Absolutely astonishing! What shall we, soaked in sin, say to such blood-stained passionate pursuit? If God is for us, who can be against us? Christian and those who will yet trust him, Father God would give up his only Son before he’d give up on you! And, Jesus would betray himself before he would betray you! Christian, as betrayed Jesus’ hands opened for the nails, heaven opened for you.

In the jungles of Irian Jaya, the Sawi people warred with their enemies. The Sawi honored treachery, duplicity and betrayal. Their greatest success? “Befriending” a person and then, when he trusted them, cannibalizing him.
In 1962, Don Richardson and his wife Carol became novice missionaries among the headhunting Sawi, taking their seven-month-old baby with them and adding three more children over the next 15 years.
Don, devoted 8-10 hours each day to learning their language. He reproduced the New Testament in Sawi, teaching the people to read in their native tongue. Carol, a nurse, labored faithfully as “the woman who keeps all the people well.”
However, the Sawi constantly made war with nearby tribes. Finally, for safety, the Richardsons considered moving.
Missionary historian Ruth A. Tucker writes: “As (Don) learned the language and lived with the people, he became more aware of the gulf that separated his Christian worldview from the worldview of the Sawi: ‘In their eyes, Judas, not Jesus, was the hero of the Gospels, Jesus was just the dupe to be laughed at.’”
Friend, is it shocking for you to discover Judas hailed as the hero? Multifaceted betrayal shone like a gem for the Sawi. And for how many others does it subliminally/subconsciously shine? Friend, what if our valuing truth, faithfulness, and relationships is due to the pervasive influence of Christ we have grown to expect? Otherwise, what if “Et tu, Brute” defines reality? Stabbed 60 times, Caesar’s betrayal was a Roman norm. Consider treachery and the history of any nation, say from Vanuatu to Venezuela.
Note, even for us “betrayal” is multi-faceted. We define it as: “unintentionally to show one’s true character” – “to indicate what is not obvious” – “to reveal or disclose in violation of confidence” – “to prove false or violate by unfaithfulness” – “to mislead, delude, or deceive in order to deliver or expose someone to an enemy’s power.”
In “betrayal,” “be” intensifies “tray.” “Tray” is like “trans” – “on the other side of,” “to go across, over, beyond.” “Betrayal” proves a “dear” (“be”) friend to be “very distant” (“trans/tray”) – an “enemy.” The distance of an “enemy” is unveiled by the origin of our word “enemy,” “the opposite of one who loves.” Ruthless!
Now, consider a Greek New Testament word, “paradidómi.”
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Once we are aware of our own fault lines, we seek to reinforce these places with the sturdy, immovable, unchangeable words of Scripture. Grass withers, flowers fade, and false centers shake, but the Word of God stands forever (Isaiah 40:8). We would do well to listen to the advice of writer of Hebrews to those in the early church who were being shaken by persecution: “Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it” (Hebrews 2:1).

When our family moved from the Southeast to Southern California a dozen years ago, we were loath to leave a strong network of relationships yet ready to leave behind mosquitos and humidity. We joked that someone had to move to one of the most beautiful cities in America to serve Jesus in a nearly perfect climate. Our weather may remain stable, but underneath the surface, where the naked eye cannot see, our city sits uncomfortably close to San Andreas fault. As secure as our home and neighborhood may seem, the illusion of security is quite literally only seconds away from being shaken.
The topographical position of our city serves as a helpful analogy to the spiritual condition of our souls. You see, we are only as secure as the source of our functional centers. Put another way, we are as vulnerable as the sources of our security. If our sense of security depends upon our financial package, we will ride the wave of the markets, our hope rising and diving with the DOW. If our sense of security depends upon the success or health of our children, we will find ourselves only as stable as the most recent test scores, well checks, or college acceptance letters. If we put even our local church congregation as the functional source of our security, our sense of stability will fluctuate with attendance, tithing, and congregational health.
While the human longing for security and stability is as old as humanity itself, we are living in a cultural moment where safety and security remain in the forefront of our minds and in the foreground of conversations. In the past year, two conversations with pastors from other continents exposed the growing idol of security in and around me. Both pastors, upon moving to the United States, noted a markedly higher hunger for safety and security in America. This struck me as strange because both came from countries where the threat of war was an everyday reality. In my mind, they had real reasons to be worried about security; however, here they were noticing how much Americans, myself included, obsessed over it. It seems that living in a largely peaceable land does not assure that we have peace in our souls.
