In today’s rapidly changing America, it is important to revisit the foundations upon which America was built. Americans once universally recognized the protestant Christian origins of this nation, yet today the spurious myths around so-called “deism” and “separation of church and state” have made serious inroads into the American narrative. Even the Christian character of undoubtedly godly men like George Washington and Patrick Henry has been cast aside by the revisionism of leftist ideologues and political pundits. It is disheartening to witness the extent to which historical figures who embraced the Biblical faith and shaped our nation’s values are now subject to reinterpretation and distortion. I’ve even met families whose college-aged children refuse to celebrate Thanksgiving, influenced by a skewed perspective that portrays the pilgrims as inherently evil.
In an historic ruling on June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the rulings of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. America has lived for 49 years under the tyrannical bloodshed of Roe but God sent a Jubilee release for us and our children. We must not let that great answer to prayers go unnoticed. Pro-Life wins. This is the month to mark and remember God’s goodness to us.
June is strategic ground to claim
The rainbow mafia has been trying to claim June for a long time. They have many corporations behind them shoving their agenda in everyone’s face. But the Dobbs ruling in June gives a legitimate and prominent way to push back. We should not let this opportunity go to waste to claim June as a celebration of life, God’s goodness to his people, God’s ordinance of marriage, and so much more. Claim June as Pro-Life Month.
Being Pro-Life cuts to the heart of the Godless agenda
Celebrating Pro-Life month is a great way to cut to the center issue of our time. The godless world is trying to claim that the autonomous self is god. They want their lusts and desires to reign supreme. They are trying to reject the way God made the world: sexuality, gender, when life begins, the nature of being male and female, God’s design for marriage. It is all connected and the godless hate it. The Dobbs ruling is a reality check on their bloodlust. God is God and you are not. Celebrate June as Pro-Life month.
During the late ’90s and early 2000s, there was nothing more exciting to me than the underground Christian music scene. In 1997, at age 12, I started devouring all the Christian punk music I could find. One of my favorite bands was called Blaster the Rocket Man. They were perhaps the most unique of any other band. Their lyrics centered on horror and sci-fi themes – like werewolves, vampires, and aliens – but from an explicitly Christian worldview. In Blaster’s songs, monsters could be saved from their monstrosities if they put their faith in Jesus. It was very Kuyperian if you think about it: Every square inch belongs to Jesus…even the horror genre.
One of Blaster’s albums was called The Monster Who Ate Jesus. That title might seem sacrilegious on the surface, but I’ve always taken it as a reference to the Lord’s Supper (eucharist, communion). In one of the band’s earlier songs, “American Werewolf,” the only way for the werewolf to end his curse was to eat and drink Christ’s body and blood. I was reminded of this concept while watching Monster, the Netflix show about Jeffrey Dahmer. (Warning: mature audiences only.)
Dahmer was one of the most notorious serial killers in US history, nicknamed the Milwaukee Cannibal. From the late ’70s to the early ’90s, Dahmer drugged, raped, killed, and ate his victims (mostly gay black men). Most people – Christian or not – find these crimes utterly reprehensible. Dahmer’s level of depravity cannot be overstated.
And yet, one of the most fascinating things about Dahmer is that he claimed to become a Christian in prison. Mind you, jailhouse conversions aren’t that fascinating. Many people claim to find Jesus behind bars and many of those conversions are dishonest and/or short-lived. What’s always fascinated me about Dahmer was that he never used his faith to try to get out of prison. In fact, he wanted to be executed, which is the biblical penalty for rapists and murderers (Genesis 9:6, Deuteronomy 22:25-27).
“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.”
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.
A car stitches its way down the highway that needles through the shimmering desert. No one but the inhabitants hears the brakes as it slows. It spits two children out in school uniform. “See you later!”
The
car drives off, accelerating quickly into oblivion.
The
two kids look at each other. The sun begins to suck sweat out of them.
It is very hot in the wilderness today.
I
would like to talk about three different ways of teaching.
The
first is indoctrination. You’ve been told to hate it, but it resembles one part
of true education just like a changeling resembles the baby the fae stole.
Indoctrination drills a single lesson, a single position or idea, into the
student’s head. This is the truth and there is no other.
Indoctrination
creates blind humans. They cannot recognize other perspectives. They don’t even
recognize other perspectives as perspectives. To the indoctrinated man,
all other thoughts are insanity. They, and they alone, know the truth.
The
second is teaching the controversy. As the idea of Darwinism gained bastion
status in public schools, Intelligent Design proponents started a campaign
begging public schools to “teach the controversy,” that is, include I.D.
alongside Darwinism in public schools, teaching both sides as equal options.
This was shot down, of course, but since then I’ve heard the phrase advocated
in different education questions, whenever some controversy about some theory
or knowledge comes along. Teach the controversy, maintain neutrality. Show both
sides, and show that you aren’t biased. All existential and fundamental
questions get answered with a shrug. Who’s to say?
Teaching
the controversy is dropping your kids off in the wilderness, and expecting them
to find their own way to civilization. It’s bad parenting, and it certainly isn’t
education. But like indoctrination, there’s a warped resemblance to true
learning in that heat mirage.
The
third is the journey. All education is a journey from falsity to truth, from
wickedness to wisdom, from the fear of everything or nothing to the fear of the
Lord. Take your students on a journey, and show them how difficult the road to
truth is, but for God’s sake don’t let them walk it alone. It is good for them
to know how hard it is to walk through the wilderness. But show them that taking
them with you through it, not by stranding them there.
