What is Sin? The Key to Unlocking the Meaning of the Universe

What is Sin? The Key to Unlocking the Meaning of the Universe

May 20, 2026 | Theology

That’s quite a claim for such a little word, but it’s a word that contains multitudes, a phrase coming from Walt Whitman’s famous poem, “Song of Myself,” in a collection called Leaves of Grass. It comes specifically from this passage which will make a good introduction to our topic:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Whitman gets at something about the nature of sin connected to the nature of man: it is a mystery, one human beings have been trying to solve since the beginning of recorded history. We know it as the problem of evil.

Most people think this is a problem primarily for Christianity, but in fact it’s a problem for every person trying to make sense of our messed up world. Human beings have been asking the same question for all of history: why? Why is there evil, suffering, and death? Why does it exist? What does it mean? How can we solve it? Every religion and philosophy has tried to find answers, speculating endlessly because without revelation, without God the Creator giving us the answers, all we’ve got is guesses, conjecture based upon conjecture, speculation upon speculation. Only Christianity via Judaism tells us why sin and evil exist, and only Christianity offers us a solution to our dilemma that is not a dead end, which we’ll explore below. A correct understanding of the problem will help us make sense of our existence, and finding real answers will also help us live better lives amid the chaos and turmoil. That is the key to which I refer in the title.

Unfortunately, we live in a thoroughly secular culture where God has been disinvited from the societal dinner table. The cultural messaging is that at best we can either rage against the meaningless machine of existence, or just ignore it, and do our best to mitigate the suffering brought about by evil, but there are no answers. Evil just is, a brute fact of existence, deal with it. That people have not been satisfied with such a non-answer throughout all of history tells us it’s not a satisfying one. In our day I believe we’ve reached the end of the road for the usefulness of secularism and its lies. Western man thought he could create a society without God, and it hasn’t worked out so well. Living in a universe with no transcendent reality or reference point is deeply unsatisfying to most people. Every human being knows there has to be something beyond our material existence, something above, outside of it that gives some kind of meaning to it all.

The metaphysical poverty of secularism is like lukewarm water, or flat soda, or another blockbuster movie sequel; it’s unfulfilling and disappointing. People are thirsty and hungry for meaning, purpose, and hope, yet secularism is dead end. That realization is driving many people who are currently looking for answers to find them in Jesus. As I never tire of quoting ex-atheist C.S. Lewis in this regard,

I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

While we will never fully understand everything, something impossible for finite creatures with limited knowledge, Christianity does offer us real answers and real solutions. As an atheist, Lewis realized it offered no answers at all, and in fact made the problem worse. Eventually he realized Christianity had the answers he was looking for, and the nature of Christianity as a revealed religion will tell us why.

The Christian Idea of Revelation
If we’re to truly unlock the meaning of the universe in our understanding of sin and the suffering it brings, we’ll have to assume the concept of revelation from God is possible. This is critical. Think of it like this. The universe is a room, and we live inside the room. That’s easy enough to imagine. But we have to make a decision about this room, and in our scenario we have only two choices. One option is a room with no opening, no door, no windows; just four walls and a ceiling. No matter which way you look, bare walls, ceiling, and a floor. That is the no revelation option; we’re stuck in the room with no way to know what if anything is outside of the room, and no way to know what anything inside the room means or why it exists. One guess is as good as another. The other option is a room with a door and windows so we can get answers from outside the room despite our limited view of things. In fact, we’re dependent on the answers from outside the room.

Which brings us to something we need to understand about the nature of Christianity: it is a religion of revelation. The answers are not something we can discover on our own; they must be revealed to us, shown to us. They must come from outside the limits of our minds and experience, outside of the guesses we come up with being stuck inside the room. So we start with a biblical fact, a biblical assumption, that as human beings we don’t find God, or the answers. We don’t work our way to him, but rather God is the one revealing and disclosing himself, and the answers, to us, or else he and the answers could not be found.

The reason it works this way is because as sinful human beings we do not seek God. As guilty sinners, both before our own consciences and before a perfectly holy God, he is our judge, jury, and executioner. No wonder we want nothing to do with him in our natural, sinful state. Rather, we hide when God shows up, as Adam and Eve did after the fall. Revelation itself tells us why, but human experience makes this perfectly clear as well; we can’t live up to our own standards, let alone those of a holy God. That doesn’t keep people from trying to find meaning in the conundrum that is existence, as we see in every permutation of religion throughout human history. By contrast, many Enlightenment thinkers wanted to rid the world of religion, so they insisted we could find meaning without revelation; human reason was all we needed. But Christianity counters that the only way we can understand the true nature of reality is revelation; we can’t get that from man-made religion or reason alone. God must take the initiative to tell us the nature of things, or life is endless confusion.

The history of philosophy is a testimony to such confusion—endless speculation and conjecture that contradicts and confuses, as do all world religions, save one. As Winston Churchill said of the Soviet Union, life without revelation is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. B. B. Warfield in The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible tells us why:

The religion of the Bible announces itself, not as the product of men’s search after God, if haply they may feel after Him and find Him, but as the creation in men of the gracious God, forming a people for Himself, that they may show forth His praise. In other words, the religion of the Bible presents itself as distinctively a revealed religion. Or rather, to speak more exactly, it announces itself as the revealed religion, as the only revealed religion; and sets itself as such over against all other religions, which are represented as all products, in a sense in which it is not, of the art and device of man.

We must also understand the nature of biblical revelation. According to Herman Bavinck, revelation is God’s self-revelation. “He is the origin, and he is also the content of his revelation.” This is an important point because if we primarily see revelation as mere knowledge, God revealing certain things to us, we will miss what makes biblical revelation so, well . . . . revelatory. God has primarily revealed himself, and continues to reveal himself, his being and nature, in three ways: creation, Scripture, and Christ. We see all three in the first two verses of the book of Hebrews:

In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. 

God’s ultimate revelation, that which defines everything else, is Christ. He spoke to us not only through the prophets, but also through the apostles, our New Testament. We also notice that revelation is spoken communication. God speaks, which shouldn’t surprise us given we’re made in His image; and we too speak. Revelation comes to us primarily in the words of God’s redemptive acts in history. We learn this in the first sentences of the gospel of John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

God’s words speak through the Word that speaks through creation even as He speaks through the stories, propositions, and reasoning we find in Scripture. The Bible is a profoundly human book precisely because it is a profoundly divine one—not a book (or 66 books by 40 different authors) of mere human invention, despite what the critics claim.

