Trust and Obey
Peter has described to us the character of God, His work of redemption, and the reality of our suffering, and likewise calls us to the exercise of faith by entrusting ourselves to God and doing what is right. We lean in to the storms of life and press on in our earthly calling toward our heavenly hope in Christ.
Commit their souls to God in doing good (1 Peter 4:19, NKJV)
One of the most well known conclusions in Scripture is found in the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: fear God and keep His commandments, for this is man’s all” (Eccl. 12:13). Not only is this the summation of the book, it is encompassing as the chief end of man.
That statement serves as a corrective lens to life for safe passage in our journey through a fallen world, lest we be led astray by our experience. When we behold the righteous faltering and the wicked prospering, when we witness seeming chaos and contradiction, we may draw wrong opinions about God and His dealings with us.
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Jesus, Born of a Virgin
The humbling witness of the virgin birth is that God did consider us worth it. Worth saving, worth sending his Son for, worth giving up his Son to the sufferings and death of the cross for.
Picture life as a journey, a journey from birth to death. We are born, we live, and we die. That’s how it was for Jesus. Life was a journey for him too. When he made our nature his own, he made our journey his own as well. At both the beginning and the end of his journey, however, we find ourselves in the presence of the utterly unique. No-one has ever begun life’s journey quite as Jesus did. And no-one’s journey has ended quite as his did either.
Let’s start with the end. Jesus’ death was agonising, cruel, and unjust and in these respects no different from the deaths of countless others. But it was only for a time — that’s the difference. When God raised him to life again on the third day it was with a body so changed that it would never experience death again. Death, for Jesus, is forever a thing of the past. It’s the great point of contrast between himself and those whom he raised to life in the course of his earthly ministry. The son of the widow of Nain, Jairus’s daughter, and his friend Lazarus were each restored to life in a body that was still mortal. Each would afterwards die again — and did so. But not Jesus! The body he took with him to the Father’s right hand is now two thousand years old and as imperishable and immortal as on the day of his resurrection.
See what a difference this makes to the end of his journey! Death ceases to be an end at all and becomes instead a mere pause. In his glorified humanity, a complete man again, body and spirit together, Jesus is journeying on endlessly! And though his journey is one on which believers will ultimately join him, it is not until our own resurrection at the moment of his return.
From the end we now turn to the beginning. If no one’s life-journey has ended quite as Jesus’ did, no one’s has begun in quite the same way either. Here is the reason: Jesus was born of a virgin. The birth itself was entirely natural. The conception, by contrast, was supernatural. It is possible for a virgin to conceive today because of the advances in medical technology, but not two thousand years ago. When Mary asked the angel how she, a virgin, could give birth to a son, this was the angel’s reply: ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you’ (Luke 1:35). -
5 Theses on Time
Written by T.M. Suffield |
Tuesday, March 7, 2023
The age to come is the one which is breaking into ours, it’s the one where Christ’s kingdom rules and reigns triumphantly, the one where death is defeated by the hand of Life riding a white horse. We are saved for this glorious revisioning of the cosmos.I suspect most of us give little thought to time. It’s simply something we move through, or exist in, or bemoan the passing of as the years slowly strip away the vigour of our youth.
The fact that what time is amounts to a philosophical question that is notoriously tricky and nevertheless vital to any sense of trying to live a good or harmonious or flourishing or blessed (delete as appropriate) life, is a fact that passes most of us happily by.
Afterall, philosophers are a notoriously unhappy bunch, so contemplating their tricky questions is unlikely to contribute to our sense of a good life, right?
That may be, and yet the Bible has a lot of things to say about time as a broad concept and as something to be inhabited well. Our theology, at least at the popular level within our churches, leaves these questions alone most of the time. It sounds esoteric, irrelevant, and impractical.
While I would want to mount a spirited defence of the relevance of the esoteric and impractical, today is not that day, and my introduction is already long and meandering enough to have lost you.
Here are five theses on time.
We Are Saved from Time
In Galatians 1 we are described as being delivered from the ‘present evil age.’ We are saved from a time. We tend to think of salvation either psychologically (rescued from the guilt or shame of sin), ontologically (union with Christ), spatially (rescued from Hell or the earth for heaven), chthonically (rescued from the powers of evil and death), or in terms of dominion (transferred to the kingdom of light).
All of those are Biblical, though I would suggest that spatially is not the best way of describing that particular set of realities. Rarely do I hear anyone speak of salvation chronologically (or kairologically?). We are saved from time.
