Monthly Archives: December 2012

Bible Scholar’s Wedding Cake

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I don’t know the happy couple but obviously they know New Testament Greek manuscript expert Dr. Daniel Wallace (pictured) and invited him to participate in their wedding service.

Dan writes, “Here’s the wedding cake at Yong and Jessica’s wedding. It was certainly a unique wedding. A prof from the Old Testament department, Dorian Coover-Cox, and I read (respectively) from the Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament. Dorian read Ps. 131 in Hebrew and English; I read 1 Corinthians 13.1-10 in Greek and English.”

In case you were wondering, the brown book is the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, Hebrew Masoretic text (BHS HMT).

I have to say, the cake is every Bible scholar’s dream. 🙂

60 Things to Think About

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Dane Ortlund: Listened to some music and thought about Jesus this week. Here’s what I jotted down.

1. His forgiveness gets down underneath not just our conscious, but everything that is broken within us.
2. He ate lunch with hookers and crooked businessmen, not the conservative seminary professors.
3. Discipleship to him does not involve attaining a minimum level of competency. No resume is needed. Discipleship to him involves humbling ourselves, putting ourselves low, not high, and anyone can do that, if they will simply let Self die and be swallowed up by light and beauty and joy.
4. Those in union with him are promised that all the haunted brokenness that infects everything—every relationship, every conversation, every family, every email, every wakening to consciousness in the morning, every job, every vacation—everything—will one day be rewound and reversed.
5. Those in union with him are promised that the more darkness and hell we experience in this life, to that degree we will enjoy resplendence and radiance in the next (Rom. 8:17–18).
6. He never, ever asks his friends to walk through a trial that he, as the Pioneer-Author-Founder-Trailblazer (archegos: Heb 2:10; 12:2) has not himself, in an even more profound way, gone through himself.
7. His sinlessness does not encourage him to be aloof from us, holding us at arms length, but a substitute for us.
8. Unlike the laws of ritual cleanliness in Leviticus, Jesus’ touch of messy humans like me does not contaminate him. It cleanses me. In the OT, clean + unclean = unclean. With Jesus, clean + unclean = clean (Mark 1:41).
9. His mercy to sinners is not calculating, scale-weighing, careful. It is lavish, outrageous, unfettered.
10. His atoning death means he is free not to scrutinize. He needs not. All has been wiped clean. Faults remain, not just in our past but in our present. But the whole atmosphere in which we live has been transformed from one of scrutiny, both toward us by God and by us toward others, into one of welcome, both toward us by God and therefore by us toward others.
11. He no longer calls us servants, but friends, and he is the friend of sinners. Of sinners. Many of us are born again, serving the Lord with faithfulness, and have never really swallowed that.
12. He is not an idea or a philosophy or a theory or a framework or even a doctrine. He’s a Person. His blazing wrath upon the impenitent is matched by his gentle embrace of the penitent. He has nothing to say to the righteous (Mark 2:17).
13. He doesn’t resent me, as I do others, though I have given him many reasons to.
14. In all my stumbling and failing, he has not yet said, ‘Enough is enough. I’m out.’ Where sin abounds, grace hyper-abounds (Rom. 5:20). Continue reading →

Friday Round Up

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(1) David Phelps probably has the best male voice I have ever heard. Here he sings “O Night Divine.”

(2) I believe that every Preacher and Christian would benefit from watching these three short videos by Paul Washer:

Examining the Sinner’s Prayer:

The Alternative to the Sinner’s Prayer:

Don’t Expect a Perfect Repentance

(3) There’s a variety of resources in this week’s Friday Ligonier $5 sale worth considering.

Proud Grandpa

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Many congratulations to my friend Dr. James White who turned 50 on Monday and became a proud Grandfather on Wednesday. May the Lord bless the new Mom and the precious little one with long lives in service of our Lord… oh, and the bald guy too. 🙂

Numbers 6:
24 The Lord bless you and keep you;
25 the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;
26 the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

Organized Religion?

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“I’m not into organized religion.”

Oh really, so you are into disorganized religion?

The only God there is (the holy Trinity – one God in three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit) has inspired His only word there is (the 66 books of the Holy Bible) to tell us with explicit detail, how we are to approach Him. Anything else is either idolatrous, blasphemous or both.

Is that too strong an opinion?

Well here’s the thing. I did not make this up myself. I don’t get to do that. None of us do. This what the God of the Bible says about the matter.

Now either He does not exist and/or His word is not true OR else we, the human race, have to fall in line.

Those who are serious about following His instructions organize things the way He has commanded. They don’t get to choose what to do. He has made His will clear. We are to gather together as disciples of Christ, based on His word, and with qualified elders to serve us in the task, worship Him in spirit and in truth.

The question is not “why only one way?” but given the rebellion of us all, why would there be any way at all. God loved the world so much that He willingly gave His one and only Son so that all those who believe in Him would in no way perish, but have eternal life. Justification before God is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.

“I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except through Me.” (Jesus) – John 14:6

“…and there is no other name under heaven, given among men by which we must be saved.” – Acts 4:12

“There is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” – 1 Tim 2:5

Reformed v. Non-Reformed Theology: The Central Difference

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– John Hendryx of monergism.com writes:

The central difference between Reformed and non-Reformed theology is that the former affirms that Jesus Christ is SUFFICIENT to save to the uttermost while later believes that while Jesus is NECESSARY, the sufficiency of Christ in salvation. There is nothing more essential to its position and this is what sets it apart from other all other theologies.

The word “sufficient”, in this case, means that Jesus Christ meets all the conditions for us that are necessary for our salvation, not only some of the conditions. It further means what Jesus does for us on the cross meets all of God’s requirements for us, including giving us the new heart which is needed to believe and obey (Ezekiel 36:26).

Evangelicalism broadly believes in an insufficient Jesus whose love is conditional, that is, that we must first meet a condition if He will help/love us. Can you imagine a parent who saw their toddler run out into traffic and first required them to meet a condition before the parent would run out to save them from oncoming traffic? No, no, no… parental love is unconditional and would run out at the risk of their life to save the child regardless of the child’s will at the time because the parent loves his child and knows better than the child what is good for him/her. If this is true about love in everyday life, how much more is it true of God. No person would say that the parent who required the child to first meet a condition was more loving. That is why the argument about the necessity of free will to have true love is fallacious. In the Bible, God gives conditions, but in Jesus He meets all the conditions for us.

“God knows we have nothing of ourselves, therefore in the covenant of grace he requires no more than he gives, but gives what he requires, and accepts what he gives.” ? Richard Sibbes, The Bruised Reed