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On October 6, 2018 By In Culture, Politics, Theology, Wisdom

Principalities and Powers, Part II

The Principalities and Powers, Part 2
Guest post by Richard Bledsoe

For Part 1 of this series, click HERE.

The great question for the emerging East, Asia and other awakening third world areas, for an emerging nation like China is, “what fate awaits them?” They are now emerging from an analogous paganism that the West emerged from centuries ago. Here is an amazing quotation from David Aikman, the Time Magazine religious editor. He is a quoting from “a scholar from one of China’s premier academic institutions, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing, in 2002.”

 “One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world,” he said. “We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective.  At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had.  Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.”1

There is a speeding up of history. (more…)

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On October 1, 2018 By In Theology

Head and Body

Luke writes his two volumes, the Gospel and Acts, to be read together. This is quite obvious from what he writes in Acts 1.1: “The former account I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach….” The story of Jesus continues in the ongoing life of the church.

Once you see this, the relationship between the two books becomes apparent. The body–the church–follows the head–Jesus. There are many parallels between the two volumes that tease out this theme of head-and-body. At the beginning of the Gospel, the Holy Spirit hovers over the womb of Mary and creates the body of Christ. At the beginning of Acts the Holy Spirit hovers over the disciples and creates the church. Toward the beginning of the Gospel, the Holy Spirit baptizes Jesus, anointing him with power for his mission. In the beginning of Acts the Holy Spirit baptizes the church anointing them with power for mission. In Luke 5 Jesus heals a paralyzed man. In Acts 3 Peter and John heal a paralyzed man. Jesus raises the dead in Luke 7. Peter raises the dead in Acts 9. Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem though he faces certain death at the hands of the leaders of Israel. Paul sets his face to go to Jerusalem though he faces the threat of death from the officials in Jerusalem. The trial of Jesus and the trial of Paul are also remarkably parallel. (more…)

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On September 29, 2018 By In Culture, Men, Politics, Theology, Wisdom

Principalities and Powers, Part I

The Principalities and Powers, Part 1
guest post by Richard Bledsoe 

Paul contends that with the death of Christ on the Cross, there was an overcoming of the Principalities and the Powers (Col. 2:15).  A great deal has been written on this subject over the last 60 years.1 What was for a long time either ignored, or regarded by liberal scholars as a mythological element in his thought, recaptured scholarly imagination after World War II when it seemed brutally and baldly clear that such entities as Paul describes had been let loose on the earth once more in civilization-destroying World Wars. Principalities and Powers are not themselves personal demonic figures, but are rather elements of the creation that in and of themselves bring order, authority, symmetry, and method to the world. Examples of Principalities and Powers would be the state, the family, the clan and tribe, and the nation. In the modern world, new examples of Principalities could be industry and the media. Each of these entities in a fallen creation cease to be subordinate to God as the creator, and attempt to establish their own hegemony and absoluteness. And, in each of these cases, the Principalities are linked to, and become subject to, personal demonic figures. Paul makes clear that in the ancient world, the Principalities were tutors and keepers of the world, and functioned often in a relatively benign way. With the coming of Christ, and with His death and resurrection, the Principalities and Powers are “disarmed and…triumphed over”, and again are called to take their rightful ruling place under the power of the now triumphant King.  While the war has been decisively won, this also initiated new phases of radical rebellion on the part of the Powers, and the church now lives by constant warfare and battle against these Powers through history (Ephesians 6:10-20). There are at least three phases of the conquest of the Principalities and the Powers through history that interest me here. There are many more, but one must necessarily simplify in order to say anything.

(more…)

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On September 24, 2018 By In Theology, Worship

The Environs of the Spirit

In Luke’s two-volumes, The Gospel of Luke and Acts, the Holy Spirit has a prominent place in the life of Jesus and his church. Whenever the Spirit shows up, our minds should race back to the first place we see him in Scripture: brooding in the darkness over the newly created, unformed and unfilled world. He is the Breath of God that carries the Word to tear apart and put everything back together in a new unified, fruitful relationship: light and darkness, waters above and waters below, seas and dry land, vegetation and ground, and man and woman. All of this is done with an eye on creating an environment for God and man to dwell together (Rev 21.3). (more…)

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On September 17, 2018 By In Theology

The Authority of the Gospel Story

Stories are powerful. As we read, listen, or watch stories, we become involved. We come to know characters in ways that we know very few people in the world. We hear their inner thoughts and feel their struggles. They become our friends in a way. Their dilemmas become our dilemmas. Our views of justice, love, mercy, and many other things are challenged, not just at the intellectual level, but on an emotional level. The more involved we are in the stories, the more they have the power to shape our lives.

