Not much of a shock: The so called “Jesus’ Wife fragment” has been proven to be a forgery.
http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/2014/05/08/the-jesus-wife-fragment-is-a-hoax/
Monthly Archives: May 2014
Miscellaneous Quotes (101)
“Upon a life I did not live, upon a death I did not die; another’s life, another’s death, I stake my whole eternity.” – Horatius Bonar
“When you fail to distinguish Law and Gospel, you lose both.” – Tullian Tchividjian
“Only when we see that the way of God’s law is absolutely inflexible will we see that God’s grace is absolutely indispensable. A high view of the law reminds us that God accepts us on the basis of Christ’s perfection, not our progress. Grace, properly understood, is the movement of a holy God toward an unholy people. He doesn’t cheapen the law or ease its requirements. He fulfills them in his Son, who then gives his righteousness to us. That’s the gospel. Pure and simple.” – Tullian Tchividjian
“Ignorance of this distinction between Law and Gospel is the principal source of abuse which corrupted and still corrupts Christianity.” – Theodore Beza (John Calvin’s successor)
“That is the reason we have so many mushroom converts . . . why? Because their stony ground is not plowed up; they have not got a conviction of the Law.” – George Whitefield
“A low view of law always produces legalism; a high view of law makes a person a seeker after grace.” – J. Gresham Machen
“Prayer is the preview of God’s action.” – Mark Dever
“We persevere because we are preserved by our High Priest’s intercession.” – R.C. Sproul
“Your faith will not fail while God sustains it; you are not strong enough to fall away while God is resolved to hold you.” – J. I. Packer
“God is awesome; he doesn’t need you to be awesome. He wants you to be obedient.” – Matt Chandler
“Our task today is to tell people — who no longer know what sin is, no longer have the categories to understand it, no longer see themselves as sinners, and no longer have room for these categories in their non-moral universe — that Christ died for sins of which they do not think they’re guilty.” – David Wells
“It is folly to think the Lord provides grace for every trouble but the one you are in today.” – C.H. Spurgeon
“In our day it’s worse to judge evil than to do evil.” – Os Guinness
“It seems unnecessary to remark that this does not, and cannot mean that the righteousness ofChrist is infused into the believer, or in any way so imparted to him as to change, or constitute his moral character.Imputation never changes the inward, subjective state of the person to whom the imputation is made. When sin is imputed to a man he is not made sinful; when the zeal of Phinehas was imputed to him, he was not made zealous. When you impute theft to a man, you do not make him a thief. When you impute goodness to a man, you do not make him good. So when righteousness is imputed to the believer, he does not thereby become subjectively righteous. If the righteousness be adequate, and if the imputation be made on adequate grounds and by competent authority, the person to whom the imputation is made has the right to be treated as righteous. And, therefore, in the forensic, although not in the moral or subjective sense, the imputation of the righteousness of Christ does make the sinner righteous. That is, it gives him a right to the full pardon of all his sins and a claim in justice to eternal life.” – Charles Hodge
“Let those be thy choicest companions who have made Christ their chief companion.” – Thomas Brooks
“God is not blind; neither is He capricious. For Him there are no accidents. With God there are no cases of chance events.” – R.C. Sproul
“Don’t seek a platform for the sake of the gospel if you’re not prepared to lose that platform for the sake of the gospel.” – Sam Allberry
“The atonement is a multifaceted event—Jesus is shown providing surety for our debt to God, mediating the enmity between us and God, and offering Himself as a substitute to suffer God’s judgment in our place.” – R.C. Sproul
“God promises the Christian heaven after death, not before it.” – John Blanchard
“Was He scourged? It was through His stripes that we might be healed. Was He condemned, though innocent? It was that we might be acquitted, though guilty. Did He wear a crown of thorns? It was that we might wear the crown of glory. Was He stripped of His raiment? It was that we might be clothed in everlasting righteousness. Was He mocked and reviled? It was that we might be honored and blessed. Was He reckoned a malefactor, and numbered among transgressors? It was that we might be reckoned innocent, and justified from all sin. Was He declared unable to save Himself? It was that He might be able to save others to the uttermost. Did He die at last, and that the most painful and disgraceful of deaths? It was that we might live forevermore, and be exalted to the highest glory.” – John Ryle
“He that serves God for money will serve the devil for better wages.” – Roger L’Estrange
“By His life, death, and resurrection, our Savior has conquered our enemies, and by His Spirit He has granted us to share in the victory.” – R.C. Sproul
“The very heart of worship, as the Bible makes clear, is the business of expressing, from the depths of our spirits, the highest possible honor we can offer before God.” – R.C. Sproul
“If the being of God ceased for one second, the universe would disappear.” – R.C. Sproul
“God in His providence hasn’t called us to watch history, but to shape history by praying in His Name.” – David Platt
“We may live in a culture that believes everyone will be saved, that we are ‘justified by death’ and all you need to do to go to heaven is die, but God’s Word certainly doesn’t give us the luxury of believing that.” – R.C. Sproul
Don’t follow your heart, lead it!
Addressing the Fourth Option of Jesus as Legend
Lord, Lunatic…or Legend?
Tom Gilson, in an article entitled “The Gospel Truth Of Jesus – What Happens to Apologetics If We Add “Legend” to the Trilemma “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord”?” writes:
He did not leave us that option: he did not intend to.” Thus C. S. Lewis closes out his famous “Trilemma” argument on the impossibility of Jesus being a great moral teacher and nothing more. The argument is beautiful in its simplicity: it calls for no deep familiarity with New Testament theology or history, only knowledge of the Gospels themselves, and some understanding of human nature. A man claiming to be God, says Lewis, could hardly be good unless he really was God. If Jesus was not the Lord, then (to borrow Josh McDowell’s alliterative version of the argument), he must have been a liar or a lunatic.
The questions have changed since Lewis wrote that, though, and it’s less common these days to hear Jesus honored as a great moral teacher by those who doubt his deity. Today’s skepticism runs deeper than that. The skeptics’ line now is that Jesus probably never claimed to be God at all, that the whole story of Jesus, or at least significant portions of it, is nothing more than legend.
Christian apologists have responded with arguments hinging on the correct dates for the composition of the Gospels, the identities of their authors, external corroborating evidence, and the like. All this has been enormously helpful, but one could wish for a more Lewis-like approach to that new l-word, legend—that is, for a way of recognizing the necessary truthfulness of the Gospels from their internal content alone.
Lewis was always more at home looking at the evidence of the Gospels themselves than at the historical circumstances surrounding them. In one classic essay (variously titled “Fern-Seed and Elephants” or “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” depending on where you find it) he delineates the Gospels as true “reportage” rather than fable, and concludes, “The reader who doesn’t see this has simply not learned to read.” Continue reading