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!

 

 

 

 

The Christian Life of Pursuit

The Christian Life of Pursuit

Apr 8, 2026 | Theology

Being a Christian is not just an ontological state, meaning what I am, my being, but also very much about what I do. It is the indicative, what God has done for us in Christ, and the imperative, what we must do. 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, which Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:17, is now a new creation. Jonathan Edwards said we don’t seek God and then find Him. Like Adam and Eve, by nature we run away, we hide. Rather, God saves us in his sovereign mercy and grace, and then the seeking begins, as I call it, the Christian life of pursuit.

We Protestants over the last several hundred years have developed a kind of Christianity where justification by faith in effect becomes the entirety of the gospel. When we use the word gospel, the good news, what we tend to mean is being made right with God, our sins paid for by Christ, and his righteousness being credited to us. Therefore, we now by faith have a relationship to God, and our alienation from him by our sin is laid aside. So far so good. But Christianity is far more than coming into a saving relationship with God through Christ. I imagine that sentence might raise a few eyebrows among faithful Evangelicals, but it’s true. One of the reasons Jesus uses the metaphor of salvation as being “born-again” is because when you’re born, you’re just starting life. You don’t stay a baby your whole life, physically or spiritually. In fact, the writer to the Hebrews rebukes Christians who think this way (Hebrews 5):

11 We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand. 12 In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! 13 Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. 14 But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.

The phrase the NIV translates as “you no longer try to understand” is also translated as “dull of hearing” or “too lazy to understand.” Lazy is the best translation of the Greek here, and it speaks exactly to what I’m talking about. Can we be honest? Most Christians are too lazy to do the hard work of growing into the maturity of the Christian faith. Or they are distracted by other things in life that appear more important, or as someone called it, “the tyranny of the urgent.” In the parable of the Sower, Jesus explains it this way (Matt. 13):

22 Now he who received seed among the thorns is he who hears the word, and the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and he becomes unfruitful.

Then he compares it to the seed that bears fruit:

 23 But he who received seed on the good ground is he who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and produces: some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.”

The question is, how do we become the seed that bears fruit a hundredfold, and do we really want that. As I’ve discovered over my growing number of years, we always do what we want, what is important to us.

Making Our Calling and Election Sure
The inspiration for this post, and its title, came from a sermon I recently heard on 2 Peter 1, which is Peter’s answer to that question. To alter a line from The Princess Bride that applies to the Christian life: We are men of action; laziness does not become us. This of course applies to women too. In other words, we do not take our relationship to God for granted, just has a husband or wife or parent should never take their relationships for granted. Great relationships take work, effort, and sacrifice. The wonderful thing about the Christian life is that we’re not on our own. The God who saved us has provided us everything we need in this divine life he has called us to. As Peter says,

3 His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. 4 Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.

Everything pretty much covers it all. But notice where these things are found, in our knowledge of him, of God, which is why every Christian is called to be a theologian, which means the study of God. Out of His love for us and His almighty power to do whatever he says, his faithfulness to those promises gives us the ability to live a holy life. In Christ we’ve already escaped the ugliness and misery that sin causes. We don’t have to live in the corruption and ugliness of sin. When we do sin, John tells us to confess our sin, name it, and that God “is faithful and just to forgive us our sin, and purify us from all unrighteousness.” It’s God’s job to do the cleansing, and our job to be obedient.

We must always remember, sin never delivers on its promises and lies every step of the way to destruction. Of course still being sinners our obedience will always be imperfect, but that is why the gospel includes both justification and sanctification, as Paul tells us in I Corinthians 1:30. But Peter tells us that in order to overcome our inclination to sin we have work to do, as he says, “make every effort”:

5 For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; 6 and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; 7 and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. 

I like Strong’s extended definition of that phrase: “properly, swiftness to show zealous diligence, i.e. one’s “best” (full effort by making haste).” We need to be like young Olympic athletes determined to be the best it is at what we do. We are called to moral virtue which we are compelled to because of our faith or trust in Christ, but it can’t stop there. If it does, it’s merely moralism that becomes legalism.

