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The Doctrine of Humanity and a Pastor’s Ministry

By Andreas Kostenberger — 4 months ago

Fast-forward millennia of human history, with God’s promise of sending a redeemer gradually taking shape (see Gen. 3:15) through a series of covenants and promises, and we arrive at Jesus. Jesus is at the very heart of history. As Paul writes, though Jesus “was in the form of God,” he was “born in the likeness of men,” “and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him” (Phil. 2:6–9). Jesus was the perfect human who came to redeem us to restore us to God’s original image.

Who are we as humans? You’ll be surprised how many different answers people give to this deceptively simple question. In part, the reason for the diversity of answers is that who we are as humans is part of a larger set of questions. These relate to the origin of the universe and the larger reality in which we find ourselves. For Christians, the doctrine of humanity is an important part of what we believe, yet we seldom reflect on it. The following discussion aims to shed light on this vital question and to provide a general framework for further reflection. How does the doctrine of humanity relate to a pastor’s ministry?
Why the Doctrine of Humanity Matters
It is self-evident that the answer to the question “Who are we as humans?” has great existential significance for all people, Christian or not. We all face a cluster of undeniable realities: We are born into this world by the choice of others. We are frail and finite; we find evil not only around us but even inside us. And we know that one day we will all die. Here are seven truths pastors will do well to teach their congregations. In this way, they will equip them to live their lives more fully in keeping with biblical teaching.
7 Truths to Teach about the Doctrine of Humanity
The following seven truths to teach about humanity follow a salvation-historical pattern. The first four relate to the way God created humanity in its unfallen state. The fifth pertains to humanity’s rebellion against God and the implications of the fall. And truths six and seven relate to Jesus’ taking on human nature (except for sin) to restore us to a right relationship with our Creator and to show us how to live.
1. God Created Humanity in His Image and Likeness
After creating the stars and the sky, fish, birds, and other animals, God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” and so he did (Gen. 1:26–27). Humanity is uniquely made in God’s image and likeness. As God’s creatures, we share in his family likeness! Later on in the Genesis narrative, we read, “When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image” (Gen. 5:3). Like father, like son. We’re not gods, but we were made to reflect God in the way we live and relate to each other.
2. God Created Humanity Male and Female
Until recently, this truth was almost universally affirmed. Yet once people no longer believe in a transcendent Creator, it is only a matter of time before humans come to believe that gender, like many other aspects of our existence, is self-chosen, even contrary to biological birth sex. However, such a notion clearly contradicts the biblical affirmation that “male and female [God] created them” (Gen. 1:27).
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Augustine Against Gnosticism

By Louis Markos — 4 months ago

The western world’s gnostic separation of the human person into a good soul and a bad body has manifested itself in the postmodern transgender movement. This radical, ultimately anti-humanistic form of dualism drives an arbitrary wedge between a person’s physical, biological sex and their so-called gender. To honor their “true” or “authentic” internal sense of gender, no matter how nebulous or confused it may be, many people today, an alarming number of them children, will hire surgeons to mutilate their body so as to bring it into conformity with their “soul.”

