"Your Sins Are Forgiven"

In Matthew 9, when friends bring a paralyzed man to Jesus, he looks at him and says, “Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven.”

Think about that. He looks at a man who can’t walk, and talks about sin and forgiveness. What he saying, in other words, is this: Your biggest problem isn’t that you’ve been lying on that mat for years, it’s that you’ve sinned against God. But take heart! God has forgiven your sins.

We haven’t even gotten to the healing yet. In fact, it comes (humanly speaking) because the scribes are upset that Jesus talks like this. They actually understand what he’s saying quite well. They know what sin is: an offense against a holy God. So they know that it’s absurd– blasphemous, in fact– for this man to come and pronounce that sins have been forgiven. Jesus doesn’t confront them on their doctrine of sin, but on their doctrine of him. And so he heals the man in order to demonstrate to them that he, the Son of Man, has authority on earth to forgive sins– sins that are ultimately offenses against God, even if they’re also against other people.

Of course Jesus healed (and heals!) for lots of reasons, including his great compassion for people, his zeal for his Father’s glory, to demonstrate his triumph over all kinds of evil. But in this case we see one of the primary purposes of all his miracles: to demonstrate Who he is. He is the Son of Man– the One who pronounces things and makes them so. He can just as easily heal the man’s legs as forgive his sins.

But make no mistake: the best news this guy got that day wasn’t that he could walk. It was “Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven.” And even though Jesus does a million other great things for us in this life, that’s the best news we can hear too.

Bible Trivia

This isn’t the kind of thing I normally do during my devotional reading, but yesterday I was intrigued by a genealogy in Genesis 11. It’s the line of Shem, the son of Noah who was the ancestor of the Israelites. The genealogy starts at the end of the Flood and goes from Shem to Abram, giving the exact age of each figure when his first son was born, so that we can trace it a little more precisely than most biblical genealogies. Here’s how it breaks down (all numbers refer to years since the Flood):

Name	Life Span	Age at Death
Shem (98 @ end of Flood)	d. 502	602
Arpachshad	2-441	439
Shelah	37-470	433
Eber	67-531	464
Peleg	101-340	239
Reu	131-370	239
Serug	163-393	230
Nahor	193-341	148
Terah	222-427	205
Abraham	292-467	175

A couple of interesting things:

• Abram was born 292 years after the Flood. Noah, according to Gen 9:28, lived 350 years after the Flood, meaning he was still alive when Abram was born. Because the sons of Noah spread out into multiple nations, we don’t know whether Abraham ever met his great-x-8-grandfather. But Noah didn’t die until Abram was 58. In fact, the entire line from Noah, 11 generations, was still living when Abram was born.

• Note how the life span falls off after the Flood. Noah was nearly 900 years old when Abram was born, but when Abraham dies at 175, the narrator remarks that he died “in a good old age, an old man and full of years.”

I don’t know that I even have any theological reflections on this; I just found it interesting. The Bible doesn’t always give us this kind of detail, especially in the earliest chapters. But as I’ve said before, this is a good reminder that we’re reading a true Story.

Preaching to Smothered Mama’s Boys

While preparing for the men’s retreat I came across this great article by Anthony Bradley, a professor of apologetics and theology at Covenant Seminary. He hits on an important reason masculinity is in crisis in our culture and in the church.

Retreat!

Apologies for the light blogging this week. I’ve been getting my talks ready for the UGA Wesley Foundation 2008 Men’s Retreat, where I’ll be the keynote only speaker. I’ve been pumped about it for a long time– I worked in men’s ministry at Wesley from 2002-2004, and there’s been a lot of growth since I left, so it will be good to be with college-age guys again. Hopefully I’ll be able to point you toward the talks next week. In the meantime, enjoy this picture, where it looks like an angry Al Gore is about to eat poor helpless Bono.

Pro-Life Resources

Today is the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that struck down nearly all laws restricting abortion. Since 1973 it’s estimated that nearly 50 million unborn babies have been legally killed in the womb.

I think abortion is the slavery of our day. God grant that in a hundred years our grandchildren will be astounded that it was ever permitted, and that as they did in the 18th and 19th centuries, Christians will lay down their lives to fight against this evil. If abortion is still legal in a century, let it not be because the church of Jesus Christ stood by and watched it happen.

I thought it could be helpful to point to some resources that aid Christians in proclaiming both the evil of abortion and the amazing mercy of Christ to those who have been or could be involved in it.

• Abort73.com is a great comprehensive resource on abortion. Their site is well-researched scientifically and theologically.

• Stand to Reason has lots of information about all sorts of ethical topics from a Christian perspective. They have a lot of great suggestions for kindly and winsomely arguing for the humanity of the unborn.

• Sermons and articles on abortion from John Piper. One of the best is “Ten Reasons Why it is Wrong to Take the Life of Unborn Children”.

• Care Net, which was started by one of my professors, is a network of pregnancy resource centers. These centers are the front lines in the battle over abortion, ministering to women who are in desperate situations. It’s vital that Christians demonstrate that we are pro-life, not just anti-abortion, and local pregnancy resource centers are a great way to do that in a very hands-on way. Care Net can help you find a local center and get involved.

• Another great pro-life choice is adoption. Bethany Christian Services is one of the biggest Christian adoption organizations. Also, Justin Taylor, whose blog is the Drudge Report of solid evangelicalism, lists agencies that help finance adoption. Justin has adopted 2 kids and often points to good adoption resources.

Of course, the most important thing we can do is pray that God will have mercy on our nation (and others) by stopping this holocaust and convicting people of the importance of protecting the unborn, who are created in his image. Pray that the church will speak the word of God boldly, declaring that the taking of innocent life is detestable to God, and that his mercy is freely available in Christ, for abortion and every other sin.

Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work? –Proverbs 24:11-12

Knowing Where to Start

Acts 17 shows Paul presenting the same gospel in two different ways in two very different settings.

At the beginning of the chapter, Paul & co. come to Thessalonica, where he goes first to the synagogue (as he usually did in a new city. Here’s his MO for addressing these observant Jews and God-fearing Gentiles:

He reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, “This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ” (Acts 17:3).

So he starts with the OT Scriptures, which they all agree are true, shows what those Scriptures teach about the Messiah, and then explains that Jesus of Nazareth is that Messiah; the Scriptures have been fulfilled. He does the same thing at the synagogues in Berea and Athens. But then he begins talking with some Greek philosophers, and it’s interesting how his approach changes. Here’s his speech in its entirety (or as much as Luke gives us):

Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.

The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for “In him we live and move and have our being”; as even some of your own poets have said, “For we are indeed his offspring.”

Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead (Acts 17:22-31).

What Paul does with this pagan audience is start in a completely different place than he does with the Jewish one. He starts with an element in their culture, the idol to an unknown God, and uses that to get to the doctrine of the true God.

• This true God is the creator (24-26).
• He is entirely self-sufficient, unlike pagan gods (25).
• All men are obligated to serve him (27-28).
• He is not like idols– he does not exist only in the mind of man (29).
• He now calls all men to repentance (30).
• This repentance is in view of a coming judgment, which the risen Christ will execute (31).

The end result is the same for the Jewish audience and the pagan one: either they repent and trust in Christ or they don’t. But Paul knows that the context is different. He has much more in common with the people at the synagogue. With them, he can start with “Here’s what the Scriptures say about Christ.” But he doesn’t share nearly as much ground with the philosophers, so he has to go further back: “There is one God, and here’s what he’s like.”

There’s a lot of ink being spilled these days over contextualization, relevance, words like that. I think a lot of it goes way too far. But the fact is that although there’s only one gospel, we’re presenting that one gospel to lots of different people. If I’m talking to a guy who grew up Southern Baptist and left the faith, there’s a good chance he’ll have a lot of the same intellectual furniture as me; we just have to talk about whether those ideas are true and whether they apply to him. But that demographic isn’t the only one out there. If we’re talking to people who have no Christian frame of reference at all, we probably need to start further back when we want to talk with them about the gospel. They might be a lot closer to the pagan philosophers than the lapsed church boy. Their need is the same– repent and believe– but explaining it to them might look a lot different.

Of course, this all starts with listening, which isn’t a strong point for most of us!

Are You Kidding Me?

Sometimes it’s depressing to run a Christian bookstore.

Rats

Wow.

Why?

Update: Some people who live in my house and are mentioned by name in this post wanted me to clarify that this was an honest question, not a “who-do-you-think-you-are” kind of question. I certainly took it that way (the good way), and did not mean it to appear otherwise. In other words, my wife’s not a jerk by any means, and I’m sorry if I made her look like a jerk.

Melissa asked me this weekend why people like me and Annie want to write. Is it because we think we have so much to say that the world needs to hear? Or the desire to get our name out there? With no publishers beating down the door, why spend time and energy trying to come up with good content here?

It’s a good question. If #1 above is the answer, that’s bad news. I mean, I’m 26, and it’s not like I have years and years of experience in much of anything. #2 has obvious problems. So although both of these are true in my worst moments, on a better day I’m doing this because I want to see people excited to learn about God, excited to grow in their knowledge of the Word, which impacts every other area of life. Theology gets a bad rap, and I want to fight that.

I also want to talk about things I like. That’s the thing with the book reviews, and hopefully eventually some album reviews too. I like to think, and I like to watch/listen to/experience other people thinking and creating. The blog just puts that interaction into written form.

But there’s a challenge here, because we’re talking about left brain and right brain type stuff. I mean, I want to maybe be a professor, a theologian, but I also have this sort of artsy thing going too. Those are really different worlds– the difference between the commentary I reviewed last week and the CS Lewis book I’m hoping to start tonight. So an analogy I came up with (because Melissa really likes analogies): As a writer, I’d like to be able to be the principal trumpet in a symphony, but also be able to be Miles Davis. Technical, but lyrical. Sharp, but free. Able to explain infralapsarianism vs. supralapsarianism, but also able to make you feel something. Wiser Time is my effort to get better at both. We’ll see how it goes.

Book Review: The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment

Readers of this site will probably recognize the name of Tim Challies, who I link to from time to time. He is one of the best-known figures in the Christian blogosphere, both for his blog Challies.com and Discerning Reader, a book review site. He’s also been known to live-blog a conference or two. He is, in other words, one of a new breed: a somewhat famous blogger.

But read his site for a few days, and you’ll realize that Tim is not your ordinary average blogger. He’s not a kid sitting in his mom’s basement (although I do think he works from home)— he daily posts thought-provoking, biblically based articles, and he avoids pointless rants and fingerpointing. At any rate, he’s a thoughtful Christian and a good writer. So I was glad to see his first book, The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment, and it did not disappoint. Challies is an “ordinary” Christian writing to other ordinary Christians about the importance of evaluating everything we see and hear by the standard of Scripture. This kind of discernment is the prerogative of all believers, not just the “experts.”

Challies defines discernment as “the skill of understanding and applying God’s Word with the purpose of separating truth from error and right from wrong.” His book unpacks both the need for Christians to hone and practice this skill and some ways to do so. Discernment seeks to obey Paul’s charge to “Test everything, hold fast to what is good. Abstain from every form of evil.” This involves the dreaded act of “judging,” but Challies explains in what sense Christians are to judge and in what sense we may not judge. Discernment is not just feeling out our own emotions or searching for some secret truth God has not revealed elsewhere; it is learning to apply the objective truth of God’s Word to any and every situation, sifting out the good from the bad. It is both a gift, something God imparts in a particular way to some believers, and a skill or discipline, something all believers should pursue and practice. And it is a skill that is critically needed in the church today.

There were only a couple of issues I had with this book. First, I think Challies goes too far in emphasizing the objective aspects of discernment over against the subjective. He rightly emphasizes discernment as being based on the standard of Scripture, but doesn’t seem to acknowledge any subjective element, as though every question we might face could be solved by solid biblical exegesis. Second, in his chapter “The Gift of Discernment,” he says: “What the church needs today is a class of believers who are identified as the experts in discernment and as those who have special ability in this area.” This and other comments in that chapter made me nervous—it almost seems like Challies is creating a new church office, that of “discerner,” which I thought detracted from his main idea, that discernment is the task of every Christian. But again, these were isolated incidents in the middle of a great book.

The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment is a timely book. The church today is frighteningly emotion- and experience-based, and we need to learn to test everything by the Word of God. Challies doesn’t just sound the alarm, he offers help toward a solution. He does this with a high view of the Scriptures and the local church, so that the fruit of his encouragement is likely to be thoughtful believers who serve God and his Kingdom well.

This book gets bonus points because it has two ads I like:

(Challies is Canadian. Classic.)