The gospel is a story; a true story, history, but a story nevertheless. God is the great Author crafting the storyline and moving the characters all in place to drive the story to a purposeful conclusion. The Gospels recount this story as it reaches its climax. They record the story of Jesus, the one they proclaim to be the Christ, the Messiah. We read and hear the stories of Jesus’ birth, a few vignettes from his early life, his choosing of the twelve, his frustrations with the twelve, his healings, his hiding, his teaching, his death, and his resurrection. They are all the story of the gospel. (more…)

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On September 10, 2018 By In Theology

Why Four Gospels?

Why do we have four Gospels? Wouldn’t it have been a bit more tidy for casual reader and scholar 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, second-century bishop of Lyons, summarizes the early church thought about why we have four Gospels: (more…)

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On September 4, 2018 By In Theology

Hyphenated Christians

Naming is an important feature of human life and the mission to which God has called man. When we name people or things, we create a way to understand them and deal with them. The unknown—the unnamed—creates tension and anxiety. If someone is prowling through your house in the middle of the night, you want to know “Who’s there?” When you are waiting on test results from the doctor, you want a diagnosis so that you can know how to proceed with any treatment. One of the first steps in understanding a person, situation, or an animal is to name it.

This started in the beginning just after God created man. God brought the animals to him to see what he would name them. God gave the man the responsibility to take dominion over all of the animals, to subdue them for the good of the created order. The first step was naming them. When awakened Adam from his death-sleep after creating the woman, the first thing Adam did was name the woman. He then gave her the name “Eve” after God pronounced all the judgments upon him, her, and the serpent. (more…)

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On August 31, 2018 By In Theology

10 Quick Thoughts on the Church

  1. While she has false sons in her pale, she ever will prevail. The Church is the enduring institution that will never be destroyed though attacked and ridiculed.
  2. We have a crisis in our society. The Church has lost its place as society’s spokesperson. She is no longer a royal polis whose voice is treasured.
  3. The ultimate weakness of the church in societal terms stems from the diminished role given to Her in the home and in the public places.
  4. As Calvin writes in his commentary on Galatians 4:26, “This designation, “the mother of us all,” reflects the highest credit and the highest honor on the Church. I am certain that this perspective is not well received even in conservative Reformed circles.
  5. There is a distinct Catholic-phobia among Protestants who think that treating the Church and her worship with honor entails a kind of idolatry. So Protestants in all their independence choose to submit to no one, but their own authority.
  6. The One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic church is treated as if it began its development in the Billy Graham era.
  7. The WCF, Chapter XXV states clearly that the Church is “….the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation.” It is central to the Reformed confession to affirm such verity.
  8. R.B. Kuiper’s “Glorious Body of Christ” stands as one of the greatest works on the church ever published:
  9. When unbelievers use the church as a scapegoat for their unbelief they should immediately recognize that Christ became the scapegoat for our sins. There is no excuse for unbelief.
  10. C.S. Lewis observed: “The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.”

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On August 21, 2018 By In Theology

The Body of the King: The Lord’s Table in Egypt, Babylon, and Corinth

Guest Post by Jacob Gucker

There are patterns in the meta-narrative of the Bible. The crossing of the Red Sea is a recapitulation of the great flood. The passion of the Christ is the greater Exodus. This post assumes the priest —> king —> prophet pattern of redemptive history and will discuss observations about the similarities among three prophetic moments in the Bible and how they relate to the function of the Lord’s Supper in the life of the church.

Israel became a nation when God brought them up from bondage in the land of Egypt. Israel was a child under the tutelage of Torah, a nation of priests with a special class of priests to guard the community practice of Torah. In time, Israel would gain a good king who would reign with wisdom to do justice. The wisdom literature of the Bible is the literature of kings, who make decisions based not only on Torah but by the maturity and wisdom that begins with fearful obedience to Yahweh. After the period of the kings came the period of prophecy. Prophetic times are times of judgment. If Israel’s kings had been Christlike, the prophets would have gone to the nations only, to tear down the world of the Gentiles and rebuild it with prophetic speech. Prophecy is both an end and a beginning. Prophets oversee the judgment of one world and the recreation of the next. In this, they are like God who created the world with divine speech.