Most American Christians are aware that it is an ancient heresy to say that Jesus was man but not God (Arianism); less are aware that there were just as many heretics who promoted the opposite error: that Jesus was God but not man (Gnosticism). The reason Gnostics denied that God became fully man in the incarnation is that they held a low view of matter in general and flesh in particular. For Gnostics, matter and flesh were not products of a good creation that fell; the creation of matter and flesh was itself the fall.
         Although there are very few full-blown Gnostics in the church today, many Americans hold to a soft dualism that sees the soul as good and the body as bad. It is because of that theological misunderstanding that many Christians imagine that when we die, we become angels: that is, pure souls. Although Christians affirm in both the Apostles and Nicene Creeds their belief in the resurrection of the body, a suspicion of the flesh persists.
         Thankfully, this gnostic, anti-biblical demonization of the flesh was dealt a decisive blow 1600 years ago in Book XIV, chapter 3 of The City of God. Although Virgil seemed to teach, in Aeneid 6, that the body weighs down the soul, Augustine insists that the Christian
faith teaches something very different. For the corruption of the body, which is a burden to the soul, is not the cause but the punishment of Adam’s first sin. Moreover, it was not the corruptible flesh that made the soul sinful; on the contrary, it was the sinful soul that made the flesh corruptible. Though some incitements to vice and vicious desires are attributable to the corruption of the flesh, nevertheless, we should not ascribe to the flesh all the evils of a wicked life. Else, we free the Devil from all such passions, since he has no flesh. It is true that the Devil cannot be said to be addicted to debauchery, drunkenness, or any others of the vices which pertain to bodily pleasure—much as he secretly prompts and provokes us to such sins—but he is most certainly filled with pride and envy. It is because these passions so possessed the Devil that he is doomed to eternal punishment in the prison of the gloomy air.
If flesh were the seat of evil, then none of the angels could have fallen. There are sins that rise up from the flesh, but they tend to be less wicked and corrupting than pride and envy, which rise up from the soul (see Mark 7:14-23). Indeed, it is more often the soul that leads the body astray than vice versa.
         No, Augustine explains in chapter 4, “the animal man is not one thing and the carnal another, but both are one and the same, namely, man living according to man.” In fact, he continues in chapter 5, it is wrong “to blame our sins and defects on the nature of the flesh, for this is to disparage the Creator. The flesh, in its own kind and order, is good. But what is not good is to abandon the Goodness of the Creator in pursuit of some created good, whether by living deliberately according to the flesh, or according to the soul, or according to the entire man, which is made up of soul and flesh and which is the reason why either ‘soul’ alone or ‘flesh’ alone can mean a man.”
         Those who are aware that St. Augustine played the central role in formulating the doctrine of original sin might be surprised to find Augustine here defending the body from its detractors. To be fair, Augustine, who went through a gnostic (Manichean) phase before embracing Christianity and whose pre-conversion years were marked by sexual promiscuity found it necessary to adopt a celibate lifestyle for himself and did sometimes speak in a disparaging manner of the flesh. Still, nowhere in his writings does he equate original sin with sex, nor does he treat the body as inherently fallen. Just as original sin tainted body and soul alike, so Christ’s atoning work on the cross restored body and soul alike.
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Presbyterians MIA (Missing in Actions)

By Larry Ball — 4 months ago

We were told to pursue excellence in all things according to the gifts that we were given for the glory of God. Leaders today in the church should be identifying such men with unique gifts and encourage them to become leaders not only in the church, but in the world in which we live. Our history is full of great leaders who helped create this blessed nation from which we have benefited so much. I’m afraid, in a day when we need them most, such men, especially Presbyterians, are missing in action.

