Prayers for Healing & Patching Up Your Tent
By all means, let’s pray for our temporary, leaky tent to get patched up and thank God every time he does. But let’s long even more for the eternal mansion he has given us through Jesus Christ.
Christians can and should pray for healing. James 5:14 says: “Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord”. We believe in a God who heals. He is called “the LORD, your healer” (Ex 15:26). He sent his servants Elijah & Elisha with a healing ministry in the Old Testament, and he sent his Son the Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles to exercise a healing ministry in the New Testament.
But we need to see healing for what it is: it’s a camper, who owns a luxurious mansion, getting his leaky tent patched up. Of course, patching up a leaky tent is a good thing. Patching up a leaky tent is something to be very thankful for. But living in a patched-up, leaky tent is not very exciting compared to living in a splendid mansion. Paul compares our present body to a tent and our resurrected body to a “house…eternal in the heavens” (2 Cor 5:1).
So, when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, Lazarus was getting his tent patched up, for 20, 30, 40 more years (John 11:44). But what Jesus has really come to give Lazarus (and all believers with him) is an everlasting house – “the resurrection of life” (John 5:29). Lazarus was never meant to confuse more camping with his move into a mansion.
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Christianity and Worldly Philosophy
Written by W. Robert Godfrey |
Friday, February 17, 2023
His reflections on the nature of true Christianity in each chapter show the profound and powerful importance of these truths. But before he develops this great theme, he reflects briefly on the broader issues confronting Christians in our times, particularly naturalism and materialism. “Material betterment has gone hand in hand with spiritual decline,” he writes. As Machen sees it, “modern unbelief” has not just attacked true religion but has also undermined the higher life of individuals more generally.J. Gresham Machen introduces his invaluable book Christianity and Liberalism by observing that he lived in “a time of conflict.” Perhaps all humans have lived in times of conflict ever since mankind’s fall into sin. The fundamental conflict is always between Satan and the Seed of the woman (Gen. 3:15), but that conflict takes somewhat different forms in different times. Machen sees the conflict of his time as a conflict between materialism and the spiritual life, which remains very much the reality for us one hundred years later.
In his book, Machen celebrates the modern advances in improving our physical lives that have come from scientific discoveries. The danger he sees is that these very successes have blinded many to the reality that there is more to life than physical well-being. They have focused exclusively on the material and have become materialists. The natural world that surrounds us, that can be seen and touched, is the only world. The supernatural, which is to say God’s acting beyond the natural in this world, is ruled out entirely. But Machen wisely alludes to the words of Jesus (Matt. 16:26): What will it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?
The great purpose of Machen’s book is to insist that only true Christianity can answer the challenge of materialism and to show that true Christianity is entirely different from and opposed to liberal or modernistic pseudo-Christianity. His reflections on the nature of true Christianity in each chapter show the profound and powerful importance of these truths. But before he develops this great theme, he reflects briefly on the broader issues confronting Christians in our times, particularly naturalism and materialism. “Material betterment has gone hand in hand with spiritual decline,” he writes.
As Machen sees it, “modern unbelief” has not just attacked true religion but has also undermined the higher life of individuals more generally. He sees a materialistic worldview as restricting the freedom of individuals to cultivate the great achievements of the human mind and spirit. He points to the modern arts, music, and literature as evidence of modern decline of human accomplishment.One example that he offers of the deadening effects of the neglect of the spirit is in the field of modern education. His remarks seem truly prophetic. Remember, he is writing in 1922. He complains that “the choice of schools must be taken away from the individual parent and placed in the hands of the state.” In state education, “the child is placed under the control of psychological experts, themselves without the slightest acquaintance with the higher realms of human life.” Indeed, “bureaucratic regulation” in education as elsewhere is leading to a “drab utilitarianism in which all higher aspirations are to be lost.” Such education values teaching only what is useful in the estimation of materialism.
As an example of this tendency of the state to ruin education, Machen refers to a law passed in 1919 in Nebraska.
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Advent Thoughts During Quiet Moments
As we celebrate Advent and look forward to Christmas, we are reminded in Philippians 2 that Jesus, as the eternal Word, forever dwelling in felicity and eternal self-satisfaction in the mystery of the Trinity, . . . this Jesus humbled Himself, indeed emptied Himself (what a mystery that kenosis!); He left behind (again in some profoundly mysterious sense) His omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, and so much more. He took on flesh, and came not as a warrior, conquering king, but as a fragile and vulnerable baby in Bethlehem.
