“In faithfulness you have afflicted me” (Psalm 119:75). For when our training in righteousness has done its sanctifying work, one of the peaceful fruits is that we learn to joyfully trust the Father’s hand because we’ve learned to trust the Father’s heart.

Scripture tells us that “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17). But have you ever received a good gift from the Father that arrived in a package that appeared to be anything but good?
Jesus came into the world to make the Father known to all whom “he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12, 18). He came to help us “see what kind of love the Father has given to us” (1 John 3:1), that “as a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him” (Psalm 103:13). He wanted us to know that the Father abounds “in steadfast love and faithfulness” toward us (Exodus 34:6).
This is why, when Jesus promised us, “Whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you” (John 16:23), he made sure we understood the Father’s heart toward us:
Which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! (Matthew 7:7–11)
It’s an astounding promise of astonishing goodness and faithfulness: “For everyone who asks receives” (Matthew 7:8). Why? Because our Father wants our “joy [to] be full” (John 16:24).
However, Jesus, of all people, also knew that some of the good gifts our loving Father gives in answer to our prayers — some of his best gifts, in fact — arrive in painful packages we don’t expect. When we receive them, we can be tempted to think the Father gave us a serpent when we asked for a fish, not realizing till later the priceless goodness of the gift we received.
Why would the Father do this? As just one in the great cloud of God’s children across the ages, I can bear personal witness that he does it so that our joy may be full. And I’ll offer that witness here, with the help of one of history’s most beloved pastors and hymn writers. Because both he and I know how important it is to trust the Father’s heart when we’re dismayed by what we receive from his hand.
Near Despair an Answered Prayer?
John Newton was the godly eighteenth-century English pastor most famous for penning the hymn “Amazing Grace,” which describes the best gift Newton ever received from the Father: the forgiveness of his sins and eternal life through Christ.
But at times he also received, as I have, gracious gifts from God that amazed him in a different sense. He expressed this amazement in a lesser-known hymn, “I Asked the Lord That I Might Grow,” which begins,
I asked the Lord that I might growIn faith and love and every grace,Might more of his salvation know,And seek more earnestly his face.
’Twas he who taught me thus to pray;And he, I trust, has answered prayer;But it has been in such a wayAs almost drove me to despair.
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In a day when the message of the cross is so often marginalised and its meaning so often undermined, doubling our efforts in proclaiming it could hardly be timelier and more relevant. Those who deny, distort, dismiss, and disparage the biblical doctrine of the atonement do injury to the gospel. Therefore, my brothers, preach the atonement. Preach it powerfully, passionately, and plainly.

“I advise you to keep close to the atonement. The doctrine of the cross is the sun in the solar system of truth.” Every gospel preacher would do well to heed this timeless counsel from John Newton. The atonement refers to the entirety of Jesus’ work of reconciling God and men, by dying as a substitute, and paying the infinite penalty for our sins. Christ died in place of sinners and bore the sins that God justly condemns and punishes. This teaching, that God himself has made full atonement for sinners (1 Peter 2:24), is unique to Christianity.
As such, it’s no hyperbole to say that the atonement is the real heart of the gospel—and the lifeblood of the Christian life. A crucified Saviour is what sets Christianity apart from all other world religions. This understanding is apostolic to the core. Even Paul preached as of first importance that “Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3). More tellingly, he identifies the gospel as “the message of the cross” (1 Corinthians 1:18). One can scarcely read the Gospels without seeing that this very idea was the orienting reality of Jesus’ life and ministry. He came to “give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).
No Greater Theme
Worthwhile preaching doesn’t merely rake leaves across the surface of scripture. Rather, it drills deep to mine out the gold. Such ought to be our preaching of the atonement. We need to preach that the atonement is perfect (Hebrews 7:26-28), efficacious for all those who come to God and believe (John 6:37, 40; Isaiah 53:5). We also ought to preach its various motifs: reconciliation (Romans 5:10-11; 2 Corinthians 5:18-20); redemption (Romans 3:24; Galatians 3:13); propitiation (Romans 3:25; Hebrews 2:17); sacrifice (Ephesians 5:2; Hebrews 9:1-10:18), forgiveness (Ephesians 1:7); and victory (Hebrews 2:14; 1 John 3:8).
Those of us who preach are never at risk of being too atonement-centred. In fact, to preach the doctrine of salvation without properly spotlighting the atonement is to preach an emaciated gospel at best and a non-gospel at worst. Paul’s resolve was to “preach Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). The knowledge of Christ crucified stands perched above all other knowledge. We may also deduce that there can’t be true pastoral ministry apart from the cross.