The history of Presbyterians who have served in leadership positions in America is rich and ubiquitous; but sadly, it appears now that Presbyterians have left the public square and are missing in action (MIA).
History is replete with examples of the importance of Presbyterians. Rev. John Witherspoon, President of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. His influence over many of those at the Constitutional Convention cannot be underestimated. One of his students was James Madison. Horace Walpole, a member of the British Parliament, said of Witherspoon, that America “had run away with a Presbyterian parson.” It is claimed that King George III called the American Revolution “a Presbyterian rebellion.”
At the Battle of Yorktown where General George Washington defeated Cornwallis, it has been noted that all of Washington’s colonels but one were Presbyterian elders.
Whether all of this is true or not, I cannot be sure, but there is no doubt that Presbyterians had a major impact on the Revolutionary War. Historian Paul R. Carson has estimated that when the number of soldiers in the Revolutionary War included not only Presbyterians, but Puritan English, Dutch and German Reformed, that “two-thirds of our Revolutionary forefathers were trained in the school of Calvin.”
J. Gresham Machen was respected so much as a leading clergyman in the United States that in the early 20th century he was asked to give testimony before a U.S, House and Senate Committee on a proposed Department of Education. John C. Breckinridge, a Presbyterian from Kentucky, who was the uncle of the Princeton scholar Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, was also Vice-President of the United States under President James Buchanan.
Maybe, the most well-respected Presbyterian in American history was the great Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, who was born in the mountains of what is now West Virginia, my place of birth and childhood home. His courage and piety in war are unparalleled.
I have not even taken time to speak of the Puritans who settled New England prior to the American Revolution. Although they were mostly Congregationalists, their theology also reflected the Calvinistic heritage.
Indeed today, I am sure that there are many conservative Presbyterians in leadership positions in every sphere of life in America. I have known a few of them myself including many in the military, in business, and in the civil government.
However, I am beginning to notice a trend. Presbyterians in such leadership positions are disappearing from public life. They are becoming very rare. For example, the United States Supreme Court contains no Presbyterians. Only 24 members of the United States Congress are listed as Presbyterians, and I doubt that any of them are conservative. You have to go back to Ronald Reagan to find a President who identified as a Presbyterian, at least later in life.
Yes, the capture of the Presbyterian Church by liberalism is part of the problem. Conservative Presbyterians and others from Reformed backgrounds are a small percentage of the American religious scene.
However, we should ask ourselves what has happened in the conservative Reformed and Presbyterian world that changed the landscape of Presbyterians participating in leadership roles outside of the church?
We may not need look any further than our young men in the church. Many of them seem to be confused, aimless, and lacking direction in life. I hear constant complaints about young Christian men in Presbyterian and Reformed churches who seem to have very little drive to excel. They seem unwilling to work hard. They often take what I call the easy road to avoid the sweat and tears it takes to succeed and rise to high levels of responsibility in accordance with their abilities. When they do choose a pathway or calling, they often do not persevere.
God gives different gifts to different men. For a man in a lawncare business, that is an honorable calling. For those who drive trucks, that also is an honorable calling. But for those with skills and gifts which could put them in leadership positions in their communities and even at higher levels, many of our young men, especially Presbyterians, are absent.
What has then happened? Radical Two Kingdom (R2K) theology has fenced up our young men into monastic cells inside the church walls. Pietism has chased away our young men from interacting with the world. Amillennialism has no victorious view of the future here on earth before Christ returns. So, many of our young men think, “What’s the use of fighting?” That’s what our theology is teaching our young men. In my own experience, I went through a period of despair, and came to believe that Amillennialism is incompatible with a robust Covenantalism which is future-oriented.
The framers of the U.S. Constitution acted to secure the blessings of liberty not only for themselves but for their posterity. Posterity was an important covenantal word among our early forefathers. They had a long-term view of their work, knowing they would have an impact on many generations not yet born.
The highest position for young men today seems to be reaching the office of an elder in the church, rather than a mayor in the town or even the Governor of a State.
We don’t look generations ahead and believe that we are responsible for the quality of life for those yet to be born. We have become less than conquers, and this attitude of ordained defeatism has been transmitted to our young men. Our anticipation of heaven has nullified our responsibility to future generations here on earth.
So, a listless floating and a dreamy drifting attitude without purpose has captured many of our young men. I’m glad I was raised in the previous generation where we knew what real manhood was in that we were expected to use our talents and gifts to the upmost. To fail to do this was shameful and dishonorable.
We were told to pursue excellence in all things according to the gifts that we were given for the glory of God. Leaders today in the church should be identifying such men with unique gifts and encourage them to become leaders not only in the church, but in the world in which we live. Our history is full of great leaders who helped create this blessed nation from which we have benefited so much. I’m afraid, in a day when we need them most, such men, especially Presbyterians, are missing in action.
Larry E. Ball is a retired minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is now a CPA. He lives in Kingsport, Tenn.

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Reading Is Fundamental

By Marty Machowski — 4 months ago

When life’s trials crash in, we want a well-worn pathway to lead our children to the comfort of the God’s Word. However, they have a formidable obstacle to overcome if they “hate” reading. So what should a parent do in a culture where screens entice our children away from books? It is time to take a lesson from a former generation’s playbook and take time out of our lives to read to our kids. Most kids will do anything to avoid bedtime, so that’s a great time to read them a story.

Do you remember who sparked your love for reading? My journey began with my parents reading me a Flintstones children’s book based on my favorite Saturday morning cartoons. In school, the Scholastic Book Club flyer felt like Christmas every month. Though they were on a budget, my parents always allowed me to pick three books. I devoured stories about Indy 500 racer A.J. Foyt and anything related to the great outdoors.
However, my passion for reading really ignited during my sixth-grade homeroom period. Mrs. Jones introduced us to The Great Brain by Dennis Fitzgerald. I was captivated by the story of Tom, a clever boy who outsmarted everyone with his “great brain.” By the end of the book, I was hooked determined to read the entire series and imiate Tom’s creativity. That one novel unlocked a lifelong love of reading and helped to shape who I am today.
I grew up before video games existed and TV shows for kids were limited to Saturday mornings. After a few hours, my parents gave the standard command, “Turn off that TV and get outside and play.” Today, screens threaten to dominate our children’s lives and one of the most significant losses is a love for reading. “In 2012, 38% of 0-17’s read every day or nearly every day for pleasure; by 2021, just 25% of children read for pleasure. Over the same period, children who said they “never read” has grown from 13% to 20%, so one in five children aged 0-17—nearly 3 million children—did not read for pleasure at all in 2021.” That concerns me as a parent—I wonder how children will fare without the creativity and love for learning that comes from reading. But as a pastor, I also wonder that if that many children are not reading for pleasure, does that mean that far fewer will open up their Bibles to read from God’s Word?
Reading is the doorway through which children access God. If we want our children to become the person described in Psalm One who delights in the law of the Lord and meditates upon it day and night, we need to give them a love for reading. If a generation of children don’t have a passion for reading, it’s unlikely they will open their Bible. Keep the Bible closed, and we lose the transformative power of the Scriptures in the lives of our children.
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What a Church Is . . . and Isn’t