I find it interesting that Peter puts knowledge so high up in the list, it is that important. That means doing something people think they gave up in high school or college, study, and also something people are less inclined today in the age of the ubiquitous screen—read. Like books, with, of course, the foundational book being the Bible. But depending on our interests, reading books on history and philosophy and apologetics, how to defend our faith, biographies, current events, science, whatever. Remember, not only is the entire Bible, as Jesus said in Luke 24, about Christ, but so is everything in life. C.S. Lewis put it best as he always did:

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

Jesus himself is the unifying principle of all knowledge. As Paul tells us in Colossians 1, not only is Jesus “the image of the invisible God,” he created all things, and that “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

And finally, as we look at the other virtues we’re exhorted to act upon, it is all tied up in the perfect ribbon of love, that which is a perfect summation of all the law and the prophets, and the entire revelation of God in Christ. Jesus himself told us what is required to live a life worthy of him, to “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness,” and all the other needs of life will be added. God and his kingdom first, and then everything else will follow. Toward the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus piles on the verbs:

7 “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

All of this screams, do not take our relationship to God for granted! Everybody takes time for what is important to them. Let’s look at why we might take it for granted.

Antinomianism: Confusing Justification with Sanctification
The word antinomianism means anti-law, nomos in Greek, and it’s been a concept debated since the Reformation and the Protestant focus on salvation by grace alone through faith alone. There has been a tendency to downplay the law because we’ve been granted Christ’s righteousness in justification. Calvin explained a proper understanding of God’s law when he was the first to describe what he called the three uses of the law. The first use, the one most Christians are familiar with and accept, is the law as a mirror. It shows us our sin, and how ugly it is, and drives us to Christ. Because of our modern focus on the gospel, there is a tendency to do what the antinomians do, ignore the law. Supposedly we don’t need the law anymore because that’s part of the Old Covenant and not the New. We might conclude God’s law is no longer applicable to the Christian because of the gospel. As I heard a pastor once say, “The Ten Commandments are not your friend.” The law, supposedly, is our enemy because the only thing it can do is condemn us because we can never live up to its demands. It drives us to Christ who is our righteousness, and we’re done with it.

The problem with this perspective is that God’s law for the Christian is in fact now our friend. I’m currently reading a book on antinomianism by Mark Jones, and he states the confusion well:

Antinomians typically fail to make the distinction between what the law requires and what the gospel requires, and only focus on the former. Not surprisingly, they are flummoxed by so many passages in the Bible that seem to speak of the saints obeying god’s law “with their whole heart.”

Jones adds further that as the gospel has both the indicative and imperative in it, “the antithesis between the law and the gospel ends the moment someone becomes a Christian.” Law and gospel are no longer in contrast, no longer in tension.

The gospel in fact requires a holy life as we see throughout the New Testament, and this passage from Peter is only one small example. Christian antinomians seem to forget that our relationship to the law in Christ has completely changed because the law is no longer written on tablets of stone but written on our hearts. As the Lord tells us Jeremiah 31:

33 “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
    after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
    and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
    and they will be my people.
34 No longer will they teach their neighbor,
    or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
    from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
    and will remember their sins no more.”

For Christians, the law is no longer there merely to condemn us because we often come up short, but rather it is now there for our sanctification, to help us to become holy. When we are saved, reconciled to our God, transformed from God’s hated enemy to beloved children, we want to obey the His law, we long to be obedient, even as difficult as that can sometimes be given the sin that remains in us. We can now say with the Psalmist in Psalm 119:

97 Oh, how I love your law!
    I meditate on it all day long.

This, for Calvin, is the third use of the law, our sanctification, the second being to restrain evil in society. As he says in the Institutes:

The third, and principal use, which pertains more closely to the proper use of the law, finds its place among believers in whose hearts the Spirit of God already lives and reigns.

