Jesus knows temptation and testing.  Jesus fights to obey his Father’s will.  And so when we’re struggling to obey we can run to him for help in prayer because he knows what it is to fight to obey. Because Jesus knows and overcomes temptation and testing we can let go of our pretended heroism and run to him which wins for us. It is liberating. It is where rest is found.

One of the things that always strikes me as I read the passion narratives in any of the gospel is the extent to which Jesus knows what he’s facing that week.  He’s repeatedly told his disciples what is coming in more and more detail.
And as he leads them to that garden again, a place they and Judas are familiar with, Jesus enters into a cosmic spiritual battle.  This is a battle on an epic scale – this is Jesus’ Marathon, Waterloo, Stalingrad, and D-Day.  In the garden Jesus fights for the salvation of every believer throughout all of time and for the kingdom of God and the faithfulness of God to his promises.
In an echo of Eden the Son of God enters a garden where he’s tempted to turn his back on sonship and doubt and disobey his Father’s will.  The consequences of this battle will be just as cataclysmic as the first.  But it isn’t a battle fought with sword and clubs, it’s not a battle fought, with joysticks or drone, with wealth or influence. This is a battle fought on his knees in prayer wrestling to obey his Father.
Of all the ways we think of prayer I think this is the one we miss most.  Prayer is a vital part of waging the war to obey God, it is a vital weapon in our arsenal for fighting temptation. Sometimes prayer is war! .
And as Jesus goes to battle he doesn’t want to go alone.  He takes all 11 into the garden, and then Peter, James and John a little further and begins to be sorrowful and troubled.
There are lots of good things that have flowed out of the focus in the last 30 years on personal times of reading the bible and prayer.  But one of the negatives is that we’ve lost the importance of praying together.  If you read the Bible with an eye to it I think you’ll find people praying together more than individually, especially in the early church.
Here Jesus in his hour of greatest weakness, when he feels the burden of what he is about to do most keenly, doesn’t withdraw alone to a mountain top, he takes his disciples with him.  When we’re fighting to obey God, when we’re in the white-hot heat of battle with sin, when we are feeling weighed down with the burden God has laid on us, we need brothers and sisters around us.  When we’re struggling to pray that’s not the time to withdraw from others but be with and around others.  Do you see that need?  If Jesus has it we have it to, it’s not a sign of weakness but how we are live as God’s people together.
But this is a prayer like no other.  (38)Jesus tells his 3 friends that he’s overwhelmed with sorrow.  Have you ever got in trouble swimming in the sea?
Read More
Related Posts:

Gaffin’s most recent book is a searching exploration of how to apply New Testament eschatology to the unfolding sweep of redemptive history, particularly regarding how the ascended Christ has ushered in the end of the ages by pouring out his Spirit on his church. 