Those who reject this possibility have no ground on which to stand. Theirs is a completely arbitrary assumption based on nothing but a rank anti-supernatural bias. Christians, on the other hand, have solid logical, rational reasons to believe in the possibility of revelation. Sadly, I can’t establish that here, but trust me, revelation is not only possible, but actual, and because it makes sense of everything a la Lewis, sin, evil, and suffering are no longer a mystery we just have accept. If there is no revelation, sin and the suffering associated with it, make of life an absurdity. With it we’re given meaning, purpose, and hope in the midst of it. Let’s take a deeper look at sin from God’s perspective.

The Nature of Sin and Its Answer
We might think this is obvious, but unless God tells us what it is, what the nature of the problem is, we’ll always see sin as all about us. The best definition I’ve come across is from Agustine and Luther who define it as, Incurvatus in Se, or Latin for being turned or curved inward on oneself. We are by nature inveterate navel gazers—it’s always about us. Or as it’s perfectly described in a song by George Harrison, I Me Mine.  But in fact, sin is fundamentally an offense against Almighty God. Even our sin against others or ourselves is primarily a sin against God, or else it has no meaning. We can see this most clearly in King David’s committing adultery with Bathsheba and having her husband killed to try to cover it up. He says in Psalm 51:

3 For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is always before me.
4 Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight;
so you are right in your verdict
and justified when you judge.

What is striking is David saying it is only against God that he’s sinned. Surely it was also against Bathsheba and her husband, which it was, but the point is that sin has no meaning, evil is not evil and morally wrong, apart from it ultimately being against God. He defines what is good and what is evil in his very nature.

A very lot could be written, and has been written, about sin and its nature, but I want to focus on one thing that infects our understanding of sin more than any other in our day. . . . . happiness. You might wonder what sin has to do with happiness, or happiness with sin. If we go back to the definition of sin as being curved in on ourselves, our tendency will be to see sin as about what makes us happy or not. In other words, we define our life by our circumstances. If they are to our liking, then we think God likes us, if not, God must hate us. Everything becomes about us, and we fail to understand what David said, that in fact it’s all about God.

In the end, we have two stark choices in life. We either start with our desires and work up toward God, which distorts everything, or from God’s being, his character, to our desires. Charles Hodge explains these choices wonderfully:

Order and truth depend on things being put in their right relations. If we make the good of the creature the ultimate object of all God’s works, then we subordinate God to the creature, and endless confusion and unavoidable error are the consequence. It is characteristic of the Bible that it places God first, and the good of the creation second.

Hodge zeroes in on the heart of the issue and argues something that will not go over well with sinful human beings, especially with we moderns who live in the ubiquitous iEverthing culture:

Few principles . . . have been so productive of false doctrine and immorality as the principle that all virtue consists in benevolence, that happiness is the highest good, and that whatever promotes happiness is right.

He further says, that if we live this way, with this orientation, “every question which comes up for decision, is answered, not by a reference to the law of God, or to the instincts of his moral nature, but to the calculations of expediency.” In other words, we become calculating and manipulative, and the only issue is how it affects me, whether it makes me happy, whether it’s something I want or not. In the worst cases, the most important issues becomes how something makes me feel. Whether it’s right or wrong, whether God has commanded it or not, is irrelevant.

If we go back to the title, and sin helps us unlock the key to the meaning of the universe, what we see in human nature is exactly what we would expect to find if the story we read in our Bible is true. Right from the very beginning it all becomes so predictable. After man rebels against God in the garden, wanting to be his own God, to call the shots, what happens? Everything goes to hell. In the very next chapter, Genesis 4, Cain becomes jealous and angry and kills his own brother! Ultimately his anger is against God, but since he can’t kill God, he takes it out on his poor brother who hasn’t done anything wrong. Thankfully, in the biblical story God himself provides the answer. In other religions we have to work our way up to God, but in Christianity God himself came down to solve the problem of us ruining our lives with the fatal inward curve. Now we can practice true love that blesses us and others, and glorifies God.

What is the Gospel? More Than You Might Think

What is the Gospel? More Than You Might Think

May 13, 2026 | Eschatology

That seems like a simple question. Every Christian knows what the gospel is, right? Jesus died for our sins, we believe it and are saved. As Paul says in Romans 10:

9 If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. 

We’re now reconciled to God and we’ll spend eternity with Him instead of separated from Him in hell. We’re no longer enemies of God, hostile to Him and dead in our sins, but reconciled children of God. That is “the good news,” and indeed it is. However, that is not all the news there is.

The modern Evangelical’s view of the gospel is extremely reductionistic, meaning our tendency is to reduce it to something narrow and simple, as if it applied only to our salvation from sin and our own relationship with Jesus. While, we think, it might have an impact on the wider world, our society and culture, that’s a spillover from out transformed personal lives. For most Christians, cultural and societal transformation is not the purpose of the gospel. Any other impact it has on the world is nice and all, but it’s beside the point, and really a distraction from the main thing. I believe God begs to differ.

The gospel in fact was like a spiritual Big Bang. An infinitely dense point of spiritual light and blessing that 2,000 years ago exploded when Jesus rose from the dead, ascended to the right hand of God, and sent his Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The gospel is an entirely new spiritual universe transforming this material world because Jesus’s mission was to transform it, as he himself tells us in John 3:

16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 

The idea of the world is pretty expansive in English, but the Greek word for it, our word cosmos, is more so. According to Strong’s, it is “properly, an “ordered system” (like the universe, creation); the world.” We as modern, individualistic Westerners tend to equate world with whosoever believes, and leave it at that. God loves people, he came to save them from their sin, that’s it. But that’s not all he was saying. The Apostle Paul gives us a picture of the expansive and all-encompassing nature of Christ’s mission, of the influence of the kingdom of God in the world, in 2 Corinthians 5:17, another verse Christians individualize but shouldn’t. The NIV has the best translation:

17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! 

Yes, the new creation refers back to the pronoun anyone, but there is no pronoun directly attached to “new creation,” no “he is a new creation.” Strong’s is again helpful with the adjective attached to creation: “properly, new in quality (innovation), fresh in development or opportunity – because “not found exactly like this before.” Christ accomplished redemption, redeemed not only his people (Matt. 1:21), but when it was applied by the Holy Spirit, the end goal, the telos in Greek or purpose, was the entirety of creation, the cosmos.

