By Farther Steps

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“But I tell you truly, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God.” – Luke 9:27

I’ve been stuck on Luke 9 for a while. I understand the events but I was first, having a hard time deriving the discipleship issues from it and second, profoundly inconsistent in reading and praying over the past few weeks. Last night Ben and I purposely set aside about half an hour to read EM Bounds “Essentials of Prayer” together and spend a few minutes in prayer. This morning when I did some quite time, the Lord graciously met me in his word and the Spirit helped me to see. I don’t think it was a mechanical linkage, a tit for tat kind of thing, but I did ask the Lord in prayer to make me seek him more. Those are the kinds of prayers he seems to delight in answering quickly. Thank you Jesus.

The events in Luke 9 that have had me stumped for a while have been:

  1. The sending out of the Twelve (1-6)
  2. Herod’s interest in Jesus (7-9)
  3. The return of the Twelve and the feeding of the 5,000 (10-17)
  4. Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Christ (18-20)

This morning I sat and observed the text. Jesus calls the Twelve and sends them out. Herod is curious about Jesus because of what the Twelve are doing and what the people say about Jesus. The Twelve return and Jesus calls them. The crowds follow uncalled and Jesus welcomes them. The Twelve tell him to send the crowd and he won’t. Instead he tells the Twelve to provide for them and they say they can’t. So Jesus does. Jesus asks who the people say he is and the report is the same as what Herod has been hearing. Jesus asks who the Twelve think he is and Peter announces that he is the Christ.

Fine observation of the literary structure of the text but I got the feeling that it was way up on the top shelf. It didn’t really matter. I wanted to bring the text down to me. What am I supposed to learn from this? What discipleship principles are present in this text? 1Side note: I’ve been dabbling in Emergent Church and post-modern thought lately. It is amazing how the Emergent Church wants to focus on ‘narrative’ but what they do with it is very different than what I’ve just done. The Emergent folks want to “enter the world of the text” and “experience it.” There isn’t really any propositional truth they’re after, just the experience. I’ve tried to “experience” the text but I’m also assuming the author is telling this story for a reason. Why does Luke tell this story and what is it we’re supposed to learn from it? Well first off, this story is about the “insiders,” the Twelve. They’re the ones in the know about Jesus in a way Herod and the crowds aren’t. 2Again, an idea post-moderns are not happy about. The Twelve know more than others and that means we’re not all the same. They may have more truth or “better” truth than others. The Twelve have been given something others have not. Jesus has commissioned them and sent them out with knowledge the people don’t have and need. “He sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal.” (9:2). The people didn’t know about the kingdom of God and they couldn’t heal themselves so Jesus sent his Twelve to do that for them.

Skip ahead to the feeding of the 5,000. The Twelve have just come back from doing wonderful things in Jesus’ name. Now when faced with something as mundane (literally) as food, they seem to have forgotten what they’ve been given. No, not food but the power of the kingdom, the excess of God’s abundance. They’ve been given all that God has and he has everything! So Jesus reminds them, “You give them something to eat” (9:13). After all, they’ve just healed and cast out demons and blessed in Jesus’ name why should they think that God’s provision ends there? You know the rest, Jesus feeds the crowds and there is a bunch left over. 3I once heard this miracle explained as not really a miracle. The crowd would never have go out into the wilderness empty handed (they’re way smarter than the Twelve!) They all had food tucked into their cloaks, Jesus just needed to prompt them to share. Ha. Well, it is a miracle then that the entire crowd of over 5,000 brought the same kinds of bread and fish! Also, it is pretty miraculous that the crowd had somehow tucked enough food in their robes to not only feed themselves, but those who didn’t plan ahead (like the Twelve) and still wind up with 12 baskets left over!

Doesn’t almost sting, then, when you hear Jesus ask “who do the crowds say that I am?” and “who do you say that I am?” As in, “don’t you get it?” Well, there is surely much more going on in that question; just consider what Jesus says after Peter’s confession! But one of the discipleship principles we’re supposed to get is that the Kingdom is not a kingdom of deficit but abundance. We can give away our loaves and fish to a greater need than they can possibly meet because we’re not on our own. We’re not doing this in our own name and so Jesus will bless it and multiply it. There is much more going on with our few loaves and fish than we can imagine! The discipleship principle I saw here is to give it away. Our supply can never meet the need but Jesus’ can.

This is the exact opposite of the health, wealth and prosperity gospel. That is all about accumulation for yourself. What Jesus is getting at here is giving away. In the midst of all of this, Jesus explains his coming death (21-22). Also, in this context is Jesus bidding his followers to take up their cross and follow him (23-27). It isn’t about what we can gather but what we can give away.