There are lots of things to bemoan in our age, and there have been in ages past too. The Bible would see these as a weave stretching back to Eden: not several ages but a succession of sin’s dark marring written across the face of the world. We are rescued from this age, so we do not have to face its consequences if we choose not to, we are free to call it evil where it is and should do so, and we do not have to live according to its rules or principles.
In other words, we’re free from the curse of this time.
We Are Saved for a Time
Positively we are rescued for the age to come (Matthew 12, Ephesians 1, Hebrews 6)—that time after our stint in the presence of Christ in what we often call ‘heaven’ as shorthand. By the age to come we mean the time after the resurrection of the dead and the triumphant and everlasting victory of Jesus the Christ over all powers and authorities.
The age to come is the one which is breaking into ours, it’s the one where Christ’s kingdom rules and reigns triumphantly, the one where death is defeated by the hand of Life riding a white horse. We are saved for this glorious revisioning of the cosmos.
This time is breaking into our time because Christ came at the end of time (1 Peter 1, Galatians 4, Matthew 26, Mark 1, John 7). We now live in the collision of two epochs, the time between the times.
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The SBC’s “Title IX” Recommendations on Handling Abuse
Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Tuesday, June 21, 2022
The recommendations in the report essentially represent a progressive takeover of the SBC, utilizing the same pattern of of Title IX style administrative control used by progressives in higher education (and elsewhere). As in secular society, accusations of wrongdoing are being leveraged for the purposes of seizing control of an institution.In newsletter #49 I discussed the importance of defending institutional integrity. The first plank of this was “trusthworthiness,” that is, operating with baseline morals and ethics. As I put it, “You would think this would be a simple baseline element of institutional leadership, but alas apparently not. The number of churches and other Christian institutions with a variety of moral, ethical, operational, and even criminal problems is absurdly high.”
Unfortunately, one of the areas with severe failings has been in responding to abuse. The Catholic abuse scandals get the most press, but there’s a ton of Protestant ones too. At the same time, I pointed out that in the Protestant world, outrage over abuse is curiously selective and often associated with political attempts by activists to insert themselves as the leaders of the institution being accused. I said with regards to this:
This is why, although even accusations by enemies that are true need to be strongly addressed, you should never give any sort of position of authority or oversight of your organization to people making accusations against it. You’ll note that they frequently agitate for this such as by demanding that some allied organization be retained for an investigation, calling for the board members to be replaced (naturally by people of which they approve), etc. But just because I point out that an organization has some conflict of interest, for example, that doesn’t mean I or my buddies should be assigned any role in running or overseeing its finances.
I want to examine the recent Southern Baptist Convention abuse report through this lens. I didn’t go into any detail on the investigation itself and the findings. Sadly, I have no doubt that there are many cases of abuse, and many cases in which incidents of abuse were poorly handled.
The SBC is a huge denomination with nearly 14 million members. Clearly, any group this large will have lot of bad things happen within it. Demographer Lyman Stone suggested that the report shows the SBC has lower levels of abuse than we would expect. Even if that’s true, it certainly doesn’t excuse the evildoers or those who failed to correctly act in positions of authority. Judgment begins with the household of God. The Protestant house has not been in order on abuse.
Rather than the allegations themselves, I want to look at the report’s recommendations for action. There are about 30 pages worth of them, including 17 executive committee recommendations (along with two alternatives) and 16 credentials commmittee recommendations. So even in the recommendations, I cannot do a detailed analysis here. But I will give a big picture look.
Creating a Title IX Style Adjudication System in the SBC
Before getting into the recommendations, it’s important to note that in baptist church polity, each congregation is completely autonomous. Unlike other denominations like the Episcopal Church or the Presbyterian Church, where the denomination provides a lot of oversight and control over congregations, baptist denominations do not have authority over their churches. Basically, the only membership requirements are very low baselines, such as giving assent to the broadly evangelical Baptist Faith and Message statement. The SBC is more of a cooperative association than a denomination per se.
The abuse report recommendations start to change that in two key ways:It proposes creating an “administrative entity” that will be similar to a Title IX style tribunal in investigating allegations of abuse.
It proposes turning the credentialing committee (which basically determines whether or not a church is affiliated with the SBC) into a more expansive accrediting committee that can kick out any churches that don’t comply with the Title IX style entity, or who are otherwise not perceived as following the party line from the report recommendations on abuse.Given that this report is about some of the some heinous felonies on the books —sexual assault and sexual abuse —it’s remarkable how few references to the criminal or civil legal system there are in the recommendations. Apart from references to mandated reporting —cases where churches are legally obligated to report suspected abuse to the police —I only saw one reference to criminal justice in the recommendations, a note that the Title IX style entity might hire people from law enforcement backgrounds.
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