An Expansive and Transformational Gospel
There is a reason most Christians miss the world transformational vision of the mission of God in Christ—Pietism. I’ve written about it here many times, and I go into it in great depth in my forthcoming book, so I won’t do that here. Briefly, I’m speaking of a German Lutheran movement that started in the 17th century and eventually came to dominate modern Evangelical Christianity. I always have to clarify what I mean for those who might think I mean Christian piety, as in a committed devotional relationship with God through Christ in daily Bible reading and prayer. Pietism, while it often includes that, is not the same as that kind of piety. It is, rather, an over spiritualized, other worldly orientation of the Christian life. The primarily personal nature of the faith I mentioned above is part of it.

If we’re to challenge this narrow, constricted vision of the Christian life, we must ask ourselves an important question: What makes the Great Commission great? Is it merely that individuals will be saved so when they die they can go to heaven? Or is it more than that? I will argue, as I do in my upcoming book, that what makes the Great Commission great is that it’s a mandate of dominion from King Jesus, as Christians being salt and light was never meant to be limited to us and our personal holiness or just the church.

If you read those parables in Matthew 5, Jesus says we “are the salt of the earth,” and “the light of the world.” By using earth and world Jesus is surely extending the scope and extent of the gospel’s influence through us to everything we do as creatures made in his image, to everything defining us as human beings and the cultures and societies we create. Yet for the last two hundred years the scope and extent of God’s kingdom influence has been a point of contention among Christians, most limiting it in the various ways I’ve mentioned.

Christians tend to see the gospel and soteriology, our salvation from sin, as the end of God’s plan for man, instead of the means to an end. Andrew Sandlin in his book, A Postmillennial Primer: Basics of Optimistic Eschatology, explains the fuller orbed biblical view of God’s redemptive plans:

The actual end is the subordination of all things to God through Christ by means of the earthly dominion of the godly. God’s purpose is not chiefly to save man and fit him for heaven, but to restore him to covenant-keeping submission and his calling as God’s dominion agents in the earth. Heaven on earth in eternity is the blissful culmination of this task faithfully prosecuted by the redeemed.

The gospel restores everything it touches because it is fundamentally a restoration project. The point of the gospel is new creation, in that the old creation, fallen and distorted, becomes paradise restored. David Chilton in his book, Paradise Restored, describes the difference between an eschatology of victory and one of defeat

We must not look upon the world with eyes that see only the Curse; we must look with the eyes of faith, enlightened by God’s word to see the world as the arena of His triumph. History does not end with the Wilderness. World history will be, on a massive scale, that of Sodom: first a Garden, lovely and fruitful; then corrupted into a Wilderness of Death through sin; finally restored by God’s grace to its former Edenic abundance.

 Throughout Isaiah we see intimations of such restoration, as in Isaiah 35:

The desert and the parched land will be glad;
    the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.
Like the rose, 2 it will burst into bloom;
    it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy.
The glory of Lebanon will be given to it,
    the splendor of Carmel and Sharon;
they will see the glory of the Lord,
    the splendor of our God.

For most of my Christian life I saw this restoration as reserved for the new heavens and earth after Christ returned, but postmillennialism turned my gaze earthward.

Per the Lord’s Prayer, we are to pray and work for, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The entire earth is our mission field. Our eschatological assumptions will determine how we view the impact of God’s kingdom coming on earth. These assumptions will further determine how we interpret history, as well as the present and future, including our own lives. Prior to embracing postmillennialism, I didn’t realize how our theology of “end times” determines how we interpret everything about the times in which we live, whether negatively or positively. In a phrase from the name of the YouTube channel I’m associated with—eschatology matters. This was put well by Greg Bahnsen’s son, David:

The cause of an optimistic eschatology has never been one of enlightening one’s view of the future as much as informing their activity in the present.

He’s speaking specifically of postmillennialism, but the point he makes about eschatology informing a person’s “activity in the present” applies to all eschatological views, even those claiming to be irreligious, like secularists. How we view the end matters in the present. For the secular, they can only look forward to an eschatology of doom, as the multitude of dystopian movies demonstrate. Christians, however, shouldn’t embrace an eschatology of doom; unfortunately most do.

As Christians there is much we agree on about what happens after Christ returns. We also agree that part of the Great Commission is to bring the gospel throughout the earth to all peoples, and build Christ’s church. What separates us are the implications of the gospel and Great Commission for this fallen world and the peoples and their cultures and their societies, prior to Christ’s return.

An Optimistic Eschatology for Gospel Transformation
Over the last several years I’ve become convinced an optimistic eschatology is necessary if Christianity is again going to influence the direction of America and the Western world, and the entire world Jesus died for. As Chilton rightly observes:

The fact is that you will not work for the transformation of society if you don’t believe society can be transformed. You will not try to build a Christian civilization if you do not believe that a Christian civilization is possible.

Or if it’s even important, which most Christians don’t think it is. Again, it is the Pietism. If we are to have a meaningful impact as salt and light in the larger culture and nation, we have to build with a reasonable expectation of success; postmillennialism gives us that whereas the other eschatological options do not.

The most important thing I’ve learned and what changed my perspective from negative to positive, from pessimistic to optimistic, is that there is biblical warrant for doing so. The most surprising thing to me about postmillennialism when I first learned about it, is that the case is completely exegetical, and thoroughly biblical. In other words, the case is made solely from Scripture. This depends, of course, on which eschatological glasses you have on. Two different sets of glasses give us two completely different interpretations of a passage. Take the passage from Isaiah 35 I quoted above. I used to believe the desert would only bloom after Christ returned. Prior to my eschatological awakening, I believed sin and the devil had the upper hand in this fallen world. After I realized that Christ’s first coming made the blooming possible now. Christ’s righteousness, the Holy Spirit working in and through us, and his authority exercised from the right hand of God now makes it possible to push back sin and evil “far as the curse is found.”

Too many Christians view the purpose of the gospel more as a means of escape from this horrible world, than as a means of transforming this into a blessed world. As I think about this specifically, how I convince others of my eschatological optimism, I go back to the very beginning and God’s covenant promises that started His reclamation project, His reclaiming the earth back from Satan. As soon as the fall happened and the curse declared, God told Satan that the woman’s seed or offspring would strike or crush his head. Then after the Lord scattered the people over the whole earth and confused their languages, he called one man, Abram, through whom he would bless all peoples on earth. The offspring of the woman, Christ, would eventually diminish Satan’s power on earth, and would come in the form of blessing.

The beauty of Christianity is that it isn’t just personally transformational but transformational in every way, societal, technological, relational, material, etc. It effects every single thing human beings put their minds and efforts to in the light of God’s word, the gospel, and His law, for our good and His glory. These blessings will eventually leak out from God’s people to bless society. And we are never under the illusion these blessings are solely due to us, but they can’t happen without us either. Jordan Peterson, one of the most important Christian apologists of the twenty-first century even though his Christianity isn’t fully formed as we would understand it, sees Christianity as essential to bringing order out of the natural chaos of life. He’s studied evil probably more than any person alive, and he sees Christianity as the answer. As Christians we should oblige him by bringing our faith into every nook and cranny of life and “infect” the people around us with a positive vision for the future.

