In this ongoing series I am publishing slightly edited versions of short papers I wrote for my church’s elder pipeline class. The prompt for this paper was, “What did Christ accomplish on the cross?”
We have talked about who Christ is – He is the Son of God, He is a man born at a certain place in a certain time, He is the fulfillment of prophecy and a prophet Himself. But it is that last part that we must look to now, not just who He is, but what He has done, and continues to do. We cannot examine the work of Jesus without looking closely at the central focus of His whole life: the cross, His death there, and His resurrection. This was no mere display of power, nor is it simply a tragedy we mourn as unjust. This was the point at which God inaugurated His kingdom, and began the work that will conclude when Jesus returns: namely, the restoration of creation to true holiness, and true and total intimacy between God and His people.
Firstly, Jesus atoned for the sins of His people. There has been much debate over the concept of penal substitutionary atonement and its centrality to what Christ accomplished on the cross, but the testimony of Scripture is clear. All those who draw near to Christ receive the benefits of His atonement, just as all those who drew near on the Day of Atonement each year received those benefits for their sins. The difference is that Christ’s atonement is a better one, for it does not need to be renewed year after year, but as the author of Hebrews says, it is completed and perfect.
After a hectic summer Dave and Jake are back together talking about life, music, new babies, and much more. Our church’s elder class recently wrapped up and we’ve been publishing these piecemeal on the podcast website. We’re also going to begin turning these into podcast episodes, so we spent a little time talking about the purpose of these as well as our hopes for the future of this class.
Some of the books we talked about in this episode:
In this ongoing series I am publishing slightly edited versions of short papers I wrote for my church’s elder pipeline class. The prompt for this paper was, “What is your view of Jesus Christ?”
The question “what is your view of Jesus” could receive so broad an answer that literally, many books exist just to tackle it. I want to address this by answering three specific questions that serve as the foundation upon which Christology is built.
Apologies for the lack of posting the last couple weeks, the transition from May into June was a busy time for church and family. We are continuing our series of posts based on papers I wrote for my church’s elder class. This week’s prompt – What is the nature of sin, and how does it affect our abiltity to choose good over evil?
This is a continuing series based on short papers I wrote for my church’s elder class, based on prompts and reading we are doing from James Montgomery Boice’s book Foundations of the Christian Faith. This week’s question: What does the Bible teach about Satan and hell?
This series is taken from short papers I wrote for my church’s elder class in response to different questions. This week’s question: What does it mean that man is an image-bearer of God?
Genesis 1 contains the account of God creating everything, day by day. Each part of creation has its place and is authored by God’s will, and each part is declared to be good. In verse 26, humanity is created specially and uniquely, “in our image, according to our likeness,” as the passage reads. But we struggle with understanding what it means to be truly made in His image. With the fall of man in chapter three of the same book, we see that humanity takes on a desire to be God. In the subsequent chapters and books and continuing down through human history, people have tried to make gods in the image of humanity, either literally or in the reckoning of what we believe is powerful.
If we look in a mirror, we see an image of ourselves created for that moment, the product of light reflected off a surface that displays what we look like. But it is not us, and it only exists as long as we choose to stand there. Walk away, and the image vanishes, yet we continue. In her book Five Lies of our Anti-Christian Age, Rosaria Butterfield uses this analogy to explain this unique relationship between God and man, one that is not shared by any other aspect of creation. She says, “God is the object in the biblical creation account, and we are the reflection.”
Her analogy is rooted in the one Paul uses to express the longing we experience in this life as we look toward a future of truly seeing and knowing God in 1 Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, as I am fully known.” And he follows it up with a very telling concluding verse to chapter 13: “Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love—but the greatest of these is love.”
Love is what flows from God to His creation, and most especially to humanity. Love is what propels Him to mercy when Adam and Eve sin, and to promise a redeemer who will restore what they have broken. Love drives God to display mercy to the Israelites over and over, to be patient beyond any human reckoning, as generation after generation falls into rebellion and idolatry and requires reminding again that there is only one true God. And most of all, love is what drives the Trinitarian work of salvation – love within the Trinity, and love of God for His creation, for His image seen in His people. To acknowledge that we are made in His image is to accept and share in His tremendous love, and to rest in that love and all the promises it carries for provision, protection, and ultimate salvation in this world and the next.
By the same token, to deny that we are made in God’s image is to deny that love, and to deny the very thing that makes us human, more than just animals with higher intelligence and greater emotional capacity. Sin is an attack on that image. The first sin in Genesis 3 was a denial of God as creator and ruler, and an attempt to assert the right to decide right and wrong apart from Him. Murder is a vicious assault on God’s image, and carries the death penalty in Israel’s law because to kill a man is to destroy that image. Idolatry is a sin because it says that a man may know better what God should be, than the One who created us.