One
exercise I do with my class involves taking on the character of an atheist and arguing
the problem of evil. I state it both logically and emotionally, as strongly as
I can. I pull no punches. Then I end the class and tell them to come back
tomorrow with an answer. They spend a few minutes in the wilderness. But the
next day they come back, and after I hear their answers, I give them the
logical and emotional answer to the problem of evil. Not everyone is
able to walk the road, but I take them with me. By the end, they know how
desolate that wilderness is, but they have also come out of the
wilderness to the garden city.
So,
yes, teach the controversy. But also teach the answer to the controversy. They
must come through the welter of conflicting ideas to safety on the other side.
So,
yes, tell them that what you believe is the truth, is the truth. But
show them how you get there, remembering that you too can take wrong turns away
from the well-lit path of the Word.
If
you do teach them the controversy, then your students are not indoctrinated –
they have seen the wilderness. They will know how to recognize the tempter who
lives there. But you must also bring them out again to the city, or they will
be vacant, lost souls, swept clean and ready to be possessed by the
schizophrenia of relativism.
Do
you not wonder why so many children are medicated? Why so many mental issues
and therapists and irrational and insane people? Why has the world gone mad?
Because we weaken our children’s mental
immune system through indoctrination, making it incapable of dealing with a new
idea; or make it comfortable with holding contradictory ideas – a functional
insanity. They either do not know any other city besides the indoctrination
they live in, or, if they do make it to the wilderness of controversy, they
stay there, wandering. If my teacher didn’t even care enough to show me the
answer to the contradiction, does it really matter? They shrug their shoulders
and decide that they should just believe whatever they want to believe, since
smart people disagree and there seems to be no way out of the controversy. If
everything is wilderness, why not call it home?
Let your students get dirt on their boots. But don’t make them walk on their own in the wilderness. From the walls of the city of truth, you can see the slums of indoctrination, and the wilderness of controversy alike – both burning in their own way. Show them how far you have come and they will love the city that you have brought them to – and it is that love of truth that makes them truly educated, that prevents them from letting the city become another slum. Someday your children will issue forth from the city as warriors, and take the city to the wilderness. But that’s a journey for another time.
Carson Spratt is a Rhetoric and Humanities teacher at Logos Online School. He lives in Spokane, Washington, with his wife of seven years, Ellie, without whom life would be inconceivable.
Somewhere in the year 2000, I came into contact with a dangerous cargo filled with contrarian literature. I ate it all so quickly that the only questions I had afterward were some variation of “What’s for dinner?” and “May I have more, please?” I still keep eating contrarian literature, and I really hope that the end result is not that I become a curmudgeon, but that I find creative ways to inculcate those blessings into my community.
So, while we are at it, let me undo speculations among some two-kingdom scholars. They consistently claim that while Jesus has authority over all things, his authority does not provide or is intended to provide a tangible change in the cultural milieu. I, as a lovable contrarian, assert the exact opposite: that the kingdom of Jesus is comprehensive, and whatever it touches, it changes.
The kingdom is not limited to one sphere, nor are things heavenly to be severely differentiated from things earthly. And again, not to repeat the obvious, but the earthly city is not Babylon, nor do we live in this perpetual sense of exile and pilgrimage simply existing seeking a city that shall come.
We affirm that the people of God are headed somewhere to take something and claim Someone as Lord over the nations (Rom. 4:13) and that the city has come. Our agenda is to get people to see the ads and RSVP ASAP.
The hill on which Jesus was crucified, Golgotha, plays a
significant role in the story of our salvation. To the east of Jerusalem,
probably located somewhere on the Mt of Olives,* was this hill where the Romans
executed convicted Jews. But the story of this “Place of the Skull”
doesn’t begin with the Romans and their executions. “Golgotha” is
related to the Hebrew term “skull” and has a history among the Jews.
In the Law, God prescribed that when the armies were
numbered that they be numbered “skull by skull” or “head by head” (Cf. Ex
16.16; 38.26; Num 1.2, 18, 20, 22; 3.47). It is quite possible that when the
armies of Yahweh were being numbered, this was the place that they went to be
counted. Now, here at Golgotha, the armies are gathering around Yahweh in the
flesh. The Gospels tell us about the soldiers gathered around for Jesus’
mockery who also accompany him to the cross. We hear many people mocking Jesus
on this hill. These armies are gathering together against Yahweh and against
his Christ, seeking to throw off their authority (Ps 2). They are seeking
to “crush the head,” Jesus. They are treating him as the serpent.
The Lord has come to his temple. He is going to destroy it.
So what?
Large sections of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are taken up with
Jesus teaching his disciples about the destruction of the Temple (Mt 24; Mk 13;
Lk 21). Jesus not only speaks about it, he prophetically acts out the
destruction of the Temple when he turns over the money changers’ tables, drives
everyone out, and shuts down the Temple for a day. The Temple occupies a
central place in the life of God’s people and becomes a focal point of Jesus’
ministry in the transition between the new age and the age to come. But why?
Why take so much time in discussing and focusing on the Temple? Why should we
care about what happens to an ancient building back in the first century? Well,
if Jesus thought it important enough to talk about, and the writers of the
Gospels under the inspiration of the Spirit believed it was important enough to
record among the massive amounts of other information that could have been
recorded (cf. Jn 21.25), then it must be important to the continuing life of
the church.
There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’Abraham Kuyper