Lorraine Boettner puts the postmillennial perspective in its definitive terms:

We hold that Christ is not merely the potential victor, but the actual victor over sin. During the interadvental reign He is steadily putting into effect the victory that He has won, gradually overcoming the forces of evil, until all His enemies shall have been made the footstool of His feet (Acts 2:35).

He also speaks of purposefully using “the word ‘conquest,’ rather than ‘conflict,’ for Christ is not merely striving against evil, but progressively overcoming it.” We are all familiar with the passage from Matthew 16:18 when Jesus says He will build His church, “and the gates of hell will not overcome it.” I never realized I was interpreting this incorrectly all my Christian life. I thought Satan and his minions and the evil they perpetuate were on the offensive, and it was Christians and the church who are on the defensive. That is exactly backward! Gates in the ancient world were defensive mechanisms. It is the church enabled by God the Holy Spirit that is on the offensive—Satan and his kingdom don’t stand a chance!

I don’t know about you, but I’m excited to be on the winning team! That is the gospel, winning and victory over sin on this earth, in this life. Quoting Psalm 8 and referring to Psalm 110, the most quoted Psalm in the New Testament, Paul says in I Corinthians 1:

 25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death. 

That process of subduing his enemies, sin, disease, chaos, disorder, and eventually death, started at his first advent. That is the good news, that is the gospel we proclaim for this age, and the age to come.

He Came to His Own, and His Own Received Him Not: Jesus, the Religious Professionals, and AD 70

He Came to His Own, and His Own Received Him Not: Jesus, the Religious Professionals, and AD 70

May 6, 2026 | Eschatology, Parents and Family

One thing many Christians seem to miss is that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, that he came first exclusively to his own people. There is a tendency to see all of Jesus’ words as written to us and universally applicable, and ignoring the historical context in which the story takes place. We’ll notice as we read through the gospels Jesus uses the word generation a lot, specifically in the Synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke where Jesus uses the word twenty-six times. Each time he uses it he is referring to the generation currently living. Even in John where that specific word is not used, John starts his gospel saying that Jesus “came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.” That statement is a good synopsis of the entire story of the gospels and Jesus’ ministry, which is the foundation upon which is built the Apostle Paul’s ministry eventually taking the gospel to the Gentiles and the entire world.

First, Jesus has to deal with the Jews and what the Jewish religion had become by the time he started his ministry. We have to look at the gospels in the context of the flow of redemptive history, and what God’s ultimate purposes were in creating a people for Himself in the first place. This requires us to go back to the very beginning. Adam was given a charge in the garden to take the world God had given him, and in effect to civilize it. Once he created man, both male and female, he gave them this charge:

28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

We call this the dominion mandate coming from the word the King James Version used for rule, dominion. Expanding on the meaning, it indicates prevailing against, to reign and rule over, to take. Adam was given a world of raw material with which to create a world of blessings for the people he would co-create with God. Needless to say, he blew it. When sin entered the world taking dominion would become a very mixed blessing, but the blessings were there to be had. Sin just complicated things. Eventually God chose Abram, one man out of all the people’s on earth to bring his blessings to every nation, to all peoples, through him and his seed or offspring, which is Christ (Gal. 3:16).

The Jews by the time of Jesus seemed to miss this message, that their religion wasn’t just for them, but for all peoples on earth. Judaism had gotten so insular, so exclusive, that Jews were not even allowed to eat with Gentiles, or to go into their houses and visit. Since God had stopped speaking through the prophets 400 years prior, the Jewish religious professionals had turned their religion into something completely foreign to what God had intended it to be. Jesus came to rectify that.

The Misunderstood Jesus
For those of us who’ve been Christians for a while and have read and heard the gospels preached many times, they don’t shock us, or even cause us to wonder what the heck is going on. Part of the reason is that we don’t realize the gospels were not written to us, but for us. In my early Christian years I thought the Bible was God speaking directly to me divorced from the historical context in which the stories took place. Needless to say that is not the most solid biblical hermeneutic, or interpretive framework. It’s impossible to understand what’s going on unless we see it as the culmination of Jewish history, as the turning point, the pivot in redemptive history.

Jesus was a corrective, and because of that completely misunderstood. His ministry, those three short years, might best be described in Isaiah 53:3, “He was despised and rejected by men.” Despite all he said and did to prove he had come from God, he was continually rejected, even by his own family! In Mark 3 Jesus is making a ruckus, and Mark tells us his family “went to take charge of him, for they said, ‘He is out of his mind.’ In Mark 6 Jesus visited his hometown, and the response of those who knew him best isn’t exactly welcoming. They say,

3 Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

As the old saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt. And as Jesus said, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household.”

In chapter 5 Mark gives us two stories of how how widely Jesus was misunderstood. In the first story, a demon-possessed man everyone must have known about because of his prodigious strength came to Jesus. No wonder the demons who spoke through him gave the name Legion. They plead with Jesus not to send them out of the area, so he gives them permission to go into a very large heard of pigs, who then immediately rush down a bank into a river and drown themselves. The people’s response is to plead with Jesus to leave their region. He had cost them a lot of money and they wanted nothing to do with him. The fact that Jesus commanded demons and they obeyed him was irrelevant.

The other story of rejection in this chapter is about Jesus raising a young daughter of one of the synagogue leaders named Jairus. He pleads with Jesus to come and heal his daughter, which he promptly does. When they arrive at his house, they tell him he’s too late, she’s already dead. Jesus tells them she’s not dead but asleep. The response of the people?  “But they laughed at him.” This is what reminded me of John’s observation in the first chapter of his gospel:

11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.

Jesus had already done amazing works of healing throughout the region, yet they still doubted. Moral of the stories? No matter what Jesus did, many, most Jews, would never believe. In fact, at the very end of his life he is completely alone, hung on a tree, a Roman cross, as a crucified criminal, enemy of the state. Only a handful of women are there in his final hours. He was truly despised and rejected by men. He came to bring good news to that generation, that man could be reconciled to God, that the blessings promised to Abraham and the Patriarchs could be theirs, that the dominion mandate could finally be fulfilled in him, and they wanted nothing to do with it.

