Written by Michael A. Milton |
Wednesday, October 12, 2022
We live in perilous days. The Church needs your scholarship to support believers making their way through a chaotic world, “a strange land”…where everything they have known is being deconstructed and reassembled without the Creator’s blueprint. 

Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth (2 Timothy 2:15 KJV).

It may be difficult to comprehend all the research, writing, editing, proofreading, and email-arm wrestling with your friendly neighborhood professor or doctoral adviser as an act of grace or a gift to others for God. However, for those engaged in theological and religious studies, in ministry (and other humanities, too), the doctoral dissertation or master thesis (or research paper) should be an enduring gift to God and humankind. We can assert this confidently because we see the truth illustrated so powerfully in the Bible. The Apostle Paul, in his Second Epistle to Pastor Timothy, chapter two and verse fifteen, admonishes Timothy to practice diligence in scholarship. He is speaking, of course, of biblical scholarship. However, “rightly dividing the word of truth” refers to the holy Scriptures. Timothy had an example of a man who studied the classics in the apostle Paul. His training as a rabbi was nothing short of the most strenuous and comprehensive study in the humanities. The Apostle Paul was able to quote poets and Greek philosophers. There is evidence in his writings of allusions to other literature as well. The Apostle Paul had studied to show himself approved. Paul also prioritized Christian scholarship in the lives of those who would follow him. Indeed, in 1 and 2 Timothy, the Apostle Paul calls Pastor Timothy to a life of uncompromising scholarship of the highest order. Why? It is because Timothy is to preach and minister the inerrant and the infallible Word of the living God. That is the thing: We who are called to the ministry of the Gospel handle holy things. Doing so requires the power of the Holy Spirit at work within us. Thus, Christ-called and Spirit-guided ministers must transmit the glorious truths of the Gospel to their generation. This incalculable responsibility demands an extraordinary level of dedication to Christian scholarship.
I shall never forget when Dr. James Montgomery Boice (1938-2000) visited our fledgling church plant in Overland Park, Kansas. He graciously preached at our church plant, and over three hundred people came to hear the noted Bible scholar and pastor. Boice, the former editor of Christianity Today and the speaker on the Radio Bible Study Hour preached from the Epistle to the Romans that night. Many who came to hear Dr. Boice would subsequently come into our newly founded Christian community. After the service, Dr. Boice came home with my wife, our son, and me. My wife fixed us a late supper. It just so happened that I was taking off the next morning for the United Kingdom. I had a month of doctoral studies ahead of me. I was halfway through my Doctor of Philosophy program at the University of Wales. Dr. Boice inquired about my studies. A graduate of the University of Basel, Switzerland (where he planted a local church even as he pursued his doctoral studies) and a Harvard and Princeton graduate, Dr. James Montgomery Boice possessed unsurpassed scholarly credentials. Though Dr. Boice’s pedagogical pedigree was unrivaled, his role in the larger Church of our Lord Jesus Christ was that of an undisputed servant-leader and “a doctor of the Church,” a mantle earned without seeking and worn without trying. As the evening ended, Dr. Boice looked at me as if he were sizing me up. He then said words that not only arrested my attention but pierced my heart: “Mike, the Church of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is where you must apply your doctoral research. There is no greater use for your Ph.D. than defending God’s truths and making them plain to little children. Never forget: the pulpit is worthy of the highest scholarship.”
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Because Jesus lives, death doesn’t stand a chance. The Son of Man has all authority in heaven and on earth, and the tombs answer to him. When the Lord returns, death shall be no more. We have this hope because we are united to Christ by faith. In Christ we will rise to experience what the tree of life held out for us: glorified bodily life.