The Fragility of Idols
Our souls were always intended to be centered and stayed upon our Creator. We were created from the stable, secure, self-giving love of our Triune God, who made us dignified yet dependent (Genesis 1:26-27). Humans, though crowned with glory and honor, were made as dependent created beings intended to be derive their security from God, their center, Creator, and Sustainer (Psalm 8:3-6; Genesis 1:31). Adam and Eve, in their devastating disobedience, placed self at the center where only God belonged, and we have been following suit ever since.
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Written by Dennis E. Johnson |
Wednesday, September 25, 2024
Hebrews presents a realistic but hopeful paradigm to make sense of your daily experience: like the Israelite generation who left Egypt with Moses, your life is a trek through a hostile wilderness, en route to a homeland that transcends this sin-stained earth.

A Treasury of Truth and Encouragement
Hebrews is a rich treasury of life-transforming truth and heart-sustaining encouragement. Do you long to know Jesus of Nazareth? Hebrews introduces him as the eternal Son who radiates the glory of God (Hebrews 1:2–3), the royal Messiah whom God calls “God” (Hebrews 1:8), and the Creator of earth and heaven (Hebrews 1:10–12). Hebrews also shows how close this glorious divine Son has come to you, sharing your human flesh and blood (Hebrews 2:9–16), enduring suffering and trials like yours (Hebrews 2:17–18), and empathizing with your weakness to help you in crisis (Hebrews 4:15–16).
Do you long to see why Christians base all their hopes—and risk their lives—on this paradoxical union of divine majesty and human frailty in the person of Jesus? Hebrews reveals the perfection of Jesus as the one and only mediator between God and humanity, who secures our communion with God (Hebrews 7:22; 8:6; 9:15). God created you for his friendship, but your bad choices have stained you to the core, creating a chasm of estrangement that you cannot cross. The Son came into the world to do God’s will, enduring temptation without sinning and offering his body as the blameless sacrifice that cleanses your conscience and brings you home (Hebrews 4:15; 7:26; 9:14; 10:5–10). This same Son was raised from the dead (Hebrews 13:20), “crowned with glory and honor” (Hebrews 2:9), and enthroned at God’s right hand (Hebrews 1:3, 13; 8:1). There he lives forever to pray for you (Hebrews 7:24–25).
Drawing on the dominant biblical-theological themes of Hebrews, this addition to the New Testament Theology series explores how Jesus fulfills perfect priesthood as he calls believers to hold fast to him amid persecution.
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Like many Americans, Latinos find themselves seeking stability in an uncertain time. Growing numbers are leaving the Catholicism in which they were raised—and they face unique cultural challenges and have distinct cultural affinities that make Islam attractive. Hispanic women in particular find themselves drawn to Islam. 

In 2014, the PBS program Religion and Ethics Newsweekly visited the Islamic Center of Greater Miami in Miami Gardens, Florida, to cover a growing phenomenon: Latino converts to Islam. Many were raised Catholic, but felt more at home in their new faith. “The Trinity was very confusing to me,” one woman said. “I didn’t understand how God was a man or how a man could become a god.”
The report said that around 50% of the converts of Hispanic origin at the time were women, and many were choosing to wear head coverings. “The reason I wear the scarf is because I expect to be respected by the opposite gender,” said another Latina convert. “I don’t want to be catcalled and I don’t want to be judged by my appearance. In fact, I want to be judged by my intellect.”
In the past decade, the number of Latino converts to Islam has grown—and so has the proportion of those converts who are women.
Today, in Miami, as in the United States at large, a substantial number of converts to Islam are Latino—about 9% nationwide according to a 2020 survey, an increase from 5% in 2017. Estimates of the Latino Muslim population in the United States range from 50,000 to 70,000. Many are of either Mexican or Puerto Rican descent, but conversion to Islam is a phenomenon across Latin America, where multigenerational Lebanese and Palestinian migrant communities have settled. This phenomenon reflects shifting U.S. Latino attitudes toward religion, culture, and gender roles in the 2020s.