↩1 Side note: I’ve been dabbling in Emergent Church and post-modern thought lately. It is amazing how the Emergent Church wants to focus on ‘narrative’ but what they do with it is very different than what I’ve just done. The Emergent folks want to “enter the world of the text” and “experience it.” There isn’t really any propositional truth they’re after, just the experience. I’ve tried to “experience” the text but I’m also assuming the author is telling this story for a reason. Why does Luke tell this story and what is it we’re supposed to learn from it?
↩2 Again, an idea post-moderns are not happy about. The Twelve know more than others and that means we’re not all the same. They may have more truth or “better” truth than others.
↩3 I once heard this miracle explained as not really a miracle. The crowd would never have go out into the wilderness empty handed (they’re way smarter than the Twelve!) They all had food tucked into their cloaks, Jesus just needed to prompt them to share. Ha. Well, it is a miracle then that the entire crowd of over 5,000 brought the same kinds of bread and fish! Also, it is pretty miraculous that the crowd had somehow tucked enough food in their robes to not only feed themselves, but those who didn’t plan ahead (like the Twelve) and still wind up with 12 baskets left over!

More Manly Men

It is man’s business to pray; and it takes manly men to do it. It is godly business to pray and it takes godly men to do it. And it is godly men who give over themselves entirely to prayer. Prayer is far-reaching in its influence and in its gracious effects. It is intense and profound business which deals with God and His plans and purposes, and it takes whole-hearted men to do it. No half-hearted, half-brained, half-spirited effort will do for this serious, all-important, heavenly business. The whole heart, the whole brain, the whole spirit, must be in the matter of praying, which is so mightily to affect the characters and destinies of men. – E. M. Bounds, Essentials of Prayer

Friday Photo

Okay, this “Friday photo” thing is turning out to be more difficult than I thought! Or is it just that July was insane? Yea, July.

Anyway, this is a bridge at Sun Lake Forrest Perserve. The stream it crosses is pretty unimpressive but this bridge looked nice.

Friday Photo

No fresh photo since my camera was out of town this week.

This is an oldie. “The little boy in the picture is now in collage” old. But I really love it. I think my mom took this at the park near where we used to live in Southern California.

Hidden Hope

I got the most recent copy of Christianity Today yesterday and when I read the cover I set it aside with a heavy heart. The lead story is the spread of the health and wealth gospel in Africa. Great. We’re exporting our worst, greediest theology to the poorest continent. I couldn’t even consider looking inside. But I did and I’m glad, it wasn’t all bad news:

  • A big youth conference in England had a falling out when one of the lead speakers said that penal substitution was akin to cosmic child abuse. Part of the group split and will run their own conference and have Carson and Piper speaking on the atonement. Excellent!
  • In a brief article on the new creation-science museum, Ken Ham is quoted as saying, “Christians have problems answering the questions of skeptics because churches and Christian colleges don’t teach apologetics.” He’s right. We need help in this. Funny that I’m co-teaching an apologetics class at church.
  • The Nazarenes are struggling over the doctrine of “complete sanctification.” It is the idea that a Christian can become sinless, also known as perfectionism. Not sure if there will be a change but there is a discussion going on and that is a good thing.
  • In light of the recent conversion of ETS ex-president Francis Beckwith to Roman Catholicism, the editors wrote an excellent editorial on the relationship between justification and sanctification.
  • There is an excellent piece on life in a troubled church by Christine Scheller. I’m going to read it again.
  • Pastor Bob Roberts (his real name) is featured and speaks of church planting with a global perspective. I don’t know that I agree with everything he says, but I was impressed that after chasing the Big Church (I hear Peter Gabriel in my head) dream, he asked himself “Why isn’t Jesus enough for you?” Then he changed his approach to church and focused on the right things.

Good stuff hidden behind extremely bad news on the cover. If you get a chance, look past the heart breaking part and find the gold.

Friday Photo

Oops! Forgot the Friday Photo. Sorry, I was out of town.

This week I organized my book shelf. Too many stacks of books in front of books. So I pulled them down shelf at a time and put them back up in order. Did some dusting too. My cat Mojave, of course, had to check all this out. She found an open shelf and watched for a while.