Jesus’ War with the Religious Professionals and the Covenant
The ministry of Jesus is the culmination of 2,000 of Jewish history starting with God calling Abram to go from his home to Canaan to the land of promise (Gen. 12):

2 “I will make you into a great nation,
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
3 I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.”

The expansiveness of this promise is the point, and it goes back to the Dominion Mandate. God always intended to bless the entire earth, his creation and everyone in it, and that blessing would come through His people. The Jews forgot that, and turned this welcoming religion into an insular legalistic affair for only the few. Witness the early church’s struggle with Jewish Christians welcoming Gentiles into the church. When Peter had his vision of the clean and unclean animals and was sent to the centurion Cornelius, the Jewish Christians “were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on Gentiles” (Acts 10). That wasn’t supposed to happen!

But if we’re going to understand the full redemptive-historical meaning of Jesus and his contentious interaction with the Jewish religious professionals, we have to see it in its legal-historical context in God’s dealing with His people. This requires some understanding of Ancient Near Easter religion, and for modern people that’s not easy to imagine. What we see in our Bibles isn’t some petulant God frustrated with His people and lashing out at them. The heretic Marcion even went so far as to see the Old Testament God as a different God. Far from it. Rather, God established a legal relationship with His people typical of an ancient Near Eastern Suzerain-Vassal relationship. A Suzerain was a superior ruler, a king, or great power who exercised dominance over a subordinate ruler or state, known as the vassal. The relationship was formalized through suzerain-vassal treaties (or a word we’re familiar with, covenants), which were common diplomatic and political instruments. These were not generally agreements between equals, although such did exist, but hierarchical relationships imposed by a stronger party on a weaker one, often after conquest, alliance, or submission.

This started with God’s unilateral covenant agreement with Abram in Genesis 15, a bizarre ritual to us, where God puts Abram into a deep sleep. He tells Abram the story of what will become his descendants’ slavery and deliverance that happens 400 years into the future, and then in the form of a firepot, a blazing torch passes between cutup animals as a ceremony to formalize the suzerain-vassal relationship between God and His people. This relationship was unique, though, because it was unilateral, only one party, the suzerain, God, declaring he would fulfill both parts of the covenant. These covenants or agreements, like our contracts today, were always established between two parties. Not with God and His people. Those who would become the Hebrews and then the Jews would never be able to keep their end of the bargain.

God rescuing His people from slavery in Egypt began to formalize this relationship as we can see from the intricate details required of the people to maintain it. God lays out the conditions and consequences most starkly in Deuteronomy 28. There are detailed blessings for obedience, and curses for disobedience, more of the latter than the former. We must notice the number one stipulation, a warning at the end of the list of blessings:

14 Do not turn aside from any of the commands I give you today, to the right or to the left, following other gods and serving them.

The turning aside, turning away from their God, was a function of their following other gods and serving them. That is the essence of the human struggle with sin. It isn’t primarily our behavior that is the issue, but which god or gods we will serve. Our behavior always flows out of that. The final result of the cursing, which would prove prophetic in Israel’s history, is destruction. It’s a sobering read knowing what happened three times in Israel’s history. First with the Assyrians destroying the northern kingdom in 722 BC, then the Babylonians destroying Judah and Jerusalem in 586 BC, and finally the Romans destroying Jerusalem and the temple in 70 AD. All this was a result of Israel’s unfaithfulness, of their turning aside to follow other gods and serve them.

Israel’s Marriage Covenant with God
In the Old Testament the covenant, i.e., legal, relationship between God and His people is depicted as a marriage, and Israel is often portrayed as an unfaithful wife who had committed spiritual adultery by turning to idols, yet God remains faithful and promises restoration. God had warned Israel of the exact consequences of the agreement, and they responded to Moses three times that, “We will do everything the Lord has said; we will obey” (Exodus 19 and 24). They willingly entered into this agreement, and would have to live with the consequences. This is the ultimate context of Jesus’ ministry and mission to the Jewish people.

If we go back through Jewish history in the Bible we see a double minded people who are not sure if they want to remain faithful to their God or follow the ways of the other heathen pagan nations. God called His people to be holy, set apart and not contaminated by those heathen pagan cultures, and by the time of Jesus the Jewish religious professionals, the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Teachers of the Law, had perfected a narrowly exclusive version of Judaism that bore little resemblance to what God intended in his promise to Abram. God’s design was that the nations wouldn’t infect His people, but rather that His people would influence the rest of the world with His blessings. After 2,000 years it was clear that just wasn’t going to work, and Jesus is bringing his message of warning to his people who instead of heeding it, kill him. Yet the Apostle Peter says in Acts 2 this was all part of the plan:

23 This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. 24 But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.

Israel’s history was one long object lesson in failure, that without God the Holy Spirit dwelling in His people, the kingdom of God could never advance on earth, or Satan’s dominion be destroyed. That would take the man who would come to be called the Messiah, who in himself would fulfill all three offices of mediator that sinful humanity required, prophet, priest, and king. As prophet, Jesus was truth teller, speaking messages the people often didn’t want to hear. It was as prophet that Jesus’ contentious relationship to the Jewish religious leaders is best understood. They chaffed at everything he said and did because it condemned them. As Jesus lamented (Matt. 23):

37 “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.

They were determined to do the same to him. As priest, Jesus would atone for the sins of the people he spent three years condemning. Sadly, they completely missed that Jesus was himself the Passover lamb, who willingly took the wrath they deserved. And finally as King, he would be their ruler, the one to whom they owed unquestioned loyalty and obedience. Instead, they proclaimed that they had no king but Caesar.

The Jews would not accept Jesus’ atonement for their sin and unfaithfulness, and him as their Messiah, so as Jesus warned them, their house would be left to them desolate. Jesus had warned the teachers of the law and Pharisees in Matthew 23 with seven woes that judgment was coming, and in Matthew 24, what is called the Olivet Discourse, he prophesies the coming destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in AD 70. God would send an unmistakable message to the Jews and the world that there was a new way to the Father, the only way, and it was Jesus, Savior of the entire world.

Tim Allen, the Hollowness of Philosophy, and the Consideration of the Alternative

Tim Allen, the Hollowness of Philosophy, and the Consideration of the Alternative

Apr 29, 2026 | Apologetics, Parents and Family

The great comedian Tim Allen, Buzz Lightyear himself, sat down with fellow comedian Bill Maher for a long conversation about their careers, and at one point discussed the credibility of Christianity. Maher’s at best an agnostic, but Allen clearly believes in God, and has struggled for years to get to the truth about the nature of things. I didn’t realize what a deep thinker he is. He wrestles seriously with the ultimate questions of life, and won’t settle for facile answers. It’s a real battle for him, and at times not coming up with answers has made him depressed. He’s a genuine seeker.

At one point in their conversation he brings up the Apostle Paul’s journey to his belief about the story of Jesus being true, and Allen is trying to wrap his mind around it all. Part of what prompted his thoughts was a trip to Israel to where it all happened, and he’s blown away that the gospels are actual history, that those things really happened in space and time. While he’s clearly not fully embraced the Christian faith, he’s also clearly compelled by it. What his thinking reveals to me is someone who intuitively understands something that cannot be denied, that we have to believe something, and it happens to be one of my favorite apologetics perspectives about realizing Christianity is true, which we’ll explore below.

His almost testimony reminds me of the actual testimony of Vishal Mangalwadi he shared in a wonderful conversation he had a few years back with Jordan Peterson. He’s Indian, the land of the Hindus, but he became a Christian in high school, and then rejected it in college because the very smart professors he encountered said it was basically hogwash. After he’d gotten out of college as a skeptic, his sister talked him into reading the Bible. His entire experience of coming to Christ was through multiple readings of the Old Testament, especially the historical books about Israel. Every time he read it he came to a different conclusion about what the nature of the Bible is and what it could mean. Eventually he saw the genius in it, the story of Isreal and their God, that could only be explained by being true revelation from God. He realized one of two things about the Bible must be true. Either it’s what it claims to be, the revelation of God to man, or it is a product of man, primarily stories of human fiction.

If it’s the latter he concluded there is no such thing as truth, and Christianity is the same as all the philosophies and other religions he studied, just fruitless searches for meaning in a meaningless universe. He and Allen both realized that without God’s revelation the very possibility of truth and knowing anything about the nature of reality is impossible. That’s why Allen was depressed and despairing over ever really knowing what life’s about. As Leon Morris said in his book, I Believe in Revelation:

[T]he view that what matters ultimately is what appeals to the individual’s experience or reason is a profoundly pessimistic view. It means that we have nothing from which to correct our errors, no way of knowing what is true or false once we have accepted an idea. If man’s mind is the measure of things there is no way of getting back to the right way once that mind has gone off the wrong track.

Both Mangalwadi and Allen knew this in their bones, and that the revelation of God in the Bible is the only answer to man’s dilemma, which which leads us to one of my favorite apologetics tools.

The Consideration of the Alternative
Simply put, if we don’t believe one thing, we must believe another. There is no in between where we get out of having faith, of deciding if one thing is true then everything else is not. As Geddy Lee sings on Rush’s Free Will, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” Exactly. If Vishal had decided the Bible was not God’s revelation, then he was saying it’s a product of man. It’s either/or, one or the other. There are many scholars in the history of biblical criticism who didn’t get this. They claimed God spoke through some of what we read in Scripture, not all of it, and lo and behold, they were the ones who decided which Scripture was which! Convenient, that, and completely arbitrary.

Being deep philosophical thinkers, both Allen and Mangalwadi realized something most people never do. They intuitively grasped that if there is no God there is no truth. This is an undeniable fact of existence that the entirety of atheistic Enlightenment rationalism missed. All these atheists just assumed truth exists while denying God who is the Truth exists, and thus the ground of all truth. You can’t get truth from dirt because if all we are is lucky dirt, then you can only get, well, dirt! Atheistic materialism posits all that exists is matter; there is nothing beyond matter, no transcendent or spiritual reality beyond the material. Logically that means any moral assessment of reality, like goodness, beauty, and truth can only be mere preference, what each person prefers, like flavors in ice cream, or taste in music or food. There is simply no way around that conundrum for the atheist. Over the years I’ve marveled reading atheistic thinkers like Marx or Nietzsche or Freud, and how it never seems to occur to them that their atheism is problematic when it comes to their assessment of things being true or not.

Which brings us to another issue in the consideration of the alternative, the burden of proof. Once we realize, or accept, that if one thing is not true something else must be, the burden of proof shifts from only one side of the equation to both. Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud never thought, even for a second, that they had to prove or justify their belief in a God-less universe. To them it was as axiomatic as water flows downhill, just the nature of things. For most atheists, reality needs no explanation; it’s just brute fact. There is no why or justification behind good or evil, truth or lies, beauty or ugliness; they just are. They, however, were wrong because without God there can be no transcendent standard for what is morally right or wrong, or for what is true or not, or if beauty or ugliness even exist. All things become inclined to the tyranny of personal preference, or tyrannical preference on a societal level. So, in Hitler’s Germany, or Mao’s China, or Stalin’s Russia, genocidal murder of tens of millions of people was for them legal and morally justified. And if there is no God who’s to say it wasn’t?

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis’s first section is on “right and wrong as a clue to the meaning of the universe.” People, he says, will quarrel about one thing or another, and each appeals to a standard that assumes something beyond their own preferences. As he says about people making claims of fairness:

Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: ‘To hell with your standard.’ Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it.

In other words, people without being taught it know that some objective standard exists to which each person can appeal, regardless of what they personally believe. In fact, we can only know what a crooked line is because we know it is not straight, and that the straight line exists. This puts the atheist in the unenviable position of trying to argue for a standard he claims doesn’t even exist. All he can ultimate says is, I don’t like it!

This means we must never accept the burden of proof double standard placed upon us by the materialist atheist. As I often say, there is no such thing as an unbeliever—all people live by faith. This applies to any counter claim to Christianity’s truth claims. For example, when the skeptic says the Bible is myth or fairy tale, made up stories, he has to provide evidence that is the case. Just saying it doesn’t make it so. Since the beginning of biblical criticism going all the way back to Spinoza in the 17th century, critics have just blithely assumed the Bible could easily be made up, that obviously the default assumption should be that for the most part it’s merely human fiction. We must challenge that assumption and force them to provide evidence beyond their blatant anti-supernatural bias. For example, I made the argument in my book Uninvented that nobody could make up a Jewish Messiah like Jesus, and laid out extensive arguments why. Now let the skeptic make counter arguments. They can’t because there are none!

What Are the Alternatives to Christianity? If we go to the big picture when we look for an explanation of reality we might think there are many alternatives vying for our allegiance. The skeptic will tell us there are thousands of religions all claiming to be the one true path to God or whatever is ultimate, but that’s not true. All religions basically accept Jesus in some form, as I say, everyone wants a piece of Jesus. But only Jesus makes the completely exclusive truth claim that he is “the way, the truth, and the life,” and that “no one comes to the Father except through” him. When you get down to it, there are only three ultimate options: theism, atheism, or pantheism. Two of these alternatives are impersonal. Atheism is material, therefore not personal. Pantheism is spiritual, but not personal. In a world filled with persons and personalities, these are not credible. Only theism is spiritual and personal. And of the great theistic religions, only Christianity because of the Trinity is truly personal. It is no coincidence that the world created by the Triune God is inhabited by persons.

Whenever I am tempted to doubt, for what psychologically healthy person doesn’t doubt at times, I consider the alternatives. There is no other plausible explanation, no other religion, or worldview, that has close to the explanatory power of Christianity, and we’ve only scratched the surface in this section.

The Power of Explanatory Power
If you haven’t heard this phrase before, it’s something you’ll want to become familiar with. The term comes from the Philosophy of science, and means what “provides a better explanation” for X, Y, or Z. For example, is a Creator or chance a better explanation for the bumble bee? In science it often comes down to probability, or what the likelihood is of one thing being the case versus another. 

Explanatory power is associated with something called abductive logic. “Abduction or, as it is also often called, Inference to the Best Explanation, is a type of inference that assigns special status to explanatory considerations.” Douglas Groothuis in his book Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism, gives us some real‑world examples of the practical power of abductive reasoning:

This kind of argument is often used in . . . courts of law. In court cases, various kinds of evidence are arrayed in support of a judgment concerning the guilt or innocence of the party on trial. One accused of larceny must give a better explanation of his whereabouts during the crime in question than does the prosecutor. If this kind of reasoning is common, useful and acceptable in other contexts, its use in the philosophy of religion should not be excluded.

C.S. Lewis put this concept best as he normally does. In a talk given on, “Is Theology Poetry?” he said the following with poetic simplicity:

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.

Light always does this. Lewis’s sun metaphor is illuminating, pun intended, because the Christian worldview sheds light on everything. Light is a common biblical metaphor. Unfortunately, light is so common and easily produced in the modern world that we take for granted what a powerful function it plays in our lives. Think about it: light lets us see what’s actually there, even though we all have different perceptions of things. For example, when you turn on the lights chances are you will not run into the couch. Instead of sitting on nothing and falling on your behind, you can just go sit in the chair. Notice when the lights are on, you also have depth perception; three‑D is so much more impressive in reality than on a movie screen. When the lights go on, you can see color. All of a sudden, everything is defined!

The Apostle John tells us about Jesus, that

4 In him was life, and that life was the light of men. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome (or understood) it. . . . . 9 The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. 

John’s claim is that Jesus is the one who allows us to see reality as it actually is! As we get to know Jesus and his word and his world, we will bump into fewer chairs. We’ll stop running into things we can’t see and stop trying to convince ourselves, and others, that there really was nothing there after all. Why do you think it is that psychotherapists do such bang‑up business, especially among the rich and famous, and increasingly among the young and not so famous? Their clients are confused! (There are over half a million “mental health professionals” practicing in the US.) If you lived in spiritual darkness you would be confused too, running into walls and couches, wondering if this thing you’re feeling is the door to the garage or the bathroom. It would be so much easier if someone would just turn on the damned lights! God has, in Christ!

That is explanatory power. Lewis gives us an example of how explanatory power works. He beautifully contrasts Christianity as an explanatory framework with what he calls the “scientific point of view,” or swallowing “the scientific cosmology as a whole.” This view assumes reality is solely material, and it provides zero explanatory power:

If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on bio‑chemistry, and bio‑chemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test.

For former atheist Lewis, the question is which cosmology, or what account of why things exist, best explains what actually exists.

The West has been indoctrinated into a secular, basically materialist cosmology; it is assumed everywhere we go, in everything we see or hear. A perfectly innocuous example comes from a golf tournament I watched on TV. The first PGA tournament of the year is always in Hawaii, and they were broadcasting the beauty and grandeur of the islands. The commentators, watching a large gray whale frolicking in the sea, remarked how beautiful this magnificent creature is, how majestic and awesome a sight. However, what they couldn’t say was how incredible and awesome must be the God who created that whale—the God who thought up the concept of a whale in the first place, and water, and oceans, and gravity, and an earth and moon, and human beings who could be blown away by the experience of it! A professional announcer today wouldn’t think of injecting “religion” into such an environment. As my family will attest, at times like that I yell at the TV and say something like, “What about the God who created it!”

It is this God, the Creator of all things, the Triune God of Scripture, and of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior that will finally put all the puzzle pieces into a big beautiful coherent picture for Tim Allen. Let’s pray for him that he makes it all the way to finding what he’s always been looking for.

The Hound of Heaven and Sanctification

The Hound of Heaven and Sanctification

Apr 22, 2026 | Theology

Whenever I tell my story, my testimony about God’s working in my life, I always use the great late 19th century poem by Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven. When I was first exposed to it many years ago, it captured my experience of God perfectly, and that was before I’d embraced Reformed theology and Calvinism. It was doubly applicable after that. Here is the first stanza which is absolute perfection when it comes to describing not just my experience, but that of many Christians I’ve known and whose testimonies I’ve heard:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet—
‘All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.’

Labyrinthine is such a great and apt word nobody would use anymore. I just learned looking it up, that labyrinth like many great words goes back to ancient Greek mythology meaning maze or elaborate, confusing structure with intricate passages that is very difficult to get out of. How perfectly does that describe sin! He also perfectly captures the emotional roller coaster of trying to live our lives outside of obedience to the will of God, even at times when we deceive ourselves into thinking we are living according to that will. We sinners can justify anything in our self-delusion. And since God will not let us go because he died for us, for his people, we can’t escape! This fact is an important piece of the story of the Hound of Heaven for our entire Christian life, which I’ll get to below.

As I say often, God is never in a hurry. His pace is never perturbed; it’s relaxed and infinitely persistent, in history and in our lives. We sense him, we turn our heads knowing he’s after us, yet we continue trying to find fulfillment in anything but him. It’s the craziest thing, but exactly what we should expect if the Bible is true. We are born rebellious sinners whose natural inclination, like Adam and Eve, is to run away from him. He will never, however, let us find any kind of ultimate gratification in anything that excludes him. The very same thing we can enjoy with and through and because of him, will betray us without him. All sin, as Augustine said, is good perverted. In one of the greatest sentences ever penned, also by Augustine, he wrote in his Confessions:

You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

The irony of this statement is that in many cases, a la the Hound of Heaven, he has to hound us into finding that rest.