Like many Americans, Latinos find themselves seeking stability in an uncertain time. Growing numbers are leaving the Catholicism in which they were raised—and they face unique cultural challenges and have distinct cultural affinities that make Islam attractive. Hispanic women in particular find themselves drawn to Islam. Anecdotally, and according to reports from Islamic centers around the country, Latinas today constitute the clear majority of converts in the U.S. According to the findings of the Latino Muslim Survey published in 2017, the overwhelming majority (73%) of 560 Latino Muslims across 33 states who responded were women.
Those women, said author Ken Chitwood, who has written about and researched the Latino Muslim community extensively, “are right at the forefront and often, you might say, pioneras—they’re pioneers in that community.”
The golden-colored domes of the Islamic Center of Greater Miami shone in the afternoon sun on a recent Friday, crowning the horizon of a landscape that is clustered with apartment complexes and strip malls. The mosque itself is surrounded by tall, lush privacy hedges and palm trees. When I arrived after Friday prayers, except for the imam’s used 2017 Hyundai, the parking lot had mostly cleared out. Crossing the welcoming courtyard with a graceful murmuring fountain at its center, I was greeted by two older men who had stuck around to chat under the shade of a colonnade.
Abdul Rashid and Ifran Khan are both grandfathers, who beamingly showed me pictures of their grandchildren on their phones. Rashid, 72, is originally from Pakistan, and has lived in the U.S. for 50 years. In that time, he has picked up Spanish and become an unofficial translator at the mosque. He told me that because he spoke Spanish, he was the first contact for a Cuban man when he arrived at the mosque 15 years ago, a man who he said has since “reverted” to Islam. (Muslims speak not of conversion but “reversion”—humanity is born Muslim, and when a person chooses Islam, they are returning to their original state.) Both men assured me that there is a substantial Latino revert population at the Islamic Center of Greater Miami, most of whom are not recent immigrants but longtime U.S. residents. And it’s not just Latinos, the men told me, saying that there is a reversion almost weekly. A man converted earlier that very day by publicly reciting the Shahada, the Islamic profession of faith, in Arabic and English: “I bear witness that there is no God but Allah, and I bear witness that Muhammad is his last messenger.” This kind of output, however, is not the result of a grand missionary project. “We’re not really doing any work,” Rashid said. “It’s God.”
“My family was very devout Catholic,” said Latina Muslim convert Monica Traverzo in a November 2020 episode of the podcast Mommying While Muslim. But in her recollection, this devoutly Catholic family didn’t attend church often. “My family was still very rooted in their Catholicism, but it was more of like an agnostic approach.”
Traverzo tried out different Christian denominations before converting to Islam in college. “It was just attractive to me to live a God-conscious lifestyle,” she said. While she said her family was “taken aback” when she began wearing hijab, in other respects they were very pleased with the positive changes they saw taking root in her life. Culturally, she saw a lot of overlap that she thinks helps explain the number of Latinas coming over to Islam. “I feel like Islam has this sense of family that Latinos really admire because Islam teaches us about having these healthy, nurturing family life environments,” she said. “That’s also part of Hispanic culture.”
A March 2020 episode of the podcast Me & My Muslim Friends featured two Latina converts, Kathia Guerrero and Shirley Puente. Puente comes from a Peruvian background and converted in 2011. She describes her religious upbringing as culturally Catholic. “I wouldn’t say that we were super religious,” she said. “We weren’t the type that went to church every Sunday.”
Like Traverzo, Puente experimented with different religions before converting to Islam after befriending a Muslim girl in college. Seeing her friend moved to tears when speaking about her faith, Traverzo was intrigued. “I was like, you know what?” she said. “I kind of want that type of spiritual connection. Like, I don’t have it. I don’t feel any type of, I guess, emotion when I talk about Christianity like that.”
Guerrero is a single mother who converted in 2015. Her family came to the United States from Mexico when she was 10 years old. Guerrero’s father was a Christian pastor, and her family was very religious growing up. Music, pants, makeup, jewelry were all forbidden. She said that after her father left the family when she was 13, “my family just kind of fell apart completely,” once her mom went to work full time. She began engaging in risky behaviors.
“The time that I decided to convert was in a time when I was down. I was very depressed. At that time, I was not practicing anything,” she said. Guerrero came to Islam through independent study, watching Muslim prayers on YouTube, and practicing Ramadan on her own. “I fasted and it gave me the peace that I was looking for,” she said. “And a month later I converted.”