Reformed Baptist Hermeneutics III: Our Confession

One of the defining principles of being a Reformed Baptist is that we 1Added 3/18/2020: I agree with the theology of Reformed Baptists but I don’t consider myself part of their tribe. I am an evangelical with Reformed theology and a baptistic approach to the sacraments. So when I say “we” I mean those who hold to that theology. have a confession of faith that is in the theological stream of the Reformers. 2Actually, we have two, the 1644 and the 1677/1689 confessions. The reason we focus on the second is not an abandonment of the first but that the second fleshes out the theology in the first. Therefore, I would be remiss if I ignored the Confession in this discussion so I’m going spend some time in this post looking at the confession and highlighting some of the hermeneutical principles found there. There isn’t a chapter specifically on hermeneutics so I’m going to have to do some reading between the lines to try to detect the principle used.

This is but a humble blog entry and the Confession covers a lot of territory so I’m going to focus on two chapters that I know well and that should illustrate our hermeneutic approach: Chapter 7 ‘Of God’s Covenant’ and Chapter 22 ‘Of Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day.’ I think these two chapters will serve us best in trying to address this subject in small scope of a blog post. Chapter 22 should highlight the Reformed aspect of our hermeneutic and chapter 7 the Baptist portion.

Chapter 22 addresses more than the Sabbath but I’m going to confine my comments to only the Sabbath portions. That isn’t to say that there aren’t some interesting things in the other portions of that chapter but I had to pick one. So let’s start with the first part of paragraph 7:

As it is the law of nature, that in general a proportion of time, by God’s appointment, be set apart for the worship of God, so by his Word, in a positive moral, and perpetual commandment, binding all men, in all ages, he hath particularly appointed one day in seven for a sabbath to be kept holy unto him…

Notice that the Sabbath is spoken of as being part of “the law of nature”. What are the hermeneutics behind this conception of the Sabbath? 3I’m fighting the impulse to allow this to turn into a defense of the idea of a Christian Sunday Sabbath. There are Reformed Baptist explanations elsewhere (20kb PDF). Richard Barcellos has an interesting series on the subject as well. I’m trying to stick to the hermeneutic that includes that principle. The Sabbath is what is called a “creation ordinance”, that is, a rule or principle that was established in and at creation. Since it is rooted in creation, it transcends any of the specific covenants just as marriage or work do. That isn’t to say that the covenants don’t add to things it, simply that the principle transcends them. So in the Mosaic Covenant, God appends rules to the covenant that pass away with that covenant, but the Sabbath itself abides. Time set aside from work to be used to worship God in is a creation ordinance and is called a Sabbath in scripture.

This is the Reformed understanding of how the covenants relate. Hermeneutically, we presume continunity from one covenant era to the next. We needn’t see God reestablish his covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the Mosaic Covenant to know that that covenant is in effect in the Mosaic. The continuity is presumed and, in the case I mentioned, it is affirmed in Scripture also (Ex 33:1).

Next we’ll consider chapter 7 on the covenants. This is where we will differ from our other Reformed brothers. The part I want to focus on is in paragraph 3:

This covenant is revealed in the gospel; first of all to Adam in the promise of salvation by the seed of the woman, and afterwards by farther steps, until the full discovery thereof was completed in the New Testament

What is unique and Baptist here may not be obvious at first glance but it is important. Our confession handles redemptive history in a more inclusive fashion than our paedobaptist brothers’ confession does. See if you can spot the difference. Here is a similar paragraph from the Westminster Confession of Faith:

This covenant was differently administered in the time of the law, and in the time of the gospel: under the law it was administered by promises, prophecies, sacrifices, circumcision, the paschal lamb, and other types and ordinances (WFC 7.5)

Did you catch it? What about the time from Adam to Abraham? In the Westminster it is unintentionally excluded whereas in the Baptist Confession it is gathered into the consideration. Though I don’t want this to turn into a criticism of paedobaptism, I need to highlight this point. From Adam to Abraham there was not an external, objective sign of the covenant. People were brought into the Covenant of Grace only by faith (see Hebrews 11 on Abel, Enoch and Noah.) As we Baptists consider the nature of God’s covenants, we incorporate this time period and acknowledge that for a significant portion of redemptive history children of covenant members were not automatically covenant members. That the sign of the covenant was not automatically applied to them.

The hermeneutic principle I detect here is that we will incorporate all periods of redemptive history when considering the relationship between the covenants. Because there was a long period of time when the covenant was not made with those without faith we must admit that it is possible in the New Covenant that this situation could apply once more. When we consider the nature of the New Covenant, the blessings of the New Covenant and the example of our Apostle’s in propagating the New Covenant, we see that it is not beyond what God has done in the past to establish his covenant only with those whom he has given the gift of faith. Our formulation of the New Covenant comes not from only the New Testament (the Dispensationalist error) and not from only redemptive history since Abraham (the paedobaptist error). Instead we consider all of the eras of God’s work in redeeming a people unto himself.