By Mark Dever — 4 months ago

The church is a people, not a place or a statistic. It’s a body, united into him who is the head. It’s a family, joined together by adoption through Christ. I pray that we pastors would increasingly recognize our awesome responsibility for the particular flocks over which God has made us undershepherds.

A Jarring Conversation
During my graduate studies, I remember one conversation with a friend who worked for a Christian ministry that was not affiliated with any one church. He and I did attend the same church for a couple of years. But while I joined the church as a member, my friend didn’t. In fact, he only came for the Sunday morning service and would slip in about halfway through, just in time for the sermon.
One day, I decided to ask him about his half-hearted attendance. “I don’t really get anything out of the rest of the service,” he replied.
“Have you ever thought of joining the church?” I asked.
He appeared genuinely surprised by my question and responded, “Join the church? I honestly don’t know why I would do that. I know what I’m here for, and those people would just slow me down.”
As far as I could tell, he didn’t say those words disdainfully, but with the genuine zeal of a gifted evangelist who did not want to waste one hour of the Lord’s time. He had given some thought to what he was looking for in a church. And on the whole it didn’t involve the other members of the church, at least not that church. He wanted a place where he could hear good preaching from God’s word and get his spiritual jolt for the week.
Yet his words reverberated in my mind—“Those people would just slow me down.” There were a number of things I wanted to say, but all I said was, “Did you ever think that if you linked arms with those people, yes, they may slow you down, but you may help to speed them up? Have you thought that might be a part of God’s plan for them, and for you?”
I, too, wanted a church where I could hear good preaching every Sunday. But the words “body of Christ” mean more than just that, don’t they?
A People, Not a Place
The church is not a place. It’s not a building. It’s not a preaching point. It’s not a spiritual service provider. It’s a people—the new-covenant, blood-bought people of God. That’s why Paul said, “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). He didn’t give himself up for a place, but for a people.
That’s why the church I pastor starts its Sunday morning gatherings not by saying, “Welcome to Capitol Hill Baptist Church,” but “Welcome to this gathering of the Capitol Hill Baptist Church.” We are a people who gather. Yes, this is a small thing, but we’re trying to point to a big reality even in the words we use to welcome people.
Remembering that the church is a people should help us recognize what’s important and what’s not important. I know I need the help. For example, I have a temptation to let something like the style of music dictate how I feel about a church. After all, the style of music a church uses is one of the first things we will notice about any church, and we tend to respond to music at a very emotional level. Music makes us feel a certain way. Yet what does it say about my love for Christ and for Christ’s people if I decide to leave a church because of the style of its music? Or if, when pastoring a church, I marginalize a majority of my congregation because I think the style of music needs to be updated?
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The Normalization of Slander

By Trevin Wax — 4 months ago

Our social media habits have made slander so prevalent, so normal, that we’re willing to overlook its pernicious effects as long as it helps our cause or confirms our narrative. We no longer see this sin as disqualifying. We no longer even see it as sin. I fear we’ve normalized this form of worldliness to the point that the righteousness described by James (“peace-loving, gentle, . . . full of mercy”) now gets reframed as soft, or squishy, or compromised. These dynamics should scare us.