When I described these women’s stories to Rashid, he was unsurprised. The converts who come to his mosque are affected by the same institutional decline as everyone else. “When the marital institution fails, the society fails, and that is the fortress for the child,” he said. The materialistic culture of instant gratification are not American values, he said, but “Satanic values.” His daughter, he said, is a counselor for lower-income families, many of whom are Latino. He said she regularly encounters families dealing with domestic abuse and the consequences of absentee fathers.
Rashid’s theory is that wider cultural forces are bringing people in. He likens the wider cultural forces—of materialism, instant gratification, failing institutions, and the deterioration of the traditional family—to a hurricane. “A hurricane affects everybody,” he said. “We are all in the same boat.” And although even Muslim youth are not immune to these pressures, Rashid said, Islam still has what he calls “social pressures” that provide social structure and expectations to ground its adherents.
He suspects that the emphasis on religion and family in Islam is what attracts Latinos and Latinas, who may have been raised in large, religious families. They are searching for strong religious and family networks of the kind they enjoyed growing up, but which they now find falling away for various reasons. “There is an emptiness,” Rashid said, and they are “not getting the answer at church.” In Catholicism, the faith in which the majority of Latinos are raised, believers go through priests for sacraments—baptism, confession, communion. By contrast, Rashid said, he observes that Latinos are attracted to the direct connection to the Creator they find that Islam offers (prayer—a direct relationship between the believer and God—is one of the five pillars of Islam, along with a profession of faith, fasting, almsgiving, and the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca).
The sermon that Rashid and Khan had just heard that Friday was on the importance of reading in the Islamic tradition. The affable, youthful preacher, originally from Yemen, conducted his sermon in English. “A brother asked me the other day about how to handle the problems in the Muslim community with the youth,” he said. “Issues like mental health, issues like identity challenges, [in] the Muslim American space, people who are born and raised here.” He responded with four characteristics of a successful community: a strong family, next, a strong faith community with shared norms and values, then investment in education, and finally, an understanding of the law and of dominant culture, which he defined as “a way and style of life.”
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Miles Smith’s book is an excellent reminder that conservatives should never prioritize an idealized individual or nation. Rather, we must work to preserve those institutions that point us to better lives.

Liberalism has not been wanting for obituaries in recent years. Academics such as Patrick Deneen have argued at length that the American experiment has failed and it is time for a new regime. Among Roman Catholics, the most extreme angst about political modernity finds expression as “integralism,” an ideology holding that the state ought to be subordinate to the church. Among evangelicals, these same anxieties sometimes manifest as the less sophisticated “Christian nationalism,” the quasi-theocratic position that Protestants need to “take back” America and return it to some earlier, more pristine set of social arrangements.
But in his new book, Religion & Republic, Hillsdale College history professor Miles Smith IV takes a different tack from sounding liberalism’s death knell. Instead, he persuasively argues that the roots of American order go far deeper than liberalism’s critics allow, and he shows how the Founders saw Christian institutions playing a vital role in the life of the early republic. The generation that built this country largely existed in a distinctively Protestant stream of the Western tradition, which is sadly neglected today. By retelling this almost forgotten story, Smith unearths tools and principles that Christian Americans can deploy as we pursue cultural renewal today.
The book begins by distinguishing Protestant tradition from “evangelicalism.” In Smith’s analysis, religion in the early republic had much more to do with historic Anglican, Lutheran, and Calvinist expressions of the faith than the more charismatic or biblicist approaches common in nondenominational churches and evangelical seminaries today. As Publius put it in Federalist No. 2, Americans were
one united people; a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.
It would be an exaggeration to say that every American was a Christian, but Christian religion nonetheless formed the moral core of the republic.
Beginning from this premise, Smith outlines an interpretation of the First Amendment altogether at odds with the strict separationism many believe it enshrines. After decades of liberal jurisprudence, it may be difficult to see the Constitution as anything but an instrument of secularism. Smith, however, comes to a different conclusion after a closer look at the way Protestants actually governed at the time of the American founding. They largely believed that government was, in fact, responsible for legislating morality—and that religion was supposed to guide it in this “essential duty.” “Put simply,” he concludes, “Early Republic legislators conceived of the First Amendment very differently than modern Americans do and did not perceive the Constitution as imposing federal will on preexisting establishments.”
