Written by Reuben M. Bredenhof |
Saturday, August 20, 2022
Not long after John 11, Jesus will come out of his own grave in triumph over Satan and death. It is through the power of Christ’s resurrection that faith lives within us, together with hope, and love. And when we are made alive in Christ, death can no longer keep its hold on us. Believers still die, but now we’re joined to the One who is “the resurrection and the life.”

Death happens every day. Every day people die from cancer and drug overdoses and car crashes. Every day there are funerals at the local cemeteries. I read that about 160,000 people die each day, all around the world—that’s a lot of death.
And that’s just physical death. Think of the pandemic of spiritual death in this world, the many millions who are living without God and a knowledge of Christ. They are dead in trespasses and sins—just like we would be, apart from God’s grace.
So how wondrous is the good news in John 11:25, where Jesus announces with another of the seven “I am” declarations,
I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he may die, he shall live.
Not far in the background of Jesus’s saying is the raising of Lazarus back to life. Lazarus, together with his two sisters Mary and Martha, were good friends of the Lord Jesus. But Lazarus had become very sick and was fading fast. It seemed like Jesus had an opportunity to go and heal him, but He delayed his journey. Now, when Jesus is finally near Bethany, Lazarus has been dead for four days.
Martha has gone out to meet Jesus on his way. We suppose that she is broken with grief over losing her brother. But despite her sadness, she speaks of great confidence in the Lord. And Jesus responds: “Your brother will rise again” (v. 23). On this dark day, the gospel is beginning to shine. Death isn’t the end, not for Lazarus, nor for anyone who believes.
Now, Martha knows already that Jesus has power to do incredible wonders. But she can’t imagine how Jesus can do something about her dead brother, here and now. This is what she says: “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day” (v. 24). She’s probably thinking about the Old Testament promises of resurrection, like in Psalm 16, and she is sure that God will raise her loved one on the great day of the Lord.
In response, Jesus doesn’t say, “Nice try, Martha, but think again.” He doesn’t correct her, but He shifts the focus onto himself. He will transform God’s promise of resurrection. For Martha is speaking with the person who is the sure fulfillment of every ancient word. “In me,” He says, “the resurrection has already come!”
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All sin originates from the heart, the moral center of every person. Everybody is guilty of sinning against God, but the doctrine of original corruption goes deeper. In addition to the inevitability of human sinning, Scripture also witnesses to the fact that we enter this world as sinners, each of us possessing a morally corrupt condition that precedes any sins we commit. This original corruption starts from birth (Ps. 51:5; 58:3) and renders us full of evil and deception (Eccles. 9:3), dead in our transgressions and enemies of God (Eph. 2:1–3). Every facet of the human personality, from the soul and mind to emotions and desires, is tainted by depravity; every sinful thought and action is polluted (Matt. 15:16–20; Luke 6:43–44). 

The Christian doctrine of sin implies that human beings are responsible creatures. This overwhelming truth so pervades every book and (possibly) every chapter of the Bible that it hardly needs defense. Sin, of course, is the very reason for the glad tidings of redemption. From the beginning, we sinned by disobeying God’s commandments (Gen. 2:17; 3:1–6), a pattern that has repeated itself every day since that catastrophe in Eden; the apostle John describes sin as lawlessness (1 John 3:4). But elsewhere in the canon, sin is also couched as missing the mark (hamartia), unrighteousness (adikia), ungodliness (asebeia), transgression (parabasis), and so on. Early theologians even tried locating the essence of sin in pride, greed, selfishness, unbelief, and other vices. Nevertheless, Scripture’s different ways of talking about sin agree that it always involves culpability before God (Ps. 51:4). Cornelius Plantinga therefore rightly defines sin as “any thought, desire, emotion, word, or deed—or its particular absence, that displeases God and deserves blame.”
A theory of the person consistent with the doctrine of sin must include the capacity for what I call moral transcendence. Moral transcendence includes three interrelated features that encapsulate the theory of moral responsibility implicit in Scripture.
First, all sin presupposes the baseline experience of the unity of consciousness and intentionality. The unity of consciousness is my first-person experience of sinning against God: “Against you,” says David, “you only, have I sinned” (Ps. 51:4). The experience of the Holy Spirit convicting of sin is not merely a series of neurons firing, or a complex sequence of brain function; rather, it is fundamentally a supernatural awareness of personal wrongdoing. The knowledge that I stand before God as his creature and that I have sinned against him is a first-person awareness of my unified self, an awareness that cannot be reduced to one or more parts of my body or brain. Intentionality, on the other hand, is a technical philosophical term referring to one aspect of consciousness, the “of-ness” or “about-ness” that we associate with mental states (often referred to as “qualia” by philosophers). Whenever I sin, there is always something I desire, want, or think that I need. Seconds before I decide to speak unkindly to my wife, I may feel the conviction of the Spirit urging me to desist because what I am considering saying to her will displease my heavenly Father. If I ignore that prompting and lash out verbally, I may later reflect on what I have done and feel remorse and perhaps repentance. Thus, every instance of human sinning involves intentionality, an array of mental acts directed at things, other people, and ultimately God.
Second, all sin is responsive to reason, and that presupposes a (nonphysical) mind. Sin always involves intellectual, emotional, or volitional aspects of the human person. We believe the wrong things, or the right things in the wrong ways; we desire things opposed to the will of God and we consciously disobey God even when we know that it displeases him. Scripture, in fact, gives a uniform depiction of human sinning: Eve sinned because “the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom” (Gen. 3:6 NIV).
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Written by A.W. Workman |
Thursday, March 7, 2024
What was the servant doing all those years when the other servants were busy trading for the increase of their master’s wealth? Presumably, looking out for his own wealth. And why? Because he did not believe that it would be worth it to risk spending all those years and all that sweat, only to have his master come back and take it all from him. If he invested for his master, he would labor and sacrifice and risk, and for what? A stingy master? No, thanks! He would instead do the minimum, follow the letter of the law, try to serve two masters. His master had given him this money to keep safe, so he would do that – and no more.