What does it mean to be worldly? I still find David Wells’s definition unbeatable: “Worldliness is whatever makes sin look normal and righteousness look strange.”
Wells emphasizes the perniciousness and pervasiveness of worldliness. We get so accustomed to sin we don’t see it. And that means we should always ask, What sins appear normal today? What sins are so common we hardly shrug at them?
The more I contemplate this question in a digital age, the more I’m convinced we’ve entered an era marked by the normalization of slander.
What Is Slander?
Slander is spreading untruth about someone else so their reputation is damaged. These untruths are sometimes flat-out lies designed to inflict maximum harm, but often slander takes the form of deceptive inferences, assuming the worst of others instead of the best, or deliberately crafting a preferred narrative out of conveniently edited facts.
God hates slander (Prov. 6:16, 19) because he is the Truth. Satan loves slander because he’s the father of lies. Jon Bloom remarks on “its poisonous power” as “one of the adversary’s chief strategies to divide relationships and deter and derail the mission of the church. . . . He knows that slander deadens and splits churches, poisons friendships, and fractures families. He knows slander quenches the Holy Spirit, kills love, short-circuits spiritual renewal, undermines trust, and sucks the courage out of the saints.”
The antidote to slander is found in the Westminster Larger Catechism’s description of keeping the ninth commandment against bearing false witness. Faithful Christians will be inclined toward these actions: “the preserving and promoting of truth between man and man, and the good name of our neighbor, as well as our own, . . . a charitable esteem of our neighbors; loving, desiring, and rejoicing in their good name; sorrowing for and covering of their infirmities; freely acknowledging of their gifts and graces, defending their innocency; a ready receiving of a good report, and unwillingness to admit of an evil report, concerning them.”
Instead, we often demonstrate a propensity for slander. The Puritan writer Thomas Manton believed the source of slander is self-love and the desire for human praise. Slanderers feel contempt toward someone with a sterling reputation. “They blast their gifts with censure, aggravate their failings, and load them with prejudice, that upon the ruins of their good name, they might erect a fabric of praise to themselves,” he says. Slander and censure go together, ever blasting outward, never looking inward. “Self-lovers are always bitter censurers; they are so indulgent to their own faults, that they must spend their zeal abroad.”
Slander’s Poisonous Effects
Matthew Lee Anderson describes the soul-sucking nature of slander by pointing to the New Testament’s framing of this sin in terms of consumption. Galatians 5:15 warns against the tendency to “bite and devour one another,” which echoes the psalmist who speaks of people with teeth like “spears and arrows” and tongues like “sharp swords” (Ps. 57:4). Anderson also quotes a medieval text that describes a woman “slandered, eaten away at, gnawed at, by the people, for the grace that God performed in her of contrition, of devotion, and of compassion.” He writes,
Slanders and defamation limit the sphere of the victim’s action: they constrict his agency and move them to the margins of the community. To that extent, they impose a form of poverty, as they are designed to remove the social conditions necessary for that person’s flourishing. In stripping away the person’s “good name,” slanders, detraction, and defamation hollow out their social identity and reduce the person to whatever interior resources they have left to survive.

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Court Vindicates Teacher with Courage to NOT Say What Isn’t True

By John Stonestreet — 4 months ago

Contrary to what proponents claim, policies that support the social transition of children are not “kind.” Nor are they aimed at “what’s best for the kids.” Rather, these policies enable and protect practices that cause irreversible harm. This includes policies about pronouns. A pronoun matters because language matters. Language should match reality, not distort it. This is true for everyone everywhere, but especially for those who teach our children. Educators should not lie about reality, nor should the state force them to do so.

Late last month, Virginia teacher Peter Vlaming won an important legal battle against the high school that fired him. Back in 2018, the well-liked French teacher was placed on administrative leave by West Point High School for failing to comply with the school district’s policy concerning preferred pronouns. Though Vlaming was willing to accommodate a request by a female student to use her chosen male name, he refused to refer to the student with the pronouns “he” or “him.”
To be clear, Vlaming did not use female pronouns either. Rather, he chose to avoid using any pronouns to refer to the student. The school superintendent, however, told Vlaming that he could not avoid using the male pronouns, even when the student wasn’t present. Vlaming refused these demands, and within a few short weeks, was fired.
In other words, Vlaming was fired for what he did not say, or as Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Tyson Langhofer put it, “what he couldn’t say … in good conscience.”
Vlaming filed a lawsuit against the school in 2019. A lower court threw out the case, but, in 2023, the Supreme Court of Virginia reinstated the lawsuit, stating:
Absent a truly compelling reason for doing so, no government committed to these principles [of free speech and freedom of religion] can lawfully coerce its citizens into pledging verbal allegiance to ideological views that violate their sincerely held religious beliefs.
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Beware: All is Lost if the Gospel is Lost

By Ben Stahl — 4 months ago

Before GPS, SOS, and CPUs, the stars and land were essential to navigation of sea. There were few things more terrifying to a sailor than a storm causing the ship to drift off course and away from land. If both were lost, especially for an extended time like fourteen days, the situation would be nearly hopeless. How much more terrible is it to drift off course from the Gospel of Jesus Christ? The consequences of drifting from land are temporal, but the consequences of drifting from Christ the Savior are eternal, the misery indescribable.