When the author of Hebrews describes Jesus in chapter 1, he calls him “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact expression of his nature,” that is to say, while we are made in the image of God, Christ is the image of God. When we trust in Christ, we are looking to He who bears the unscarred, unbroken perfection of God’s image in His humanity, and the perfect power and total authority of God in His divinity.
When we place our trust in Jesus, when we preach the power of His name and the love and mercy of God found in Him, we are calling out to all humanity with a tremendous message. We are saying, “Stop trying to be something you are not, and remember that you are something so much greater in creation – you are made to reflect the perfect, the complete, the holy.” When we preach the gospel we say to our listeners, “Be who God made you to be, because to be His image is to find true life that transcends anything your base desires in this world could hope to find.”
How does knowing that you are made in the image of God affect your view of yourself and others? How can this empower you in your walk with Christ and the way you love your neighbor? Let us know below in the comments!
This is a continuing series based on short papers I wrote for my church’s elder class to prepare for discussions of different doctrinal questions. This week’s prompt: What is your view of the Trinity?
The doctrine of God’s existence as one being in three persons is one of the most controversial and defining doctrines of the faith. It is sensible that discussion of this topic follows an exploration of the nature of Scripture, because it is through a belief in the character of Scripture as God-breathed and therefore infallible and supreme that we must arrive at the conclusion that the doctrine of the Trinity is true.
As with so many doctrines, it was defined in the face of error. It is tempting to linger on these errors in a historical sense, and it is important to understand them because so often people tend to repeat them. There are whole offshoot faiths from Christianity that are founded on denials of various aspects of the Trinity – for example, United Pentacostals who hold to a modalistic view of God, or Jehovah’s Witnesses who insist that Jesus is a mere created being. But it’s important to define what we do believe, rather than just what we do not.
Looking back at the early discussions in the church that hashed out the doctrine and the way it is stated across denominational lines to this day, we see the priorities of these believers as they examined what the Scriptures say for the sake of clarifying teaching and avoiding error. We see them prioritizing the nature of God, and the distinction between God’s being (or substance, to use the Nicene term) and the persons of the Trinity, who Scripture reveals as unique in role and action, yet utterly united in will and fully bearing the nature of being God.
We see the early church’s recognition that for salvation to be effective, Christ must be fully man and fully God. He must be fully man so that He may share in our existence and bear our suffering and sin upon the cross, and He must be fully God so that He may endure in a way no mere sinful human ever could alone. We see the Father as the one who declares the nature of creation and trajectory of history through His perfect plans. He does not do anything alone, but plays His own unique role in sending forth the Son and blessing His work. He calls all those who will be Christ’s. And we see the Holy Spirit as the one who ministers constantly through and in Christ’s church, to glorify Christ and to be the “Giver of Life” as the Council of Constantinople put it, as He makes possible Christ’s words from John 3 that to be saved, we “must be born again.”
God’s Trinitarian nature is beyond our comprehension in many ways, but that itself is evidence of it being a revelation of God and not a production of man’s own mind. The legion of heresies that the church has contended with through the centuries show what happens when humans attempt to apply their own wisdom to God’s nature. From Sabellius teaching that the persons of the Trinity are little more than masks worn by one being of God, to Arius’ claims that “there was a time that the Son was not” and his theological children in groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, to outright polytheists like the Mormons, many times man refuses to be satisfied by trusting to what God says but insists that he has better wisdom. Yet none of them can truly say they believe that Scripture is God’s Word, when they refuse to heed God’s own revelations of Himself. They cannot claim to have true salvation in a Christ who is not who He said He was, in His own words – “I am.”
To rest in God’s promises we must trust in the words of Deuteronomy 29:29, “The hidden things belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed things belong to us and our children forever, so that we may follow all the words of this law.” We cannot truly reckon as created, mortal, singular beings with the true nature of existence for an eternal, Trinitarian God, but we can trust that He is truthful and trustworthy. We rely on Him to grasp this, and His work and Word calls us to let our doubts and confusion rest on His promises.
Do you have questions or areas where you struggle to understand? Please ask them below or email me if you prefer, our hope here is to bless the body and engage in dialogue.
A week ago Friday I picked my wife up from work, our 3 year old riding in his seat in the back singing and pointing out fire trucks and windmills as we drove across town to to the grocery store. We pulled into a spot and started making a list – after all, the only bigger mistake to make than going grocery shopping without a list, is going while hungry.
As we sat there chatting about what to get, watching grey clouds roll in, my phone buzzed with a text message from a friend of mine. “Dave, I just heard about Jarod. I’m so sorry.”
I looked at my wife and we both sat there confused and horrified for a moment. Neither of us had no idea what was going on, and I asked him to clarify.