It is for this reason, Smith argues, that the American Revolution’s commitment to personal liberty did not result in the retreat of Christianity from the public square. Other secularizing movements born from Enlightenment ideology, such as the French Revolution or English liberalism, may have aimed at such an outcome—but in this, as in so much else, America was exceptional. “Disestablishment commitments regarding church and state did not revolutionize family or other institutions that upheld life in the Early American Republic,” Smith contends, “nor did the United States enter the family of nations perceived by commentators as a sanctuary for secularism, social democracy, or social egalitarianism.” It would be more accurate to say that Christianity undergirded the early republic’s public square. Religion played a fundamentally conservative role in the American founding, to put it another way, by providing both a shared sense of a transcendent moral order and links back to an enduring Western tradition.
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By powerfully saving Israel from danger and their enemies, God points us his greatest work of salvation (Luke 24:27; see John 1:19-27). Israel was waiting, expecting a Messiah to save them. But what many of them missed was that he came to deliver us from our sins (Matthew 1:21). Many make a similar mistake today.

Looking across the landscape of churches in Nigeria, excluding the relatively new churches that have sprung up in the last decade or so, the vast majority of these churches, which are mostly denominational, have something of a common denominator. The common denominator is what I would refer to as an excessive fixation on the Old Testament, with wrong intent.
What I mean is this: the reason for this fixation on the Old Testament, and this is evident in the focus of the teachings in these denominations, is that it most appeals to the underlying cultural beliefs here especially around generational curses, enemies and spiritual warfare. And I think that the Old Testament appeals more because it speaks in a similar way to many African folklores that have been taught over many generations.
Consider a few examples. The Old Testament is crammed full of dramatic stories depicting God’s power, or his presence with the people of Israel; there’s the Mount Sinai, the burning bush, Elijah and the prophets of Baal, along with many other stories of God defeating his people’s enemies.
Of course, I believe and affirm that God performed all these wonderful acts. However, the question is: to what end did he do them? What do these miracles and signs tell us? What do they point to? These are important questions. Because if we don’t know what God’s ultimate intent was in writing the Old Testament, we’ll fail to see how it culminates in the person and work of Jesus Christ (John 5:39). So my simple purpose for this article, is to work through some examples of these glorious Old Testament events and show how they point us to salvation in Christ.
The Passover Lamb That Dies (Exodus)
In Exodus 12, we pick up the narrative of the Passover. The Lord God Almighty is about to exact judgment on the land of Egypt, his most intense judgment yet: the tenth plague. This plague will take away all the first borns in the land of Egypt, from cattle to king. As a way of escape for his people, the Lord commanded them through Moses to prepare a Passover lamb, eat it and then use its blood to cover the doorposts and lintel of the houses where they are. And God says, “When I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt” (Exodus 12:13).
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Written by O. Palmer Robertson |
Wednesday, September 25, 2024
At stake is the accurate record of the early proclamation of the saving gospel of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. In terms of the progress of redemption, this speech of Paul at Antioch, delivered at the heart of the trade routes of Asia, represents the fullest record of an early proclamation of the saving gospel of Jesus Christ to the nations of the world, which therefore embodies a significant step beyond the record of Peter’s summary of the gospel as preached at Pentecost. 

God’s glory in the Gospel connects directly to the display of his righteousness when he declares righteous a sinful human being, a depraved, wrath-deserving sinner who has repeatedly violated God’s law. That he might be “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus,” God offered his Son “as a propitiatory sacrifice through his blood” (Rom. 3:26, 25). This justification by God of the guilty sinner through the substitutionary death of Jesus, received by faith alone, openly displays the righteousness of God.
Was Paul’s letter to the Romans the first time this “Gospel” was declared that so wondrously displays the righteousness of God in the justification of the sinner through the blood of Christ?
By no means! Before any written Gospel had been published, during the twenty years in which apostolic proclamation alone defined the Christian Gospel, Paul preached the doctrine of the “rising and falling church”—justification by faith alone apart from the works of the law.
When and where did he make this proclamation?
During his first missionary journey into Asia, as he preached in the synagogue of Antioch of Pisidia.
What exactly did he say?
Let it therefore be known to you, men and brothers, that through this man, the forgiveness of sins is being proclaimed to you. From all the things from which you are not able to be justified by the law of Moses, all who believe in this man are justified (Acts 13:38, 39).