In light of this apostolic precedence, we too must centre the cross in our preaching and pastoring. If we do, we will benefit ourselves and our hearers in the following five ways:
1. The Atonement Establishes Both Identity and Assurance
Our essential identity as Christians is tied up with Christ’s work on the cross. Martin Luther said that the sweetness of the gospel is found in the first person pronouns: “the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). Jesus did not die for nameless, faceless people. He died for “me.” His cross stands as an eternal monument of God’s holy and infinite love towards believers, like me.
His love is such that “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8)! The cross testifies to the matchless blessedness of every believer. So Paul asks: “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).
That Christ died in our stead also cements our assurance of eternal forgiveness (2 Corinthians 5:15-21; Galatians 3:13). The words of Augustus Toplady ring ever so true: “Payment God cannot twice demand, / First from my bleeding surety’s hand, / And then again from mine.”
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Written by Robert C. Thornett |
Thursday, January 5, 2023
In Plato’s Republic, social justice is about finding harmony among all the diverse elements of society to achieve The Good. By contrast, woke social justice brands certain segments of society “oppressors” and seeks to purge them, even as it mouths platitudes about seeking diversity. Woke social justice is also antithetical to justice in the classical sense of giving “to each his due,” as Cicero put it. It recognizes only group moralities and ignores individual morality, ensuring that no individual receives their due. 

The woke version of social justice is based on the fallacy that engineering an equality of power among identity groups somehow creates justice. But as Plato and Greeks before him knew, forcing any result, let alone one based on incidental markers like race and gender, often leads to bizarre outcomes and usually works against true justice for all involved.
In Book 8 of The Republic, Plato illustrates how all flawed governments (e.g., timarchy, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny) fail by misprioritizing some relative good over the absolute good. Specifically, democracies overvalue the relative goods of freedom and equality and do not know where to draw the proper limits in pursuing them. This leads to the acceptance and proliferation of all sorts of dysfunctional and unjust forms of freedom, which conflict with the true freedoms and equalities that provide the foundation for a just society. As the spirit of equality-at-all-costs takes over, democracies treat children as the equals of their parents, foreigners as equals of citizens, and students as equals of teachers; even the animals think they are equal to people and free to do whatever they want.
Wokeism is a manifestation of precisely what Plato describes: democracies’ inability to comprehend the proper limits of equality and freedom, or the fact that there need to be limits at all. Wokeism is built on the democratic error of treating equality as The Good and pursuing it ad absurdum. But like honor, wealth, and power, equality is only a relative good, which means it can be used for good, evil, and everything in between. Relative goods only become truly good when they are used for good purposes, when they are employed in the service of The Good. Unlike Plato’s world, there is no true absolute Good in wokeism, no higher principle than equality of result for its own sake.
Thus wokeism has no compass pointing to true north, no way of recognizing when equality is on course to achieve good and when it is not. It simply dons a blindfold and embarks on an endless wild goose chase in pursuit of identitarian equity. People are put in identity boxes marked “oppressor” and “oppressed” based on whatever power advantages and disadvantages their incidentals afford them, as if to be powerful were necessarily to be oppressive and to lack power were necessarily to be victimized. Every inequality of power is conflated with a form of discrimination and “oppression.” The woke quest is to manufacture an equality of power among identity boxes, calling this goal “progress.”
Take for example the case of transgender athletes competing in college women’s swimming. While the purpose of Title IX is to achieve equality by eliminating unfair discrimination based on sex, woke gender equity works against this. It advocates that someone with an unfair advantage, a male body, should have an equal chance to compete against those with female bodies. In the name of an equality of power among genders, woke identitarianism creates an inequality of power wherein female swimmers are forced into a competition that is self-evidently unfair.
Forcing Equity Brings Destruction
Long before Plato, Greeks illustrated the folly of equating equity with justice through the myth of Procrustes, a robber who invited passing travelers to spend the night. Procrustes said his iron bed would fit everyone equally perfectly. And it did, but only after Procrustes had stretched the legs of the shorter until they ripped or hammered off the legs of the taller, killing every traveler in the process. Eventually the hero Theseus came along and killed Procrustes by fitting him to his own bed.
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