Dr. Richard Gaffin, professor emeritus of biblical and systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia), is famous for his emphasis on redemptive history and the historia salutis, or the factors concerning Christ’s once-for-all accomplishment of redemption. Claiming the legacy of Geerhardus Vos and Herman Ridderbos, he has focused his scholarly efforts on the major redemptive-historical shifts that occurred in Christ’s first coming, also highlighting the eschatological flavor of New Testament, particularly Pauline, theology. Gaffin’s students have often lauded his course on Acts and Paul as his fundamental contribution to the field. His most recent book, In the Fullness of Time, preserves those lectures in published form, produced from transcriptions of his recorded lectures and edited by Gaffin himself.
This book is essentially a work on eschatology, arguing that the inbreaking of the last day in Christ’s advent is a primarily encompassing feature of New Testament theology, and tracing out its implications. It has two parts, the first exploring the theology of the book of Acts, and the second examining the Pauline corpus. Under each topical chapter, Gaffin performs careful and detailed exegesis on several passages related to the point he is considering, each focusing in some way or other on the already-not yet of New Testament teaching.
Part one on the theology of the book of Acts predominantly focuses on Pentecost’s theological significance. Gaffin argues, rooting his claims not only in the events of Acts 2 but also in a holistic consideration of Luke’s treatment of the Holy Spirit and God’s kingdom in both installments of his account to Theophilus, that Pentecost belongs to the historia salutis as a facet of the once-for-all accomplishment of redemption and a turning point in redemptive history itself. His target, of course, is Pentecostalism, which has often posed Pentecost—at least in the categories with which Gaffin is grappling, even if not their own—as part of the ordo salutis. That Pentecostal position entails that every individual believer should experience the same sort of phenomenon as occurred in Acts 2 because they see that tied to how salvation is applied to the believer. Gaffin, on the other hand, makes a strident case that the Holy Spirit’s outpouring at Pentecost is not a normative experience as part of the ordo salutis but was a pivotal moment in redemptive history wherein Christ sent the Helper whom he promised to send, so that the church would be equipped for her kingdom-expanding mission of gospel ministry.
Gaffin’s exegesis is thoroughly persuasive on this point, demonstrating Pentecost’s age-shifting significance as the extension of Christ’s kingdom into this world by the power of the Spirit to be carried forward in the church’s means of grace ministry. As a convinced cessationist, I am glad for this thorough pushback against destructive understandings of the Christian’s experience of the Spirit. The presentation, however, does leave some questions unanswered. Gaffin convincingly outlines what Pentecost’s implications are not, yet never outlines what its implications are with much specificity. The dawning of the age of the Spirit is of course an exhilarating idea, prompting thanks for the Spirit’s presence with the church in our endeavors. This material’s value could be richly supplemented, however, by focusing also on what it means to live in the age of the Spirit and how the Christian experience of the Spirit should be understood. That is not to say this experience need be described all that experientially, but is to say that sometimes extended refutation (and even positive exposition that is nonetheless rightly but primarily aimed to circumvent error) can leave us with only half of what we need. What does the Spirit do in the church during this period of redemptive history?
Another question arises from Gaffin’s helpful case that Pentecost belongs to the historia salutis: namely, related to the difference, if any, that comes in relation to the ordo salutis compared to believers who lived prior to the Incarnation and Pentecost. This question is a necessary point to consider because the recent increase of Baptist reflection on the covenants and the unity of redemptive history has focused on the Spirit’s indwelling as the difference between Old and New Testament soteriology. In this respect, and to some degree in relation to the emphatic concern to preclude Pentecostal conclusions, this book could have used some slight updating as it seems to focus on matters that may be somewhat out of date in most recent discourse. That certainly does not diminish its value for what it does contribute, but leaves some important matters unclarified. It would have been a significant help to see Gaffin think Pentecost’s redemptive-historical shift all the way down to its specific applications for more precise systematic theological questions. This point in no way suggests that Gaffin’s answers to these questions would be deficient, just that it would have been most helpful to get to read those answers.1
Part two, which concerns the theology of the Pauline letters, likewise emphasizes Paul’s contributions to understanding the shifts in redemptive history that accompany Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. This section too, then, focuses on eschatology—namely, the inbreaking of the last days through Christ’s humiliation and exaltation. The survey of the history of interpretation for Paul’s letters is particularly helpful regarding the higher critical period, showing Gaffin’s familiarity with a host of literature, available only in the European languages when he would have been originally preparing this course, with which modern readers of Paul must in some way or other reckon. After framing the investigation of Paul’s letters in terms of the history of interpretation and the overall eschatological structure of his thought, the bulk of part two focuses on the significance of Christ’s resurrection for redemptive history and for the Christian life. The chapters here probe deeply into how Christ’s resurrection should reorient the way we think about eschatology, redemptive history, and salvation.
I am aware that readers of the Heidelblog will be especially interested in this book’s treatment of the doctrine of justification. Gaffin has made controversial claims about justification in his earlier published writings, particularly concerning an application of our already-not yet eschatology to justification itself, leaving some aspects of it to be completed in the future. Although valuing his emphasis on eschatology and his thoroughgoing amillennialism, I have disagreed with Gaffin on this point, especially his interpretation of Romans 2. Two points must be noted here: 1) This post is a review of a particular book, not an engagement with everything Gaffin has ever written, and 2) nonetheless I believe that there was a demonstrable shift in Gaffin’s thought on the ordo salutis in his 2016 essay “The Work of Christ Applied.”2
The second point may be worth elaborating. Whereas Gaffin had formerly criticized the notion of fixed relationships between Christ’s benefits within a truly ordered ordo salutis, this essay contains more resolute statements concerning a logical order. For example, he contended that the blessings of the ordo salutis “are not received as an arbitrary or chaotic mix but in a set pattern with fixed connections among them,” which prevents “misrepresenting individual aspects or acts and so distorting the work of Christ applied as a whole.”3 In another instance, Gaffin also affirmed the priority of the legal aspects of salvation:
While these two [forensic and renovative] aspects are inseparable, the judicial aspect has an essential and decisive priority. Because his [Christ’s] obedience unto death is the requisite judicial ground for his resurrection, his becoming the life-giving Spirit presupposes his being justified in the Spirit, not the reverse.4
It is possible that this suggested shift in Gaffin’s thought on the ordo salutis occurred while he edited the English translation of Geerhardus Vos’ Reformed Dogmatics, an invaluable contribution. Vos took positions that remarkably resemble Gaffin’s most recent arguments. For instance: “The subjective application of the salvation obtained by Christ does not occur at once or arbitrarily.” Rather, “there are a multiplicity of relationships and conditions to which all the operations of grace have a certain connection.”5 This point has bearing on how we must review In the Fullness of Time.
Read More
Related Posts:

Thessalonians confirms that believers remain forever with the Lord. But the location and circumstances of that blessed condition are assumed rather than articulated. Recalling the “tenses” of salvation, we see that salvation is completed only when God’s final favorable judgment is rendered. Douglas Moo’s summary of Pauline theology observes that “salvation covers the entirety of Christian experience.” He reminds us that salvation language is used of God’s past, present, and future work in our salvific journey, and he calculates that the Pauline writings most frequently address God’s rescue in the final steps of our course. 

Biblical Eschatology
What happens at Jesus’s return? The writers to the Thessalonians give only some of the puzzle pieces. Thessalonians does not present a complete picture. Neither do other parts of Scripture. What do these letters contribute to a fuller biblical eschatology?
An Unmissable Return
One of the theological shortcomings of popular dispensationalist eschatology is an extra coming of Jesus. His first advent at Christmas is followed by two second comings! Coming 2a is alleged to be a secret arrival to rapture believers, while 2b involves the more public parousia, the day of the Lord, final judgment, and so on.
Jesus’s return will not pass unnoticed. The first letter gives three descriptions of loud audio accompaniment: “a cry of command,” “the voice of an archangel,” and “the sound of the trumpet of God” (1 Thess. 4:16; cf. Matt. 24:31; 1 Cor. 15:52). And the second letter assures the Thessalonians that the day of the Lord won’t pass unawares (e.g., 2 Thess. 2:1–4). Gordon Fee notes how “ ‘the manifestation of his coming’ [in 2 Thess. 2:8] . . . is intended to emphasize not just the fact of his coming, but especially its unmistakable and evidential character. . . . Christ’s Parousia will be openly manifest to all.”1 Thessalonians says nothing of a secret second coming.
A Rapture Unlikely
Despite its popularity in the last century, there is no evidence of a rapture either, certainly not in the sense of believers being whisked into heaven before a period of intense tribulation suffered by those left behind. This is significant because 1 Thessalonians 4:17 is the only verse in the New Testament to hint at the idea and because it’s the verse that dispensationalists identify as central to the doctrine. English Bibles talk here about being “caught up” (for which the old Latin translation used the verb rapio). The passage tells us nothing about which direction believers travel after meeting Jesus in the air—and that its sense more likely is that the august gathering returns to earth rather than to heaven.
The pastoral thrust of the passage is that believers who die before Jesus returns will not miss out. They will have a distinguished position in his vanguard. The apostles are equally clear that all believers will thus be with the Lord forever (1 Thess. 4:17; 5:10; 2 Thess. 2:1). These ideas are far more prominent—in 1 Thessalonians 4, in the two Thessalonian letters, and throughout the Bible—than any alleged exempting of living believers from universal difficulties.2
Judgment and the End of Evil
Rather than being exempted from tribulation, the Thessalonian letters remind believers that they do face difficulties—and regularly—especially for joining the Christian journey. Along with the church planters, the Thessalonians have been oppressed since their conversion (1 Thess. 1:6; 1 Thess. 2:2, 13–16).
Read More
Related Posts: