Category: Biblical Theology
-
ot believers… regenerate… roms 7
One of the difficult questions to answer is the status and experience of OT believers. This post does not pretend to answer this question but I hope it points to fruitful fields of inquiry. Old Testament believers were justified by faith (Roms 4: Gen 15:6). Abraham’s faith=justification serves as the template for all future justification…
-
zion, city of our god (2)
By the end of the OT, Jerusalem was not the city the prophets anticipated. To place the prophetic hope in a wider frame, the promised Kingdom had not arrived. It lay somewhere in the future. And so the people of God died in faith, like Abraham looking for a country and city yet to come.…
-
zion, city of our god (1)
It is sometimes said that the Bible is ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. In a sense this is true. Two cities feature in the Bible story. However, really it is the story of one city for it is the story of God. He is the leading character… and his love is Zion or Jerusalem –…
-
jesus, the logos, the word of god
Christianity is Christ. A Christian is someone who has faith in Christ. He has come to see the glory of Christ and to be enthralled. The glory of Christ is all he is and all he has accomplished. There are many facets to this glory and Scripture uses many images or better, concepts, to describe…
-
sussing the sermon on the mount
It seems that The Sermon on the Mount has a negative press in large segments of evangelicalism. Some insist it is pure law and its purpose, like the Mosaic Covenant, is only to kill (Lutheranism and variants of it). Others also see it as law but think its primary focus is to instruct believers during…
-
all things new
all things are new The NT is clear that there is a relationship of promise and fulfilment between the OT and the NT; what is promised in the old is fulfilled in the new. Fulfilment implies both discontinuity and continuity. However, we should note that when the NT discusses aspects of continuity hard on its…
-
genesis… a simple introduction
I am writing a short (very short) introduction to each book of the Bible for a Church Bible exhibition. Each summary should be accessible to the average 13-year-old (though it is intended for adults). I aim to have an opening paragraph that is comprehensive if terse and then a further paragraph or two (if necessary)…
-
the psalms – experiences of ot faith realized and resolved in christ
The Psalms are the expression of faith in Israel. They reveal the complexity of thoughts and feelings that were the response of faith to the experience of life in the old covenant. Moreover, they gave individual Israelites the language and thought-forms to express and interpret their own experience according to faith. If they express the…
-
new covenant theology… and to a large extent my own theology
This link leads to an excellent summary of what is called ‘New Covenant Theology’. Although, over the years, I read little of NCT when I ‘discovered’ it, I found it reflected fairly closely my own views. I was raised a Dispensationalist and over the years read a fair amount of Covenant Theology. I found neither…
-
does god care more for people or plants?
The malevolent ingenuity of Satan and the muggable incredulity of Christians never ceases to amaze. If there is a cockeyed way of thinking then Satan will suggest it and we will embrace it. One that deserves a place in Satan’s Hall of Fame for C21 delusions is the idea that somehow God cares more about…
-
out of Egypt have I called my son…
Matt 2:13-21 (ESV) Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” And he rose…
-
imputed active obedience (IAO), a must or a misdirection? (10)
The Bible and IAO. My intention in the next few posts is to demonstrate that the Bible locates justification in the infinitely valuable death of Christ and his subsequent resurrection without reference to IAO. Indeed, I hope to show that IAO is not only absent but does not fit as presented into the biblical contours…
-
imputed active obedience (IAO), a must or a misdirection? (9)
In previous posts I tried to demonstrate that it is mistaken to claim that IAO is to evangelical orthodoxy. In the next few posts I shall contend that IAO is inadequate biblically; the case is biblically wanting. But first, a recap. Let’s remind ourselves of the basic position of those who argue for IAO. They…
-
flesh and spirit in romans, and beyond (9)
There can be no doubt that the distinctive feature of new creation life is that it is ‘life in the Spirit’. Christ’s enthronement began a new era, a new age, the age of the Spirit. For Paul in Romans, and elsewhere in the NT, the Christian life is nothing if it is not ‘spiritual’. Everything…
-
don carson the church and the wilderness
In his recent book ‘Scandalous’ , a book which is really the outcome of a series of sermons on aspects of the cross, Don Carson has a chapter on the slaughtered lamb of Revelation. In this chapter he has a comment about the woman who flees to the wilderness to be protected by God from…
-
flesh and spirit in romans, and beyond (8)
The Christian life is life in the Spirit. For Paul this is absolutely paramount. To be a Christian is to have ‘the law of the Spirit of life set us free from ‘the law of sin and death’ (Roms 8:2). The requirement of the law impossible in the flesh is fulfilled in us through the…
-
flesh and spirit in romans, and beyond (5)
If you look at the preceeding blogs on this topic you will be better placed to grapple with the issues in this one. The fundamental point made is that Christians ought to view themselves not as ‘in the flesh’ but as ‘in the Spirit’. This is a biblical distinction between two realms or two worlds. …
-
flesh and spirit in romans, and beyond (3)
We have been considering two alternative realities in Paul’s theology – the flesh and the Spirit. For clarity’s sake we should emphasize again that these two realities – flesh and Spirit – although involving principles and peoples are for Paul perhaps primarily , provinces or principalities. They represent two realms, spheres, kingdoms, – two distinct…
-
law and gospel:continuum or contrast… a compendium (1)
The relationship between Law and Gospel, or, perhaps more accurately, between the Mosaic Covenant and the New Covenant, is of continual interest to me. Not least, I confess, because it seems to me a lot of people get it badly wrong. Now I am presumptuous enough to think I have got at least the big…
-
flesh and spirit in Romans, and beyond (2)
This is the second in a short series of blogs reflecting on the ‘flesh/Spirit’ contrast that controls Romans and beyond. In a previous blog we observed that this contrast is not metaphysical, a God/Man divide nor anthropological, a Body/Soul divide but chronological and eschatological, a divide of two Realms and Eras. The gospel is about…
-
judge and ruler
Moses and Jesus are both paralleled in Scripture as great leaders of God’s people. They both mediate between God and his people. There however the formal similarity ends for while Moses is at best a servant over God’s house, Christ is a son (Hebs 4). The parallel, like that with Adam in Roms 5, is…
-
flesh and spirit in romans, and beyond (1)
We cannot properly understand Romans until we learn it describes two realms of existence. In fact, the Christian gospel, which is of course the theme of Romans, has not been truly grasped until it is seen as the story of two distinct and deeply different worlds. Different images are used in the Bible to describe…
-
covenants real and imagined
The Bible clearly has a number of covenants between God and man that are very important in the structure of salvation history. Understanding these biblical covenants (principally the Noahic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic and New Covenant) is key to understanding the gospel. However, theologians have muddled the issue by adding a number of other supposed ‘covenants’…
-
the law of Christ
Gal 6:2 (ESV) Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ. For Paul to speak of the Christian life in terms of a ‘law’ is unusual. Paul doesn’t normally speak of the Christian life as ‘law’ (nor do most other NT writers) largely because ‘law’ conveys wrong idea about who a Christian…
-
siding with the crowd
When God gave the Covenant at Sinai one civil law was the following Exod 23:1-7 (ESV) “You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with a wicked man to be a malicious witness. You shall not fall in with the many to do evil (the crowd NIV), nor shall you bear…
-
biblical theology
The following is an extract from Carson’s article Systematic Theology and Biblical Theology found here. ‘By the second half of the 18th century, the influence of the European Enlightenment and the rise of English Deism generated a small but influential group of theologians who sought to extract from the Bible timeless truths in accord with…
-
biblical theology and preaching
(I picked this up from somewhere and I can’t remember where or I would acknowledge it. Friend has just informed me. It can be found in SBTJ Forum 2006. This is available as a pdf file here) D.A. Carson has written an excellent summary of how biblical theology should impact our thinking and preaching. Here…
-
naked and ashamed
We observed, in an earlier post, that in an unfallen world Adam and Eve were unashamed of their nakedness. In a fallen world, however, nakedness involves shame. This shame is clear in the recreation story of the flood and beyond. Noah is the new Adam. God’s words to Noah in Gen 9:1-4 largely echo his…
-
naked and unashamed
Our sinful lustful hearts find a prurient interest in nakedness. The nakedness of another excites us for a variety of reasons. It is not simply the sensual attraction of a naked body of the opposite sex that excites, which of course it does, perhaps especially for men, but what also improperly excites is the exposure…
Cave Adullam 