This pattern is repeated throughout the Bible. Adam was a failed priest. His firstborn son, Cain, was a father of tyrant kings who filled the earth with blood, requiring judgment and rebirth through Noah and the flood. The cycle begins again with Abraham being priest, Jacob ascending to kingship by wrestling with God and man to become Israel, and Joseph ascending to a throne over the rest of his brothers. For the purpose of this post, we want to juxtapose three prophetic moments and compare them: Joseph in Egypt, Daniel in Babylon, and the Church in Corinth.

We observe that Joseph and Daniel are in very similar situations. They are both exiled to a foreign land where they ascend to prominence among the Gentiles despite their Hebrew heritage. They are both nearly killed for their faithfulness, facing the dangers of pit, dungeon, furnace, and lions’ den. They both rise to prominence by advising kings through dream interpretation. The kings call upon them because they are known to have the “spirit of the gods” in them. The same is true of the apostles and first century Christians. The first-century was a period of judgement upon Israel and the nations. They have the Spirit. They suffer persecution. They rise to prominence among Gentiles, even in Caesar’s household (Phil. 4:22). The major difference in Corinth is that Jesus is Lord, having ascended to the right hand of God. Corinth is in Christ… or at least they are supposed to be, but let’s go back to Daniel and Joseph.

James Jordan has shown that Belshazzar’s feast in Daniel 5 is a sort of anti-Christian communion feast, the result of which is that the king of Babylon is found wanting as a king in the eyes of God. The word for “feast” is actually “bread.” Belshazzar’s feast is a feast of bread and wine, and he orders the vessels stolen from the temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem to be used to drink the wine. The lampstand, the symbol of Yahweh’s vigilance, is brought in to observe this feast. Belshazzar has manifested the Jerusalem temple within Babylon and has drunk judgment upon himself. The temple vessels are in exile and symbolize the people of God as vessels of worship. The body of Israel is being used to prop up a wicked head. The divine response: “This is not my Son, and I am not well pleased.”

Something similar happens in Genesis 42-44 when Joseph’s brothers appear before him looking for grain during a famine. Joseph’s brothers were not brother-keepers, having sold him into slavery. Now, Joseph is in the place of God and he wants to see what these men will do. Joseph divides the brothers for the purpose of reassembling them, for this is the end of prophetic judgment. Joseph wants the brothers to prove their brotherhood, so he keeps Simeon and sends them for Benjamin. They go home, but the only way to get more bread and restore Simeon is to also bring the youngest brother to the table.

When the eleven brothers come before Joseph, he tests them again by hiding his wine cup of divination in Benjamin’s grain sack. Wine has been added to bread; now is the hour of judgment. Joseph’s steward pursues them and accuses them of stealing his master’s sacred cup. The life of the thief is forfeit. However, when the cup is discovered in Benjamin’s sack, Judah returns and offers his own life for Benjamin’s. Joseph breaks down at this and reveals himself to his brothers, for Judah has laid his life down for the youngest. Judah has washed his own garments in the wine of judgment and thus all the brothers in Israel are found faithful. It is for this reason that the scepter of rule did not depart from Judah, but was given to Jesus, who washed His own garments in the wine of judgment by taking up His cross and laying down His life.

The lesson that Paul teaches the Corinthians is the same. The factions in Corinth are the opposite of brotherhood and kingship. The rich feast while the poor go hungry. However, communion is a manifestation of the new temple of God and the body of the King. In order for the church to pass as Christ, the youngest or poorest brothers and sisters must be welcomed to the table, whether poor of pocket or poor in theological understanding. To fail in this area is to fail to discern the body of the King.

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On July 26, 2018 By In Theology

Walking on Water as Proof of Jesus’ Kingship (Mark 6:45-52)

In Mark 6:45-52, Jesus appears to his disciples by walking on water. This is a famous miracle of Jesus, but why did he do it? What was its purpose? Such questions aren’t irrelevant. Presumably, Jesus could have appeared to the disciples in a number of ways – but he chose to walk on water. What was the significance of this miracle?

For context, the disciples were in a boat on the Sea of Galilee traveling to Bethsaida. This was at the command of Jesus, but he stayed behind to pray on a mountain (6:45-46). When evening came, Jesus could see that the disciples were having a hard time. Verse 48 says, “They were making headway painfully, for the wind was against them.”

The disciples are caught in a storm, and this is when Jesus appears to them on the water. When they see him, they think he’s a ghost! They cry out in fear; they are terrified (6:48-49). But Jesus immediately speaks words of comfort: “Take heart. It is I, do not be afraid” (6:50). When he enters the boat, the wind ceases and the disciples are greatly amazed (6:51). By this miracle, Jesus comes to the disciples’ rescue and he displays his divine power. But its placement in Mark 6 gives us an even deeper meaning. (more…)

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