Rather remarkable is the translation of the root δικαιόω as “freed” rather than “justified” twice in this passage, as it appears in the 1952 Revised Standard Version of the Bible (RSV).
It would be impossible to discover the thinking behind the Revised Standard Version of 1952 in its rendering of “freed” rather than “justified.” The RSV, it should be remembered, was the first major effort to provide a new translation of the Bible into English that would replace the King James Version of 1611, made almost 350 years earlier. The RSV is basically a good rendering of Scripture, representing a more “literal” rather than a “dynamic” translation. It is frequently used as a helpful tool by Bible translation societies. Yet one might re-imagine the climate of the 1950’s in which the RSV originated in cooperation with the National Council of Churches. Significant resistance to the translation arose when the classic prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 read, “Behold, a ‘young woman’ (rather than a ‘virgin’) shall conceive and bear a son…” As a consequence, this version of the Bible was rejected outright by evangelicals of the day.
In the prevailing climate that produced the RSV, it can easily be imagined that its translators could have concluded that the phrasing in Luke’s report of Paul’s speech in Acts 13 was “too Pauline” to be “authentically Pauline” at this early stage in his life and ministry. To read “everyone who believes” is “justified from everything from which you could not be justified by the law of Moses” might have appeared to them as simply incorporating “too much Paul” into this early speech in the Israelite synagogue of Antioch. These statements agree so perfectly with Galatians and Romans, Paul’s later writings, that it might have been concluded that they represented a “reading back” into Paul’s earlier speech in Acts the more refined theology of his subsequent formulations of doctrine.
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Failure to honor God leads to mental darkness, which leads to idolatry, which leads to a debased mind, which leads to corrupt actions, which leads to a disordered moral vision, and so on. Do people behave like beasts because they treat God like a creature, or do they treat God like a creature because they want to behave like beasts? Yes.

Earlier this week, I attended a summit at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation on the upcoming Supreme Court case, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, which could determine the future of any efforts to regulate children’s access to hardcore pornography. One of the presenters, Lisa Thompson, shared the results of a recent study that demonstrated that teens who regularly watched pornography were more likely to (1) have much worse relationships with their parents, (2) have poorer academic achievement, and (3) show a propensity to acts of sexual harassment or violence. Today, another of our collaborators in this battle, Michael Toscano of the Institute of Family Studies, published an article at the IFS blog documenting a recent survey that showed that frequent porn consumption doubles the risk of feeling depressed or lonely.
When hearing Lisa’s numbers, I couldn’t help hearing the voice of a devil’s advocate (in this case, it really is the devil’s advocate!) in my head: “correlation doesn’t imply causation.” The porn industry will tell us that of course, teens who are lonely and depressed and have bad relationships with their parents are more likely to take refuge in porn, and that those who have a sexually predatory streak will be more apt to want to watch porn too. They might even suggest that lazy, unfocused students are going to be the ones with more time for watching porn anyway. Now of course, none of these retorts place their industry in a very good flattering light—“So what you’re saying is that your product is best suited for depressed, anti-social, predatory drop-outs?”—but at least it gets them off the hook for causing the anti-social behaviors.
In following Jonathan Haidt’s Substack, I’ve noticed a similar theme. For the past couple of years, he’s been playing whack-a-mole with more tech-friendly sociologists who insist that the connections he’s documented between social media use and poor mental health don’t tell us anything about causation—maybe it’s just that otherwise unhappy, unstable people are just more likely to binge on X or Instagram? And indeed, they probably are!
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Looking to Christ by faith in His name means trusting in Him to supply what He has secured. We pray in Christ’s name as an act of faith in Him as the only Mediator and the fulfiller of the covenant promises. 

Certain practices have become so familiar among Christians that believers can be in danger of thoughtlessly performing them. We are all prone to simply going through the motions in our Christian lives. For instance, how often have we prayed the Lord’s Prayer without reflecting on the petitions that we are presenting to God? How often have we recited the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed without giving due consideration to the truths that we are confessing? We can easily go through the liturgical motions in a worship service without focusing on what we are doing before God. Similarly, it is altogether possible for believers to close their prayer with the words “in Jesus’ name” or “in Christ’s name” or “for Christ’s sake” as a sort of mindless mantra.