A number of months ago I was reading the parable of the talents to my kids at bedtime. There was nothing unusual about the night. I was leaning against the doorframe to the bedroom they all currently share, Bible open in my hands. The lamp was turned off in their room to help them settle down and I was relying on the hallway light for my reading. The plan was simple as always. Read a little bit, discuss a little bit, sing a song or two together, pray, give kisses and hugs goodnight, and finally, navigate multiple attempts to get out of bed again for various and sundry reasons. It was a typical night, not the kind of time I would have predicted for the conviction of the Spirit to fall.
We were almost finished our reading through the book of Matthew and that night had come to chapter 25, verses 14-30. The parable of the talents will be well-known to most of you, but if it’s not you can read it here and I’ll also post it below. The summary is that a master leaves on a long journey, entrusting three servants with three very large sums of money (called talents). The first one receives five talents, about 100 years’ worth of wages for a laborer. The second receives two talents, about 40 years’ worth of wages for a laborer. And the third receives one talent, roughly 20 years’ wages. The first two servants spend the following lengthy period investing their master’s money and both double the amounts they received. The third servant goes off and buries the money he received. When the master returns, he affirms the faithfulness of the first two servants and then rewards them with both increased authority and joy. But the third servant explains that he played it safe and merely stashed his master’s money away. He says he did this because he knew his master’s character to be harsh and stingy. The master, in turn, strongly rebukes him, telling him that if he knew this he still should have at least put the money in the bank, where it could have collected interest. He then commands that the one talent be given to the first servant, and that the wicked servant be cast out into the “outer darkness,” essentially into hell. The parable ends with the third servant losing even the amount that he had preserved, while the first two servants receive even more than the enormous amounts they had ended up with.
This is a parable I know well, and have read dozens and dozens of times. But for whatever reason, when I read it this time (and read it for my kids, no less, not for me), clarity and conviction fell hard. The familiarity of the passage meant that I’d never really understood the whole bit about the master’s character. But I suddenly realized that this was at the very core of the parable. The wicked servant says of the master, “I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground.” Essentially, “You are a stingy, exacting man, so I didn’t risk doing costly work that would go unrewarded. I played it safe and stashed your money away.” In Middle Eastern culture, then as well as now, stinginess is viewed as one of the very worst vices.
I was struck with a question I’d not thought of before. What was the servant doing all those years when the other servants were busy trading for the increase of their master’s wealth? Presumably, looking out for his own wealth. And why? Because he did not believe that it would be worth it to risk spending all those years and all that sweat, only to have his master come back and take it all from him. If he invested for his master, he would labor and sacrifice and risk, and for what? A stingy master? No, thanks! He would instead do the minimum, follow the letter of the law, try to serve two masters. His master had given him this money to keep safe, so he would do that – and no more.
The other two servants seem to have had a radically different view of their master’s character. We see this from their actions. They do spend a long time using what their master had entrusted to them to generate even more wealth for him. How are they able to do this? Well, the parable tells us that they are faithful. In one sense, this is enough.
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