Pastor Brian McLaughlin, Grand Ledge Baptist Church, has posted a very helpful series of posts on the Emergent Church Movement. Brian is gracious. His posts are concise. He has studied this for himself and interacts with primary sources. If you want to understand more about the Emergent Church, this is a good place to begin.
Monthly Archive for November, 2007Page 2 of 3
Christmas is upon us. How about for a change of pace this year in your Christmas Devotions you meditate on what Isaiah says about the Messiah - - See, for instance, Isaiah 9.
If you feel a little lost getting started in Isaiah, the below material I wrote may help. Continue reading ‘For Unto Us a Child is Born’
Whether we realize it or not, people in the West are indoctrinated with individualism. The symptoms are many:
- “What I do is my own business.”
- Don’t make discerning evaluations of any sort.
- The idea of church discipline: that there is spiritual accountability to a local church, is despised.
- “Parents refuse to consider how much they represent their children.”
Yet, as Murray so concisely argued, the idea of representation (that we are represented by others and represent others) is basic to life.
”The principle of representation underlines all the basic institutions of God in the world - - the family, the church, and the state. In other words, solidarity and corporate relationship is a feature of God’s government. We should expect the prototype to reside in racial solidarity. At least, racial solidarity is congruous with what we find on a less inclusive scale in the other institutions of God’s (John Murray, Collected Works, Volume 2, page 59)..”
Indeed, the principle of representation (the opposite in some sense of individualism), is basic to understanding both how we all sinned in Adam and how we are justified in Christ. Murray sums it up:
“By Adam sin-condemnation-death, by Christ righteousness -justification-life. A way of thinking that makes us aloof to solidarity with Adam makes us inhabile to the solidarity by which salvation comes. Thus the relevance of the Adamic administration to what is most basic, on the one hand, and most necessary on the other, in our human situation appointment (John Murray, Collected Works, Volume 2, page 59).”
Said another way, if you insist on total individualism, then you are insisting that Christ cannot represent you.
Exodus 34:7 raises interesting questions. Describing God, the verse reads:7 maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.”
What does it mean that God punishes the children for the sin of the fathers?
“If I had a choice, that is if Scripture were not so clear and conclusive, I would certainly not believe in Hell. Trust me when I say I do not want to believe in it. But if I make what I want –or what others want–the basis of my beliefs, then I am a follower of myself and my culture, not a follower of Christ. ‘There seems to be a kind of conspiracy,’ writes novelist Dorothy Sayers, ‘to forget, or to conceal where the doctrine of hell comes from. The doctrine of hell is not ‘mediaeval priestcraft’ for frightening people into giving money to the church: it is Christ’s deliberate judgment on sin . . . We cannot repudiate Hell without altogether repudiating Christ.’ In The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis writes of Hell, ‘There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and, specially, of our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason.” Randy Alcorn, Heaven, page 26, emphasis his.
John Piper recently said, “the post-modern mind has no place for the biblical truth of the wrath of God (The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World, page 76).”
To the extent this Piper’s evaluation is on target, this is a tremendous problem.
- The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10).
- A fear of God’s wrath motivates us to live godly lives.
- An understanding of God’s wrath is basic to saving faith and to evangelism.
- Trusting in the justice of God helps us avoid bitterness and feel compassion for enemies. When Bonhoeffer was imprisoned by the Nazis (before they executed him) he wrote to a good friend, “. . . it is only when God’s wrath and vengeance are hanging as grim realities over the heads of one’s enemies that something of what it means to love and forgive them can touch our hearts.
- An understanding of the wrath of God, is basic to understanding the atonement.
The list could go on and on. Pastors must be more willing to proclaim the truth of the wrath of God.
“Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on him.”(Jn 3:36, NIV).”
Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion that you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all thee boys’ philosophies - - these over simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either. (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book II, chapter 2, “The Invasion,” page 36).
Why did God feed Israel with manna? You ever think about that one? See if you can come up with the precise, emphasis on “precise,” reason for the manna exercise.
Randy Alcorn has endorsed Mike Huckabee.
Alcorn’s post is very worthwhile reading.
Speaking of which, if you have not yet read, Heaven, by Randy Alcorn, you should at once. . . perhaps, more on that later.
Ken Fields summarizes an initiative by Senator Grassley to investigate the finances of six prominent tele-evangelists including Joyce Meyer.
See also a later post.
