Christians can strain the relationship with God through our sin. But if we are repentant, we don’t need to fear that we will be removed from God’s family. 

Christians all love the idea of being forgiven. We love to sing of our sins being paid for and know how kind our God has been to us. That is 100% correct. If we trust in Jesus, we are secure knowing that Jesus paid our penalty for us.
This has led many to struggle to understand why Christians should keep God’s law or try to deal with sin. After all, logically, if we are forgiven by what Jesus has done, then our future is secure. It doesn’t depend on us, we are constantly told, it all depends on Jesus. So this should mean, we reason, that we can live however we want. God loves us. Why worry about sin and law at all?
The idea that we can live however we want because of God’s grace is not a new one. Paul deals with it at length in Romans, for example, way back in the first century after Jesus. And in our modern individualistic age, we are very tempted to follow the same line of reasoning. We’re saved by grace, so that means I can live how I want and I am still forgiven!
I think the logic of adoption helps us a great deal when it comes to understanding why how we live as Christians is so important. Let me explain.
Adoption is when a couple decide to accept a child into their family. That child is not theirs genetically, but usually due to some significant problems in their biological family, they are looking for a safe place to belong. When this child is adopted, it is not due to their worthiness. It is due to the gracious act of their new parents. They have a new legal status due to what their parents have done. That’s what Jesus has done for us. When we come to trust in Jesus, we then have a different status before God, and we are part of God’s family. We have that status by grace alone.
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Written by W. Robert Godfrey |
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
John promised that whoever reads this book aloud and hears it and keeps it will receive a blessing (Rev. 1:3). We will indeed be blessed as we read it slowly, thoughtfully, and meditatively, asking what God is teaching us through the images He uses.

The whole Bible is the Word of God—inerrant, authoritative revelation. That revelation is in words, and those words come to us in a variety of literary styles. For example, some parts of the Bible are history, and some are poetry. Both forms are the revelation of God, but they must be read somewhat differently for their meaning to be properly understood. When biblical history says that David was a shepherd, it means that he tended sheep. When the poetry of Psalm 23 says that the Lord is our shepherd, it means that the Lord cares for His people in a way that is similar to the way that a shepherd cares for his sheep. To insist that Psalm 23 teaches that the Lord tends sheep is to miss the point completely. To interpret Scripture properly and to truly understand its meaning, we must recognize the various ways that the human authors of the Bible were inspired to write and what they intended.
Careful attention to style and the intention of the author is particularly important as we approach the book of the Revelation. There John is writing prophetically and using a great many word pictures that often have a poetic quality. Consider, for example, John’s description of Jesus in the heavenly temple in the first chapter of Revelation. He does not name Jesus explicitly, but his meaning is clear. He sees “one like a son of man” (Rev. 1:13), and initially the picture he paints seems straightforward: “clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire” (Rev. 1:13–14). Already we may have questions. Does the glorified Christ in heaven literally have white hair? That is possible, but John may also be speaking somewhat poetically and suggesting the maturity and wisdom of Christ. Does Christ in heaven have eyes like a flame of fire? Again, John may be teaching us the intensity of His searching sight rather than the color of His eyes.
These questions are really answered for us by John in the final two elements of his description of Jesus: “From his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength” (Rev. 1:16). Clearly, John is teaching that from the mouth of Jesus comes the sharp, judging Word of God in the spirit of what we read in Hebrews 4:12: “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” Even more certainly, when John writes that His face was shining like the sun in full strength, he shows that his description goes beyond the literal appearance of Jesus in heaven in order to communicate its meaning. If the face of Jesus was literally shining like the sun, then John could not have seen His hair or His eyes or His mouth. John writes of the shining of the face of Jesus to show His glory and the fullness and purity of light that is in Him.
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God’s Christ has conquered, and he will return to consummate his inaugurated kingdom. While we wait, the nations are raging, trying to burst his bonds and cast away his cords. It is ours to understand and embrace the interpretive perspective of the biblical authors, to see the patterns in the narrative and then to align those with the patterns of our own experience: the seed of the woman could only come if women are saved through childbearing, and the human race will only continue if men and women embrace their created sexual identities, enter into marriage, and do together what God commanded in Genesis 1:28. The serpent hates the woman and her seed, and he hates Christ and his church.

