“He Will Come to Judge”
Written by R. Fowler White |
Friday, July 1, 2022
God will intervene to destroy the present world with fire (2 Pet 3:4-10). And that last Day will not only be a Day of Destruction, but also a Day of Judgment. From His seat in the Holy of Holies in heaven, Christ will return to judge, and all will see His glory. Until that Day, we must bear witness of His return to judge. For all who would enter God’s presence on their own, there will only be unending agony and anguish. But for all who trust in Christ who submitted Himself to God’s judgment in their place and removed all the curse from them, there will be everlasting comfort and consolation.
Continuing this series of posts on the Apostles’ Creed, we focus now on Article 7: from there—from the right hand of God the Father Almighty—He will come to judge the living and the dead. Just as we did with Article 6, it’s important to go back in history to get the most out of Article 7.
Remember the question that has haunted dying sinners since the fall: Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? In the liturgy of Leviticus, God provided Moses His answer to the question: only a man undefiled by sin and death is welcomed on His mountain. Thus God made known that the way to enter His presence undefiled was through the sacrifice and the priesthood that He required. Following God’s direction, Moses set up the sacrifices and the priesthood for the first old covenant worship service, and then he and Aaron were ceremonially cleansed to enter the Holy Place to meet with God and to intercede for the people. The drama of that first old covenant worship service was not over, however, when Moses and Aaron went into the Holy Place. No, the culmination of that service was when Moses and Aaron came out of the Holy Place to bless the people as the glory of the Lord appeared to them.
It is at that point that we engage with the seventh article of the Creed: Jesus our High Priest and King will emerge again from Heaven’s Holy of Holies, descending from His seat at His Father’s right hand. In other words, we confess what the Apostles heard when Christ ascended: This same Jesus, who has been taken … into heaven, will come back in the same way that you have seen him going into heaven (Acts 1:10). In the Creed, following Scripture, we confess His purpose in returning: He will come back to judge. As we know, depending on the context, the verb to judge can be negative, or positive, or both. Both is the Creed’s point. Christ’s purpose when He returns is to hand down His rulings, whether negative or positive. The Heidelberg Catechism, Question 52, makes this point well when it declares, He will cast all His and my enemies into everlasting condemnation, and He will take me and all His chosen ones to Himself into heavenly joy and glory. Here we can pick up again the events that unfolded back in Leviticus. After Moses and Aaron came out of the place of meeting, they pronounced God’s blessing on the people, and all the people saw the fiery glory of the Lord, and they let out shouts of joy and fell on their faces, overcome with awe.
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Understanding the New Abnormal
Written by Francis X. Maier |
Monday, October 10, 2022
Most us still imagine society as a community of reasonably intelligent, reasonably independent individuals capable of managing their own affairs. Many of those in our expert class profess the same; but down deep, in the secret crevices of their hearts, they have a hankering for the cattle-management model Aldous Huxley captured so vividly in Brave New World and C. S. Lewis imagined in The Abolition of Man.Let’s start with a simple irony. Much of today’s chatter about “defending democracy,” the sanctity of personal rights, and the sacred quality of human dignity comes from people who, consciously or otherwise, jeopardize all three by their actions. The evidence is abundant. And Aaron Kheriaty’s forthcoming book, The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State (to be released November 1), is Exhibit A. Every few years a book comes along like Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed or Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self that hits a cultural nerve and mustn’t be ignored; that combines elegantly lucid writing with vital and timely content.
The New Abnormal is just such a book. It’s a compelling account of the tech-driven “surveillance and control” state now emerging around us—reputedly for our own good, of course—by a doctor and scholar who’s paid a heavy price for noticing it, recognizing the implications, and resisting them.
But more about that in a moment. First, some background.
Hans Jonas, the philosopher, argued that three things set humans apart from all other living creatures. The tool enables man to pursue his needs; to imprint nature with his knowledge and will. The image—the grandeur of human art—expresses his memory, his desire for beauty, and his imagination. But the greatest factor distinguishing humans from other creatures is the grave. Only human beings bury their dead. Only humans know their own mortality. And thus only humans can ask where they came from, what life means, and what comes after it. The grave, for all its pathos, is actually a statement of reverence and hope. A nearly universal fact of human civilization is this: The body, even in death and decay, carries the resonance of something unrepeatable and holy, something “other than” this world and its cycle of futility.
When a biblically-informed culture speaks of “the dignity of the human person” and “the sanctity of human life,” it grounds those concepts in the Word of God. Consider Genesis 1:27: “God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” And note Genesis 2:7: “Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” The American founding was shaped in equal measure by biblical and Enlightenment thought. But even the Enlightenment, as experienced here in the United States, drew its morality and anthropology from the Jewish-Christian ages that preceded it.
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Unnatural Behavior Does Not Exist?
Written by Andrew T. Walker |
Friday, September 8, 2023
Yuval Harari offers his readers a rare insight into the worldview of a postmodern materialist. According to Harari, morality is a façade that we attach to naturally occurring realities. Because all we are is just our biology, whatever occurs within us is, by definition, natural, and presumably, in Harari’s understanding, good. If it is natural, it cannot be immoral because whatever occurs, occurs in accordance with nature. So, it must be okay.Occasionally, statements get made by important figures that, for individuals like me, a Christian ethics professor, do a great service. They just accidentally say what they truly mean with little possibility of confusion or misinterpretation. They reveal their underlying worldview. They do not disguise their beliefs. In an act of intellectual transparency, some say the unvarnished truth out loud, even if by accident. This is an act of public service.
One such example comes from the Twitter/X account of the world famous intellectual, Yuval Harari. Harari is an Israeli professor well known for forecasting the future of scientific and human advancement.
In a tweet posted last week, Harari showed the reality of a worldview that neglects God as the foundation of morality. In Harari’s own words, he stated: “From a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.”
Now, be patient as I try to explain Harari’s philosophical gobbledygook.
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Old Testament Allusions in Colossians
There are three Old Testament allusions in Colossians of which many Christians are likely unaware.
Be Fruitful and Multiply
The first Old Testament allusion is in Colossians 1:6 and 1:10. Verse 6 says, “The gospel, which has come unto you, just as in all the world also it is constantly bearing fruit and increasing.” Similarly, verse 10 says believers are “to please [God] in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.” Both of these verses are allusions to Genesis 1:28: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.”1
At the least, Paul’s use of language from Genesis 1:28 about the beginning of the old creation is intended to indicate that a new creation has been inaugurated with believers because of their identification with Christ. Furthermore, Adam and Eve’s “being fruitful and multiplying and filling” the earth with literal children who would join Adam in reflecting God’s image and in exercising kingly dominion over the earth may also be in mind. In Christ, the last Adam, believers have begun to regain the image of God in spiritually “bearing fruit and increasing,” since Adam’s own “bearing fruit and increasing” would have had spiritual dimensions in that he was to bear children who were in God’s image and were to reflect God’s own spiritual attributes.2 Thus, in Christ we begin to fulfill the mandate of Genesis 1:28 as we “bear fruit in good works” and as we “increase in the knowledge of God” in His word of truth in the Bible.
Be Filled with Knowledge and Skill
A second Old Testament allusion occurs in Colossians 1:9, which is a reference to Exodus 31:3 and 35:31–32 (note the allusion italics): “We have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding.” The Exodus passages say that God filled Israelites (Bezalel, Oholiab, and others) with His Spirit to have skill in building the tabernacle (see Ex. 31:1–11). The focus of the allusion in Colossians. 1:9 is that Paul is petitioning that God would fill believers with the Spirit in order that they would build their spiritual lives skillfully, as verse 10 makes clear (“to walk, . . . bearing fruit in every good work”).