It’s Christmas vacation! And I begin to have some quiet moments now that grading is done for my squad of 80-something students. I realize now that there is a profound difference between life as a full-time administrator/part-time teacher, and a full-time teacher. Administrative life takes a rather large emotional/stress drain as one deals with various and sundry crises day-in-day-out. But that role also provided some significant (though perhaps not adequate “think-time”) to write. The full-time teacher, on the other hand, has less significant think-time due to teaching and grading for 87 students, but also near zero stress at managing life crises of families that manifest as bad student behavior and conflict in our community. But . . . with a teaching break, some thoughts emerge in the quiet.
First, some thoughts on “identity.”
Who am I? Who are you? Who are we as individuals and as a people? Do we have the power to “self-identify”? Or is this a realm belonging only to the One who causes all things to exist? These thoughts come as I complete a study of John’s Gospel with a focus on Jesus’ “I am” statements. Jesus has a right to say who He is, since most fundamentally, He simply “IS” as the great “I AM.”
We do indeed have an identity — we are made (note the passive form of the verb) in the image of God — imago Dei. But we now live in a world where we are told by “the world” that people can, indeed must, choose their own identity.
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Covenant, Election and Realized Eschatology
Biblical eschatology contemplates not that the kingdom of this world would be replaced by the kingdom of Christ, but rather a coexistence of two kingdom realities until the summing up of all things in Christ. (Ephesians 2:19ff; 1 Corinthians 15:22-28). What the Jews missed is something that too often escapes many evangelicals as well – that Christ’s kingdom is a present reality as the former things are passing away.
The four part drama of creation, fall, redemption and consummation is not just soteriological but eschatological and covenantal. This is to say, the whole of redemptive history is according to promise and fulfillment. Yet perhaps less familiar to many of us is that redemption in Christ has made the future now present.
With respect to promise and fulfillment, at the heart of God’s redemption is a foretaste of things to come – a spiritual reality that is enjoyed now in proportion to the extent in which it is perceived and believed. As we await the final adoption of our bodies on the last day, believers have already entered into the age to come. As enlightened believers who are born from above, the communion of saints on earth already taste of the heavenly gift, the word of God, and even the powers of the world to come as members of Christ’s body who share in the Holy Spirit. (Romans 8:23; Hebrews 6:4-5)
Back to the garden, a refresher on how it all began:
The first covenant God entered into with man was a covenant of works. (Hosea 6:7) Although life was promised to Adam and his posterity upon the condition of one man’s perfect and personal obedience, the terms of the covenant were nonetheless a matter of divine condescension. Adam was the recipient of unmerited favor by virtue of having been created in original righteousness, holiness and with natural religious affections. Perpetual faithfulness would have ultimately resulted for Adam and his offspring in further blessedness, perhaps even consummated communion with his Maker. Yet in God’s unsearchable wisdom, Adam fell from his original state of sinlessness according to God’s eternal and unchangeable design.
After our first parents plunged themselves and the human race into sin, misery and death, God revealed his eternal decree pertaining to the redemption of creation. In the protoevangelium God speaks into existence a deep seated enmity between two seeds, Christ and Satan. As a result of the fall and by divine fiat, the spiritual antithesis would now extend beyond the King of Kings and the prince of darkness unto their respective spiritual offspring – God’s ordained objects of divine mercy and wrath. (Genesis 3:15; 2 Corinthians 11:3; WSC 13)
Grace without the sacrifice of righteousness:
The second covenant, more commonly known as the Covenant of Grace, was established with the incarnate Son and, through eternal identification, those chosen in him. Christ, the second Adam by divine appointment, would be the chosen race’s new representative before God. It is Christ who would perfectly obey God’s law, even vicariously on behalf of those given to him by his Father. Accordingly, the terms of the second covenant were not discounted. There was nothing cheap about the second covenant compact. Christ would indeed earn the redemption of his people, even as life was offered to Adam beforehand. (Genesis 17:7; Galatians 3:16,29; Romans 9:8; WLC 31)
Similarities with striking differences:
Although the second covenant is called a Covenant of Grace, its gracious nature would not pertain to the second Adam but only to the recipients of his vicarious work on their behalf. The difference between the two covenants is all the more striking precisely because its righteous demands were not lessened. The incarnate Son took on the demands of the covenant of works on behalf of sinners, even in an oath of self-malediction. (Genesis 15:17)
Yet with the fall of man life alone could no longer be offered, for there were none righteous from below. Any offer of life would now have to be accompanied by an offer of deliverance from sin’s penalty and power. If life were to be offered, it would be accompanied by salvation through One who must come from above.
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