This raises the important question, Why should believers pray to God “in Jesus’ name”? If we are going to employ the name of Jesus in a conscientious way at the end of our prayers, a proper amount of theological reflection is required. Ultimately, we pray in Jesus’ name because He is the only Mediator between God and man, He fulfills all the covenant promises of God, and He is the object of our faith in God. Consider the following.
The Only Mediator
During His earthly ministry, Christ taught His disciples how they should approach God in prayer. He said: “Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it” (John 14:13–14). “Whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you” (16:23). Jesus teaches us to do so because He is the exclusive Mediator between God and man. As Thomas Boston explained:
In whose name are we to pray? In the name of Jesus Christ, and of no other, neither saint nor angel, John 14:13. “Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, says he, that will I do.” We must go to the Father, not in the name of any of the courtiers, Col. 2:18 but in the name of his Son, the only Mediator.
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Written by Thomas R. Schreiner |
Tuesday, September 24, 2024
The crucifixion of Paul and all believers to the world occurred when they were crucified with Christ (Gal. 2:20). A radical disruption has taken place so that the love for the present world has been severed at the cross. Old polarities, such as whether one is circumcised or uncircumcised are fundamentally irrelevant. What matters is whether someone is part of the new creation that has dawned in Jesus Christ. Such a perspective accords with what Paul affirms in 2 Corinthians 5:17. The arrival of the new creation means that the old has passed away.

New Creation
Paul only uses the expression “new creation” once in his letter to the Galatians (Gal. 6:15), but the notion isn’t restricted to the phrase. Indeed, the new creation surfaces in the first verse, which affirms that God raised Jesus from the dead (Gal. 1:1). The resurrection in Jewish thought means that the new age has arrived and that the old age of evil and death has come to an end.1 Isaiah prophesies that the Lord “will swallow up death forever” and tears will be a distant memory (Isa. 25:8). Similarly, those who are raised from the dead will experience “everlasting life” and will shine “like the stars forever and ever” (Dan. 12:2–3; see also Isa. 26:19).
On the day of the resurrection the Lord’s promises to his people will be fulfilled, and the people of God will be restored and unified (Ezek. 37:1–14). The resurrection of Jesus means that the old age has ended, and thus Paul foreshadows the argument of the entire letter. Circumcision is no longer required because it was a permanent ordinance in the old era while the old creation persisted. Now that the new creation has come, the ordinances of the old age have passed away. Commands like circumcision only apply under the old covenant and in the old era, but the resurrection represents the apocalyptic irruption of the new age, and thus the regulations of the former age have expired.
Paul has died and now he lives to God (Gal. 2:19). In other words, he has “been crucified with Christ,” and now Christ “lives in” him (Gal. 2:20). Paul speaks representatively so that what is true of him applies to all believers in Jesus everywhere. They have died and come to life again. This is another way of describing an apocalyptic inbreaking through Christ Jesus. The new creation has come, and this is evident since Paul and all believers have died and come to life again. The power of the resurrection has, like a sneaker wave, washed up into the old age and taken over the shoreline of the beach. Now believers live in the new creation inaugurated by Christ’s resurrection. The new age has broken in and the old age is set aside. The arrival of the new creation in Christ’s resurrection affects every theme in Galatians, whether it is justification, the law, the people of God, or life in the Spirit.
The eschatological and apocalyptic dimensions of Paul’s gospel are apparent in Galatians 1:4 where Christ “gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age.” The term “deliver” (exaireō) presents Jesus’s death as an exodus type of rescue (see Ex. 3:8; 18:4, 8, 9, 10 LXX). The same verb is used for the Lord’s promise to liberate his people in a second exodus foretold in the prophets (Isa. 31:5; 60:16; Ezek. 34:27 LXX).2 A distinction between this age and the age to come was common in Jewish thought (see 1 En. 71:15; 4 Ezra 4:27; 7:12–13, 50, 113–14; 8:1; 2 Bar. 14:13; 15:8; 44:8–15; CD 6.10–11, 14; 12.23; 1QpHab 5.7–8), and we find it fairly often in Jesus’s teaching as well (Matt. 12:32; Matt. 13:39, 40, 49; Matt. 24:3; Matt. 28:20; Mark 10:30; Luke 18:30; 20:35).
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