Therefore we must give the more earnest heed to the things we have heard, lest we drift away. 2 For if the word spoken through angels proved steadfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just reward, 3 how shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation, which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed to us by those who heard Him, 4 God also bearing witness both with signs and wonders, with various miracles, and gifts of the Holy Spirit, according to His own will?
Hebrews 2:1-4
The Primary Theme
The epistle to the Hebrews is shrouded in a measure of mystery. Questions begin even with, who wrote the book?[1] What was the occasion for its being written? When was the book written? We will have to wait for answers to the questions that God has not yet revealed. The theme of the book, however, is anything but mysterious: “God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son.”[2] From the opening verse, the absolute supremacy of Christ Jesus as prophet, priest, and king over all things is the beginning, middle, and the end of the whole matter.[3]
The supremacy of Christ is emphasized in His being and His work. In His being, Christ is supreme over all else because of His perfections. Seven perfections of the Son (1:2-3) promote His completeness and the “sevenfold glory of the Mediator.”[4] 1) The Son has been appointed heir of all things; 2) the Son made the world; 3) the Son is the brightness of God’s glory; 4) the Son is the express image of God’s person; 5) the Son upholds all things by the Word of His power; 6) the Son purged our sins; and 7) the Son sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.
From His being, the supremacy of the Son extends over all His creatures, the work of His hands. The Son is supreme over the prophets (1:1-2), the angels (1:4-14), Moses (3:3), Joshua (4:8-9), the Old Testament priesthood (7:20-25), the Tabernacle (9:11), and the sacrificial system (9:12). There is nothing in heaven or earth that is over Christ, for He is both Lord and God, the receiver of all worship. His throne alone is “forever and ever” (1:8).
Next to this central theme of the Son’s superiority is the second theme that is like the first – namely, the perfect work of salvation accomplished by the Son. He has “by Himself purged our sins” (1:3). “He is able to save to the uttermost those who come to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them” (7:25). “But now, once at the end of the ages, He has appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself…so Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many” (9:26, 28). “But this Man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God” (10:12). The perfect salvation was accomplished by the perfect Christ for the perfection of the many sons whom He brings to glory (2:10).
The Primary Concern
With the primary themes established, Hebrews 2:1-4 comes from the writer, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, with a concern for his readers that is present throughout the book – “Do not drift away!”. They have heard the gospel of Christ. They have heard something of His being and work. Now they must pay more abundant attention to what they heard. Failure to take heed will lead to drifting away from Christ and the great salvation which He has provided through His blood.
Five times in Hebrews, the writer deals with the danger of falling away from Christ and His salvation.[5] Five times He warns the reader against coming up short. The application of Hebrews is so strong that Richard Phillips refers to the book of Hebrews as a sermon on the theme, “Do not fall away.”[6] The abundant warning against coming up short of eternal life is a direct contrast to the abundant gift which would be lost by doing so—namely salvation through Jesus Christ. You have heard the gospel. You must pay more abundant attention to it, lest you drift away.
The Urgency of the Matter
Having laid the foundation for the gospel of God in chapter one, several key words are used to draw our earnest attention to the matter at hand and address questions raised by the opening argument. What type of attention must we render to God and the gospel of His Son? The phrase,περισσοτέρως προσέχεινis, is rendered “the more earnest heed” in the NKJV and “must pay much closer attention” in the ESV.[7] The use of the word περισσοτέρως (more earnest) denotes an exceptionally strong attention. Lexicons translate the word, “far more, far greater,”[8] “more abundantly,”[9] and “more superabundantly.”[10] While it is somewhat awkward for English speakers to add “more” to a superlative (i.e. more fastest), the goal of the text is to grab our attention by the weightiness of the matter.[11] Like the double red flags at the beach warning potential swimmers of deadly currents, the sense of the text is that our life depends on the manner of attention we render to the message. The whole beach is filled with red flags! Take that kind of heed!
The following word προσέχειν means “to give close attention to something.”[12] The closeness of the attention is not merely, or even primarily, referring to proximity to the object of attention, but rather to the application of oneself to the object.[13] The Scripture says of Lydia, “The Lord opened her heart to heed the things spoken by Paul” (Acts 16:14). John Owen described Lydia as attending “with readiness, humility, and resolution to obey the Word.”[14] The Westminster Shorter Catechism highlights the same type of resolute attention to the Word when in answer 90 it says, “That the Word may become effectual to salvation, we must attend thereunto with diligence, preparation, and prayer; receive it with faith and love, lay it up it up in our hearts, and practice it in our lives.”[15] Attention must be given with great diligence, for our life depends upon it.
What happens if we do not pay more superabundant attention? The final word of 2:1 gives the warning, παραρυῶμεν (lest we drift away). This is the only time the verb is used in the Bible. It is a nautical word meaning “slip away,” “be washed away,” or “drift away.”[16] Whether it is a boat drifting at sea, washed clean by water, or unknowingly departing off course, the aorist active subjunctive form of the verb gives the sense of a present possibility of departure from where one should be. “The metaphor in mind here seems to be that of allowing the current to carry one away from a fixed point through carelessness and unconcern…of failing to maintain a secure anchorage which will keep one from drifting from the gospel”[17] Secure your anchor firmly to Christ, the sure foundation, lest you be carried away by the current to your own peril.
To what should we give more abundant attention? From what would we drift away? Τηλικοῦτος σωτηρίας(“so great a salvation”). The emphasis of the word τηλικοῦτος (“so great”) is in the degree of importance.[18] Speaking of the salvation of God, Paul uses the word to describe God who “delivered us from so great a death” (2 Cor. 2:10). We are not giving attention to something weak but extremely powerful, namely, σωτηρίας (“salvation”). Here the salvation in mind is that of “Messianic Salvation,” which is to say the free, full, and finished work of God in Christ.[19]
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Died: Jack Iker, Anglican Who Drew the Line at Women’s Ordination