“I’m so sorry, I thought you would have heard by now. Jarod took his own life today.”
It didn’t make sense. We didn’t have a category for this information, because…we thought we knew him. As we learned more about the circumstances surrounding everything, our grief and the grief of many others was mingled with the question that always seems to come up when someone reflects on someone who recently committed suicide: “Why couldn’t he just talk to me? To somebody?”
I met my friend Jarod shortly after I started going to Christ Community Church. He was a regular musician there, and on staff helping, among other things, to coordinate with the small group leaders. He and I developed a friendship that developed over many years. We had many things in common – we were both musicians, albeit of a very different variety; Jarod was a singer and songwriter who played guitar and taught many students, while I was a tuba player with on-and-off times playing with New Orleans brass bands in town. We were both strongly in the “reformed” mindset of Christianity, though over the years we parted ways on certain issues; he wound up developing convictions that led him and his wife Morgan to leave the Baptist tradition and join an Anglican church, while I grew more firm in my credobaptist and church autonomy convictions.
But through all that we remained close. While that was going on I started my previous podcast, formerly known as Spurgeon Audio, then Kings Way Talk. When I wanted to have a regular partner to discuss subjects, my first choice was Jarod. We’d always spent hours many weekends up at the local cigar shop discussing the books we were reading, the goings-on of our lives, and the struggles of sin and faith we were working through. He sat with me and listened as I discussed issues like my previous marriage collapsing and trying to find healing in that. He was a tremendous encouragement to me in very dark times, and an incredible blessing in good ones. He served as a groomsman for my marriage to Ravyn and led us all in worship for the service.
When we’d get behind the microphone his insights were always helpful. He helped me think through my own maturing faith in new ways, and helped me to get away from looking at my faith as a matter of “us versus the world” and more as a matter of “serving those around us in patient love.” Because of his encouragement I was able to grow in new ways as I saw the deeper truth underlying the reality of God’s gracious and sovereign rule over our world. Our discussions especially helped me think through the dangers of valuing certainty over truth.
So when I read those texts, I was shocked and horrified to my very core. My good friend, my brother, wasn’t just dead – he’d taken his own life. I was shocked, because I couldn’t imagine him feeling like he couldn’t just talk to me about difficult things. I couldn’t picture him reaching that level of despair.
But then I took another step in thinking about it that I found later many of my friends who’d known Jarod were also doing: I began asking myself, “What would drive me to that level?” I know my sin tendencies. I am well aware of the ways in which I tend to fall when life’s pressures are turned up. Is there a fear, a frustration, a doubt that could grow like a weed in my heart to the point that I begin to believe I can’t dare confide in someone else? Or that even if I do find that someone, that my life is about to be blown open in irreversible ways?
I don’t know. I don’t think any of us truly know the depths of our own hearts, and only God can say He knows us to that level. So grief and confusion become mingled with a flavor of fear and self-doubt in such a time. And then there’s the anger. Anger at myself for not pursuing our friendship harder than I had been in the days leading up to it. For not somehow knowing what even his closest family didn’t know. And anger at him, for not knowing – he could have come to me. To someone.
Honestly there are lots of questions I’ve wrestled with over the course of the last week. But as I do, I find myself sitting in the dirt with Job, my hand over my mouth. My wisdom is so small, and I certainly have no special insight into his mind in those last moments. All I do know is God’s character. I know God is merciful and kind. I know His grace is greater than we can imagine. I know that our salvation is His work, not our own.
And so, I grieve the loss of my friend. I grieve my brother. And I trust to God’s perfect wisdom and love for Jarod, and for myself. I’ve had dark moments in my life and I’ve known those who have died, but this is a uniquely difficult flavor of sadness. But as Paul said, I don’t grieve as one without hope. I look to the day that I will see him again. And I am incredibly grateful for all those around us who are grieving in this time who are offering comfort and wise counsel, who are helping us to turn our eyes to Jesus and find our hope there even in this dark time.
I would like to close by asking you to consider supporting his widow Morgan in this time, to help offset funeral costs and to give her what she needs as she works through this tragic period: time, to heal and to see what her next steps will be. You can find the GoFundMe being managed by one of her church leaders at this link. And if there is anyone reading this who is finding that despair growing, who is beginning to think on some level that this “permanent solution to a temporary problem” is the right choice – please, find someone to talk to. Know that you’re not alone. You can even send me an email. Our life in Christ is not made to be run on our own, but we are to bear one another’s burdens, and yours is not too great for such a grace.
In this continuing series, I am posting short papers I’ve written for my church’s elder class on different topics. This week’s paper is on finding the gospel in the Old Testament.
When I was young, I remember that at the church we went to, “preaching the gospel” referred specifically to sermons that were on the story of Jesus’ death on the cross and resurrection. We weren’t a terribly expository church in terms of the approach that was taken to Scripture, and this meant that “preaching the gospel” happened maybe a couple times a year.