To give an anecdotal illustration: Two girls in our church, an eleven-year-old and her fourteen-year-old sister, recently met girls their own ages in a public place. Both were asked by separate little girls on different occasions: “Do you like girls or boys?” These encounters took place, not in San Francisco or New York City, but in Louisville, Kentucky.
The loss of the givenness that, for instance, little girls will like little boys represents the successful destabilization of norms, or “hegemonic discourses,” as Antonio Gramsci terms them, whereby the assumption that little girls will like little boys can no longer be made. This “blurring of boundaries” is exactly what things like Drag Queen Story Hour are designed to achieve. The drag queens, by the way, have made it all the way to Jackson, Tennessee. The offensive and perverse sexualization of the public library is meant to call into question fixed categories of male and female. As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay explain, Queer theorists hold that “we should believe sex, gender, and sexuality to be social constructs, not because it’s necessarily true, but because it is easier to politicize them and demand change if they are social constructs than if they are biological.”[3]
The water in which we swim is a toxic brew of Marxism, postmodern philosophy, and expressive individualism. It is an alternative religion, a false gospel, as has been observed:
Social Justice Theorists have created a new religion, a tradition of faith . . . a postmodern faith based on a dead God, which sees mysterious worldly forces in systems of power and privilege and which sanctifies victimhood.[4]
We must take our thoughts and our tastes captive by the knowledge of Christ. Here are the strongholds that need destroying. These are the lofty opinions and arguments raised up against the knowledge of God (2 Cor. 10:4–5). We must bring taste into line with the truth. We must disciple people so that they know the difference between the worldview of Critical Theory and Christianity. The formation of a Christian worldview requires a biblical-theological understanding of who we are and where we live, and biblical theology will also equip us to notice the typological patterns in the way the serpent and his seed keep trying the same things in new ways.
Biblical theology is the attempt to understand and embrace the interpretive perspective of the biblical authors.[5] That interpretive perspective, or worldview, has an overarching master story, from which those authors derive (1) truths, doctrines, and dogmas, (2) symbols, imagery, and patterns, and (3) values, ethics, and culture. In the Psalms and other expressions of worship (Exod. 15, the hymns in the New Testament, etc.), the liturgical expressions of worship reinforce the truths by activating symbols to build culture.
In other words, the master narrative explains where the world came from, who human beings are, what has gone wrong, and what God has done, is doing, and has promised to do to set things right in the end. Thus the master narrative inspires faith in God and provokes those who believe to respond to him with thanks and praise. The master narrative also generates symbolism and imagery that summarize, interpret, and portend what has been and will be. In the narrative we find recurring patterns whose significance escalates with each new repetition.[6] And the explanation given in the Bible for why God began the project, how he has orchestrated it and to what telos, is that God seeks to set the fullness of his glory on display. He does this as he makes known his character as a righteous God who upholds his own word when he judges, setting the backdrop and context for the simultaneous display of his character as a merciful God when he forgives and saves the repentant who believe. That is to say, the center of biblical theology is the glory of God in salvation through judgment.[7]
I rehearse this definition of biblical theology and its central claim to be grounded in God’s revelation of his own character because I want to set the biblical worldview in contrast with what seems to be the predominant worldview that informs the rejection of the Bible’s teaching on how human beings have been created male and female with specified responsibilities. Paul speaks of those who “depart from the faith” to embrace alternative worldviews that inform alternative ways of living as “devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared” (1 Tim. 4:1–2). Note that this comment follows hard on the heels of his statement that he does “not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man” (2:12), shortly after which he explains that he writes so that Timothy might “know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth” (3:15).
Carl Trueman explains how the Marxist worldview works:
Take, for example, Christianity’s teaching, taught from myriad pulpits over the years, that husbands and wives should be faithful to each other, should not drink too much, and should work hard and honestly for their masters or employers. A Christian might see these as imperatives because they are the will of God and the means by which human beings, made in his image, can flourish.
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