By Daniel Silliman — 4 months ago

“Almost every day I am in conversation with one of our attorneys. We have engaged six different law firms to respond to the litigations brought against us.” The legal battles dragged on for 12 years before Iker and the Anglicans ultimately won. Finally, a Texas Supreme Court judge ruled that “under the governing documents, the withdrawing faction is the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth.” The national church appealed, but the US Supreme Court declined to take the case, letting the ruling stand. Throughout the long legal battle, Iker maintained there really was only one thing at stake: whether or not the church was going to remain committed to the faith handed down by the apostles.

Jack Iker, a Texas bishop who took 48 congregations and 15,000 parishioners out of the Episcopal Church USA and helped start the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), died on October 5. He was 75.
Iker was a conservative Anglo-Catholic who made common cause with evangelicals—whom he called “strange bedfellows”—in order to fight against liberal theological revisionism. He was especially opposed to the ordination of women. He would not accept women as priests in his diocese nor submit to the leadership of a woman elected as presiding bishop over the Episcopal Church in 2006.
“It puts me in a compromising position,” Iker told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram at the time. “It’s not against women. It’s a theological position. We believe the ordination of women … is a fundamental break with apostolic tradition and biblical teaching.”
The Texas bishop became one of four bishops to found ACNA in 2009. He continued to quarrel with the more conservative ACNA over the issue of women in ministry, however. The Anglicans ordain women as priests in some dioceses, but not others. For Iker, this was a line in the sand.
“It would be a bad legacy to be remembered as the bishop who didn’t ordain women,” he said. And yet he believed he had to fight to protect Episcopalians and then Anglicans in America from becoming “a church that acts more and more like a rebellious Protestant sect and less and less like an integral part of the one holy catholic and apostolic church.”
Iker was a polarizing figure, especially in Texas, where his followers were sometimes derisively called “Ikerpalians.”
“He didn’t back down from what we’ve received in terms of Biblical faith,” said Ryan Reed, the ACNA bishop who succeeded Iker in Fort Worth after Iker’s retirement. “His stance for the biblical Christian faith made him either a hero … or it made him despised.”
Many of the men who served under Iker in Texas praised him for his faithfulness in the face of sustained opposition. The word they used most often was steadfast.
Iker was “an incredible example of a Godly man faithfully living the gospel of Jesus Christ,” according to Mark Polley, an Anglican priest in Bedford, Texas. “God only knows how many people he positively influenced with his faith, courage, steadfastness.”
Iker was born in Cincinnati on August 31, 1949. He said little publicly over the years about his childhood, early faith, or call to ministry. He got married in a Methodist Church in 1968 as a freshman at the University of Cincinnati and pursued ordination in the Episcopal Church after graduation. He was ordained at St. George’s Episcopal Church in Dayton, Ohio, in 1974 and went on to serve quietly as a priest at Church of the Redeemer in Sarasota, Florida, for 15 years.
Iker didn’t become a public figure—or a lightning rod—until he was nominated to become a bishop in 1992.
The Episcopal Church had allowed women in ministry for 16 years at that point, but church canons could not force a bishop to ordain anyone. A bishop’s authority over his diocese was considered inviolate. And Iker said he wouldn’t ordain women, nor allow them to serve in any parish under his care.
One female critic said Iker’s nomination was “appalling” and predicted he would hold the Episcopal Church “hostage” to misogyny.
Iker was narrowly elected, however, with the support of John Shelby Spong, the liberal Episcopal bishop who rejected traditional Christian doctrines including Jesus’ resurrection and even theism itself. Spong said that though he wanted to force the church to evolve and believed it had to change or die, he thought Episcopalians should also tolerate traditionalists.
Spong later complained that “the act of gracious inclusion has never been reciprocated.”
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Meaning, Purpose, and the Will to Live