In the beginning there was life—and so shall the end be. The power of God and his faithfulness to every promise ensure the triumph of life over death. This is the Christian hope of resurrection, or the raising and glorifying of our bodies.
The Bible has much to teach us about this glorious hope. In the following sections, we will meditate on bodily resurrection in several ways. We will see how the Old Testament authors taught God’s death-defeating power. We will notice how the defeat of death will establish what God designed for his image-bearers: immortal physical life. And we will rejoice in the gospel news that Jesus has been raised from the dead, inaugurating bodily life without end—a life that will belong to all who are united to him.
Martha’s Words About Resurrection
Near the end of Jesus’s public ministry, his friend Lazarus died (John 11:14). Even though Jesus learned earlier that Lazarus was ill, he did not make a trip to see him. He waited, but not because of callousness or busyness or misunderstanding. As we can infer from John 11:3–4, Jesus planned to show the glory of God in what happened next. For that reason, Lazarus would spend four days in the tomb when Jesus finally showed (John 11:17).
Martha met with Jesus and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21). Jesus’s reputation as a miracle-worker preceded wherever he traveled those days. Martha knew that Jesus could have healed Lazarus’s illness. Jesus told her, “Your brother will rise again” (11:23).
Faithful Jews had a concept of bodily resurrection because of what the Old Testament authors taught. This understanding is why Martha said, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day” (John 11:24). There she referred to her brother’s future bodily resurrection. The dead would one day rise, and Lazarus would be among them. This she believed, as she had been taught.
Waking from the Dust
A conviction in the Four Gospels that the dead would rise was based on God’s revelation in the Old Testament. In the clearest expression of resurrection hope in the Old Testament, Daniel 12:2 says, “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” Pictured as waking from bodily sleep, the dead will awake from the dust and live.
The language of dust takes us back to Genesis 2–3. The Lord pronounced judgments and consequences to the serpent and to the human couple, and Adam heard these words: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:19).
Being “taken” from the dust recalls the creation of Adam, where the very first instance of “dust” is used. The Lord “formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Gen. 2:7). Because of the words in Genesis 3:19, however, the dust signifies not just Adam’s life; he “shall return” to the dust, which means death. Like Adam, going to the dust is our earthly end. But as Daniel 12:2 reminds us, life will once again come from the dust. In Genesis 2, the granting of life was creation. In Daniel 12, the granting of life will be resurrection. At death, we go to the dust, but we do not go there to stay.
Made for Embodied Life
Bodily resurrection is what will accomplish God’s design for his image-bearers: embodied life with him. When God made Adam, the man was not a disembodied spirit who was later given a body. God created Adam as an embodied creature, so the only kind of life Adam knew was embodied. Death disrupts bodily life because the body dies even as the soul lives. Resurrection is the recovery of God’s design because the body is raised and re-united to the soul.
We were made for unending bodily life. Consider, as evidence, the tree of life in the Garden of Eden. God put the tree of life in the midst of the garden (Gen. 2:9). And when God exiled Adam from Eden, he was barring Adam from the tree of life, “lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever” (3:22). The tree of life represented immortal physicality. The question for God’s image-bearers, then, is whether we will ever experience what the tree of life held out. The answer is yes: through bodily resurrection, we will, as Daniel 12 puts it, “awake” from the dust unto embodied immortality.
As we affirm the kind of life God created us for and will raise us to receive, we can discern more of what our Christian hope entails. Our ultimate hope is not to die and leave this world as mere souls. Paul says that at death, believers are absent from the body and present with the Lord in heaven (2 Cor. 5:6–8). To die is gain indeed (Phil. 1:21). But if our future was only disembodied life with God, then death would hold our bodies in its cords forever.
Paul, speaking about our earthly bodies, told the Corinthians, “For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling” (2 Cor. 5:2). Our earthly tent—marked with moans and groans—will be surpassed by our heavenly dwelling, our risen body. God is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory (4:17). And if we knew the glorious future of embodied life that will be ours, we would long for it like Paul did. The body’s “light momentary affliction” can’t compare to the body’s future glory (4:17–18).
Proving a Staggering Claim
When Martha told Jesus that Lazarus “will rise again in the resurrection on the last day” (John 11:24), she was correctly understanding the Old Testament hope of God’s power delivering the bodies of his people from the cords of death. But she probably wasn’t prepared for Jesus’s response. He said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live” (John 11:25).
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Written by William C. Godfrey |
Tuesday, January 17, 2023
The presence of the image of God in all human beings is cause for hope. God’s will concerning peacemaking, for both maintaining and mending peace, can be applied even in our workplaces, schools, communities, and digital spaces in the world. 

We undergo a radical change in becoming Christians. We are born again to a living hope through true faith in Jesus Christ. We are no longer citizens of this world, and we become citizens of heaven. We are still in the world, but we are no longer of the world. Our citizenship in heaven involves alienation from the world. Our Christian commitments now differ starkly from the commitments of those in the world around us. We no longer share the same loyalties and priorities.
Psalm 120 vividly captures the reality of these divergent commitments. This psalm is the first in a collection of psalms that each bear the title “A Song of Ascents” (Pss. 120–34). The word “ascents” simply means “going up.” These psalms were likely given these titles because they were used by pilgrims as they made their way up to Jerusalem for their holy feasts (because Jerusalem is on a mountain, one always travels up to Jerusalem). In Psalm 120, we find the psalmist at the beginning of his pilgrimage. He is far from home (Ps. 120:5), surrounded by a world of “lying lips” and “deceitful tongue[s]” (Ps. 120:2). And the psalmist prays, expressing the desire for deliverance from a world of people who “hate peace” and who “are for war” (Ps. 120:6–7).
Of course, we thank the Lord every Sunday that we are able to “go up” to church and to our heavenly worship, fellowshipping with like-minded believers. But after the Lord’s Day, most of us are called to go “back down” into the world for another six days. Our jobs, our schools, our volunteer and recreational pursuits, even our digital and social media activities bring us into contact with the world. So how can we bring the peace of Christ to bear on a world that hates peace?
God’s people must begin with the calling we have received in Romans 12:18: “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” This is an important passage because it reminds us of our God-given responsibility. We are to do what we can to live peaceably with all, including with the world. Wherever Christians can make peace without compromising godliness, we ought to do it.
In the first place, we live peaceably when we strive not to be the ones who interrupt the peace. Peace is an aspect of the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22) and a characteristic of the wisdom that is from above (James 3:17). Psalm 120 reminds us that the world hates peace and is war-mongering. The hatred of peace and love of war are characteristics of the sin-cursed flesh and manifest themselves in enmity, strife, rivalries, dissensions, and divisions (Gal. 5:19–20). What Samuel Miller said to his incoming divinity students about their conduct in the church certainly applies to all Christians and their conduct with the world: If war is made and peace is broken, “see to it that none of you be found among the workers of the mischief…Do not lend your influence to the unhallowed work of corrupting and dividing.” Our God-given responsibility to live peaceably begins with not being the ones who break peace by our sinful conduct.
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