↩1 Added 3/18/2020: I agree with the theology of Reformed Baptists but I don’t consider myself part of their tribe. I am an evangelical with Reformed theology and a baptistic approach to the sacraments. So when I say “we” I mean those who hold to that theology.
↩2 Actually, we have two, the 1644 and the 1677/1689 confessions. The reason we focus on the second is not an abandonment of the first but that the second fleshes out the theology in the first.
↩3 I’m fighting the impulse to allow this to turn into a defense of the idea of a Christian Sunday Sabbath. There are Reformed Baptist explanations elsewhere (20kb PDF). Richard Barcellos has an interesting series on the subject as well. I’m trying to stick to the hermeneutic that includes that principle.

Friday Photo

Yes, I did it. I started using my Flickr account and appear to have entered the “Friday Photo” clan. Not sure if I’ll be able to do this every Friday but it might be worth a try.

The thistle plant wasn’t so good looking, but this blossom begged for a picture. There is some dispute between Gillian and I as to who took the picture. I’m pretty sure it was me but she says she did.

Transformers…

More than meets the eye? Probably not.

I watched the film with my son tonight after work. Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay are co-executive producers and Bay directed. I read a review that said the first half of the film is Spielberg and the second half is Bay and that turned out to be pretty accurate. Characters are developed and you sort of begin to care about them in the first half. Everything blows up in the second half. The visual effects were stunning. The acting was not horrible and there was a joke about it being 7 times better than Armageddon (an abysmal Bay film).

There were some excellent values in the film. The Autobots have honor and loyalty and respect Optimus Prime’s leadership. They are willing to sacrifice themselves for a greater cause. These are laudable things that Hollywood more often than not messes up. They can’t seem to understand virtue.

However, there was some unnecessary crude humor in the film that ruined it. My family will not be seeing this film. The ‘humor’ was brief but it was still too much. Because of it I would say that this is not a family film. Don’t take your family to see it. Instead take the family to see Ratatouille. A few times. It was good natured humor with lovable character.

A good portion of Transformers was filmed at Edwards Air Force Base, my old stomping ground. It served as Qatar and Nellis AFB. I saw the place I used to work a couple of times. :) We used to call it North Hollywood Air Force Base for a while. That was back when Bay filmed part of Armageddon there. When the A-10s rolled in to save the day I just about cheered. What a nerd. Hey, I was too old to watch Transformers on TV so I got to nerd-out over something else in the movie. The Air Force came to the rescue.

Missional – Missio Dei, Missionary or Mission

Author: D. Goodmanson

At the Acts 29 conference Ed Stetzer spoke on the history of the word missional which traces it’s origins from three streams of thoughts: missio dei, missionary & mission. He presents why we may all use the same word, yet it means radically different things for emerging churches, evangelical camps and the reformed community. So when Tim Keller speaks about being missional it is not the same thing as when it used by John Franke or Alan Roxburgh. He plans to publish a paper on this soon which will be extremely helpful for the missional conversation. I thought I’d share a few thoughts from his presentation framing missional from a triperspectival view:missional.gif

Missio Dei (Normative) – The Mission of God is the reality of why the church is on mission. It is bigger than the mission of the church, yet the church is central to this mission. Why is this important? One danger of the emerging church is that they can reject the Biblical call of the church as the central place of mission (situational) and therefore see their call to be missional only from the Missio Dei perspective. This error is no different than a Calvinist who rejects a call of proclaiming the gospel (existential/situational) to the lost because the doctrine of election (normative). Stetzer provided one example where a missionary group helped fund the over-throw of a government as part of their missio dei understanding of being missional. The clearest picture of the missio dei that we have is from the Bible.

Missionary (Existential) – As part of God’s mission, he changes the heart and identity of people. This conversion includes becoming a person who is sent on mission. Our identity also changes into being citizens of the Kingdom of God, which is both already & not yet. A sense of Missional that stems from missionary can lead to para-church ministries and ‘lone-wolf’ evangelism that doesn’t truly reflect the unity of the church as the family of God or the bride of Christ.

Mission (Situational) – The church exists for God and for others. At the center of our identity is being a people on mission to the world around us. This mission includes evangelism, mercy ministries and other tangible signs pointing to the Kingdom of God. It is in this situation we see being missional as an outflow of our lives in all situations to reflect the glory of God.We must see all three working together so that being ‘missional’ means that we are participating in God’s mission as He intends as a collective group of missionaries on mission to this world. Any reductionism of this can and may lead to errors which include uniperspectival churches (great post by David you need to read) and people with limited views of the church as God’s agent of mission.