But the truth is, the gospel is a much bigger concept than that, and in fact, it is seen all throughout Scripture. Some take this idea and apply it in ways that go beyond good hermeneutical principles, with one more extreme example being something like, any reference to the word “rock” is a reference to Christ because Christ is the rock upon which we are to build our lives, as Jesus says in a parable in Matthew 7.
But we truly can see the gospel all throughout the Scriptures. The Old Testament constantly points ahead to the person and work of Jesus Christ, and if we look at the whole message of the gospel, we can see how this works. It’s not that every part of the Old Testament points to the entire gospel, but that it touches on different elements all throughout. To illustrate this I want to introduce a tool I’ve borrowed from the Simeon Trust preaching workshops, a truly excellent program I think everyone who aspires to teach and preach in their churches should consider taking part in at least once. That tool is what is referred to as the Eternal Gospel Timeline:
Each section of the diagram points to different points in the life and work of Jesus, from His existence in eternity past before the incarnation (“before” being a relative term of course, given the timeless nature of eternity), to the different elements of His life, death, resurrection, and ascension, and beyond – His current position as the firstborn of those who will receive eternal life, and to our future hope in His return and the restoration of creation to sinless perfection.
Using this tool, I will take three passages in view and argue how they point to different elements of the gospel as this diagram breaks it down. These aren’t intended to be exhaustive, but simply brief summaries that could be expanded upon in sermons or other settings.
This passage is a break between two long poetic sections of prophecy, running from all of chapter 13 and 14:3-21, where God pronounces judgment upon Babylon, who had taken the remaining tribes of Israel into captivity (after Assyria had taken the 10 tribes of Samaria). Prior to this section God declares that Babylon itself will be destroyed, and subsequent to it, that the king of Babylon will lose everything and fall from the greatest heights to the deepest depths.
These two verses are held to point to the return of Israel to its lands seen in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, and certainly that is true, especially in the fulfillment of phrases such as “The nations will escort Israel and bring it to its homeland.” But even in those books we don’t see a total fulfillment of this prophecy in that time, because while the Israelites did return with the support of the Persian king and enjoyed their protection while they began to rebuild, they certainly did not “possess them as male and female slaves in the LORD’s land” or “make captives of their captors and…rule over their oppressors.”
The greater fulfillment in Christ can be seen in the eternal future, when there is no longer any animosity remaining between Jew and Gentile but all are one in Christ, and worship Him together in a kingdom without end. Isaiah draws this picture out further in chapter 60, as he describes Zion as the center of all human commerce and worship, where all the peoples of the world will come to pay tribute to God and to God’s own people.
This passage sees God summarizing the covenant to Israel, and reminding them of His promises if they fulfill the covenant and obey His laws. Of course, Israel did not do so, repeatedly falling into idolatry throughout their history. But we see this fulfilled finally in the consummation of all things, when Christ stands in the place of His people as the one who has perfectly honored and fulfilled God’s law in life, and taken on the punishment due His people in death.
In Christ we have a better Adam who we can rest in (Romans 5:12-21), and who receives glory in His triumph that we can rejoice in (Revelation 5:6-14). In Christ we find success in our desires to walk in His ways, to keep His statutes, laws and ordinances, and to obey Him, and in that restoration of creation we will see that finally fulfilled before our eyes.
In this desperate cry to God for help, the sons of Korah cry out with the agony of an Israelite suffering not just from an enemy’s attack, but under God’s own wrath. Death is approaching, and is here, as the psalmist pleads with God for mercy. We see throughout this psalm the agony of Jesus dying, and the mourning ache of His burial, the questions of God’s silence in the face of such a loss that weighed on His disciples’ minds in the days before His resurrection.
The heart of suffering sees its cause in God’s own will, yet also trusts to God as the one who will bring a perfect resolution to that suffering, as Jesus did. When we walk through times of suffering as believers, we see in passages like this that our circumstances are not out of God’s control, but rather, that even in this His will is accomplished. We are also reminded that to suffer in this world is a tiny thing in the face of the glory of eternity with God.
This is only a small sample, but we can use this same method to work through the entire Old Testament. Because Jesus and His work are the lynchpin of all of Scripture, He truly provides the lens through which we can understand the entire Bible, and through Him we can preach the gospel from every passage.
Take some of your favorite Old Testament passages and use the diagram above to see how it points to the gospel. Share your thoughts and questions below!
We’re back for our second episode, and Jake features a piece of music he’s been working on along with conversation about music, current events and more. We cover J.K. Rowling’s reaction to Scotland’s hate speech law and discuss, books we’re reading and want to discuss more, family life and much more. Listen and share your thoughts below!
Coronation Radio 