By Bill Muehlenberg — 4 months ago

“What is it about the kingdom that is of such profound value? It is a multifaceted treasure, but at the center of its value is the possibility of ultimate meaning. Jesus’s gospel of the kingdom is good news because it offers us deep, durable meaning powerful enough to sustain us through life and through suffering and dying. Our story becomes part of God’s grand story, the story behind all of our stories. it is the story in which our suffering is shown to be for good, to be meaningful, to matter, to be worth it.”

Let me preface things by saying that I am about to ban the word “coincidence” from my lips – and my fingers on the keyboard. As happens so very often, a number of different but related things happen at almost the same time, not only giving me the stuff of another article, but making me see how God’s hand is behind what we experience in life.
In the period of a day or so, three quite separate events occurred, all centring on the issue of suicide, self-worth, and why we must resist the culture of death. The first one was this: in a radio interview speaking of rock stars and rejection, the conversation steered to how sometimes when things get really bad, we can see that God is there to help us out of our downward and dead-end spiral.
So I ended up briefly recounting one example of this in my own life when as a depressed and bummed-out hippy I was quite suicidal. I had no sense of purpose or meaning, no sense of self-worth, so the idea of ending everything seemed to be the way to proceed. That episode is recounted in an earlier article of mine: link
The second thing that occurred during the same period was stumbling upon one of those many cop shows on television. The episode was about an officer called to deal with a woman on a bridge threatening to jump to her death. It turns out she was a youngish mother who kept shouting about how she was a failure and there was no reason to go on.
It was quite a tense and traumatic situation, and she was obviously in great distress and turmoil, thinking she was of no use to anyone, not even to her own children. The problem was, she was on the outside of a curved (from bottom to top) fence, which was over another busy road some thirty feet below. So it was quite difficult for the policeman to get to where she was at on the other side of it.
He had to try to comfort her and talk her out of it , telling her that she was not a failure and she was needed. She kept shouting “I’m sorry” as well, so he had to say she had nothing to be sorry about. He had to draw upon all he learned in his training to deal with people in this situation.
Soon a female officer came along, and as she talked to the distraught mother, the officer managed to get to the top of this fence thing, and tried to grab a hold of her. She still seemed intent on jumping, so he finally managed to get her two wrists into handcuffs which he also connected to the fence so she could not jump. A fire truck crew came and finally managed to get her down.
It was quite an intense and lengthy standoff, but finally ended with a good outcome. But what would have driven a mother like this to want to end her own life? How low of a view of her own worth and value did she have? And as the police told her, her children certainly needed her.
The third thing involves – no surprises here – a new book. It is on euthanasia and I was reading it at the same time. It is Ewan Goligher’s How Should We Then Die? A Christian Response to Physician-Assisted Death (Lexham Press, 2024). Although a brief book (140 pages) it offers a helpful look at this crucial issue of how suicidal thoughts are so closely connected to our sense of worth and importance as human beings.
Obviously those with a deep awareness of their own value as a person and their importance to self and to others will be far less tempted with thoughts of taking one’s own life. It is only when we lose all sense of meaning, purpose and value that the will to love is radically undercut.
Of course the idea of meaning and purpose contributing to our will to live is well-documented, and has been written about by many. One famous work on this is Man’s Search For Meaning by concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl. I have discussed him before, and Goligher also mentions him and his book.
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