God’s Sovereign Salvific Plans in Sanctification
As I mentioned above, I’m a Calvinist, and have been so since February of 1985. It was pretty much an instant conversion because once I was introduced of God’s sovereignty in our salvation, not only did I start to see it everywhere in the Bible, I saw it everywhere in my life, specifically in God bringing me to saving faith. I knew in some sense it applied to my sanctification as well, that my inner transformation and growth in holiness was God’s work and responsibility, not mine. However, I didn’t quite understand my part in all this, that I am responsible to seek God and obey his law. I recently wrote a post on The Christian Life of Pursuit, how the Christian life is a verb, what we are commanded to do now that we are those who belong to God, his holy ones, set apart for service. Christianity is a doing religion flowing out of our being, who we are, who Christ saved us to be. An example of one verse among many is from 1 Peter 2:

24 He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.

All of this is, of course, God’s working in us, but it is still our work. Just because God is sovereign and in control of all things, doesn’t mean we are not responsible beings with agency whose choices really matter and have real consequences. This is what most Christians misunderstand about Calvinism, that because we affirm God’s sovereign control of all things, that means human beings are robots, that it is just a Christian form of determinism. It’s not. It is a mystery, how God can “control” someone and them still be free and accountable. Nonetheless, it’s true, a biblical reality from Genesis to Revelation. The sovereign power of Almighty God is an important piece of the Hound of Heaven catching those he’s after, his people, which brings us to the biggest theological hangup with Calvinism for most Christians, and to me the most obviously true—Jesus died for his people, not every human being who ever lived. He didn’t make salvation possible for all people, but made it actual for his people.

This means Jesus only died for them, what we call limited or definite atonement. This idea offends many Christians because they think it somehow not fair that God wouldn’t offer salvation to all people, and make it possible that they could believe in Jesus and be saved. God, however, is not obligated to be fair, whatever that means. If justice is what it means, then every human being should be justly condemned and damned. We’re born guilty, and nothing we can do will change that; the penalty must be paid. Over my decades as a Reformed Christian I accepted this, but I don’t think I fully understood the implications. Then at some point God opened my eyes to two verses that transformed my perspective on our sanctification in salvation. This first is part of the birth narrative in Matthew 1 where Joseph has a dream and an angel tells him what the name of Mary’s child is to be:

21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

I noticed two things. First, Jesus didn’t come to make salvation possible for all people, but actual for his people. In theological terms Paul calls this election; God chooses whom he will save. Then I saw that it wasn’t from sin in general, but the word Matthew uses is plural, sins. God in Christ didn’t just save us from the guilt and penalty of sin, something that was done with animals in the Old Covenant, but from the power of sin as well, something the blood of bulls and goats could never accomplish. Augustus Toplady in the classic him wrote about how Christ’s death provides the “double cure” for sin, saving us from both God’s wrath and also to make us pure. It’s as we say, a twofer. And because our sanctification is part of God’s sovereign plan in salvation, the Hound of Heaven will inevitably make us holy, more like Christ in the process, like it or not.

The other verse is from the Apostle Paul, I Corinthians 1:30:

It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, sanctification and redemption.

It’s a package deal! Back in 2012 I had been going through a bit of a dry time in my faith, partly because I forgot that the Christian life is one of pursuit. So one day I decided no matter how rotten I felt, I would read the Bible and pray every morning, and that I have done ever since. In due course I discovered it made all the difference, and at some point God opened my eyes to this verse. I realized, not only was my justification not up to me, but either was my sanctification. I of course was and am involved in both, but both are the ultimate responsibility of God, the Hound of Heaven. The one part of this we will not be involved in is our redemption, our resurrection because we will be dead. But from the moment we are raised spiritually from the dead in our justification, God works throughout our lives to make us increasingly holy, set apart for good works unto him. As Paul says in Ephesians 2, salvation is the gift of God, and that includes sanctification, as he says:

10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

How does this happen? God.

The Transformation is God’s Work
The first Reformed theology I read not long after my “conversion” was Charle’s Hodge’s Systematic Theology. I’ll never forget the simple sentence for his definition of Christianity: “The work of God in the soul of man.” For much of my Christian life I thought my sanctification was a matter of my willing it. If I just tried hard enough I could overcome my sin, but I found that my experience was much like the Apostle Paul’s as he describes it in Romans 7:

14 For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. 15 For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

Yet as he discusses the law and the sin dwelling in him, he declares something I felt many times:

24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

I often felt nobody could deliver me, including God, but the answer that frees us from despair and will deliver us is obvious:

25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Some commentators think Paul’s description of his struggle with sin is prior to his becoming a Christian, but I don’t think it is. Even after we come to Christ, sin still lives in us, in our flesh as Paul calls it, the body of death we are stuck with in this fallen world. Because of this we can understand why the first of Martin Luther’s 95 Thesis had to do with daily repentance:

Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said “Repent”, willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.

Somewhere along the way on my journey from 2012 when I learned this, I started to begin every morning prayer repenting of my sin, following it with prayers of thanksgiving. The struggle still exists and always will while we live in this body of death, but now we realize our sanctification is as much the work of Christ as is our justification. This truth is why Paul follows the chapter of our struggle with sin with the assurance of forgiveness and the possibility of transformation in chapter 8:

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. 3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. 5 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. 6 For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.

I realized I can’t change myself, but God in Christ can change me. That does, however, require something on my part. It is within our power to abide in the true vine (John 15) that we might bear much fruit. So, knowing I was too weak and pathetic with little will power, focused on what I knew I could do. Initially, my prayers were inspired by Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in Luke 18: “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.” I figured like the tax collector I could beat my breast and say that. In due course my process every morning became reading God’s word, which along the way also started to include Scripture memory, then prayers of repentance, thanksgiving, and supplication.

At some point I realized that any real, substantial change and transformation of who I am was the supernatural work of God in my soul because of the work of Christ. I still had choices to make, the most important being to ask, seek, and knock, that I might receive, find, and the door opened to me. Then obey in whatever feeble way I could and trust God for the inner transformation to make me want to obey. It is important to understand the power and the beauty of the gospel isn’t that God in Christ just changes our actions, but that he changes our desires and affections and abilities. The inner transformation required to live the Christian life, what we call sanctification, is every bit as up to him as is our being born again in the first place. As Paul says in Philippians 1:

6 being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

The good work he began in us and will continue in our sanctification is just as supernatural as when we were raised spiritually from the dead to eternal life. I love my 1978 NIV translation of Romans 4:17 as it relates to our sanctification and transformation. Speaking of Abraham he says:

He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed—the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.

He literally call things that have no existence into existence, like this universe and us in it. If he has the power to do that, our paltry little sin problem is nothing for him. That’s why Paul’s declaration of deliverance is so exuberant: Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!