The law being a reflection and extension of God’s character and being, was never meant to be our enemy, even has God himself was never meant to be our enemy. Now redeemed and renewed, the law is our friend, our guide, our north star, meant to bless us in our obedience which God Himself makes possible by the power of the Holy Spirit within us.

As I said above, there is a tendency to confuse justification with sanctification. We, in effect, equate the gospel with our getting right with God, being born-again, justified by Christ’s righteousness being imputed to us, but that’s only the start of the gospel in our lives, the good news. Transformation is also good news, and that too is, in Paul’s favorite phrase, in Christ. He tells us in I Corinthians 1:30:

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. 

What Christ accomplished in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension, not only freed us from the guilt of sin, but also from its power. In the same year America declared independence from England, 1776, Augustus Toplady wrote the beloved hymn Rock of Ages about our independence from sin in Christ, from the guilt and power of sin. The first stanza says it beautifully:

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee;
Let the water and the blood,
From Thy riven side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure,
Save me from its guilt and power.

 

 

 

A Protestant Take on the Catholic Faith

A Protestant Take on the Catholic Faith

Feb 18, 2026 | Theology

I’ve been a Christian north of 47(!) years now. That’s insane. There was a time I couldn’t conceive of ever being 47 years old; now 47 is receding in the rear view mirror. I was born-again in the heyday of the Jesus Revolution late 1970s, and as the Grateful Dead also in the 1970s sang, what a long strange trip it’s been. I’ve found as I’ve gotten older that in many ways I’ve become more Catholic than Protestant in my basic understanding of the nature of things. Mind you, I could never embrace Catholic theology given I’m a convinced Reformed Christian in the Presbyterian tradition, but I think I’ve grown increasingly more Catholic than Protestant in my perspective on things, as I’m going to attempt to explain in this post. 

Coming from an Italian heritage I grew up Catholic, but firmly rejected it when I was introduced to the Evangelical faith my first semester in college. In fact, I became vehemently anti-Catholic for a period of time because they never told me I could be assured of salvation and have eternal life, not wonder if I did. For example, When I was introduced to Romans 10 the night I prayed the Sinner’s Prayer, I was blown away:

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. 

I will? I didn’t know this as a Catholic, and one of my big fears was going to hell when I die; maybe that’s a Catholic thing. I was also early on introduced to this passage in 1 John 5:

11 And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. 12 He who has the Son has life; He who does not have the Son of God does not have life. 13 I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life. 

I can know this? Really? When I realized the Catholic Church had never told me this, it ticked me off. Of course it horrified my mother and father. My mother is still convinced that I had gotten involved in a cult, but I keep telling her that no, I was just a young know-it-all teenager who had no idea what life was all about.

Eventually I lost my animus toward Catholicism as I got to know about the many solid Catholics I highly respected in the conservative movement. These people were not stupid or ignorant. Eventually I came to accept that they simply came to different conclusions with the information and facts presented to them. I also was able to learn more about Catholic theology, and I discovered it was far more nuanced than I realized in my know-it-all ignorance. There is much I disagree with, but they are not as far away from what I believe as I initially thought.

It’s far too complicated to explain, and I don’t know enough to really do that, but I’ve concluded that no, Catholics don’t believe their works will save them, that in effect obedience to the law will earn them God’s favor. Some Protestant Catholic haters will declare that, but it’s a caricature. They too believed we are saved by God’s grace alone, and Christ’s merits, only that it’s applied in and through our lives differently than we Protestants understand it. Most importantly, they are passionate about standing for the ancient creeds that declare the historic orthodox Christian faith. For me, as long as someone can proclaim the Apostles or Nicene Creed, we’re brothers or sisters in Christ regardless of their other theological convictions.

What exactly is it about my perspective on things that has become more Catholic? The nature of salvation is one, and the nature of reality is the other. I may be going out on some thin ice, but I’m confident it’s much thicker than it first appears.

The Difference Between a Proposition and Trust
Protestants are a people of the Book, of words, of propositions. Our Reformation, our break from the Roman Catholic Church, was declared by the five Solas, one being Sola Scriptura, Scripture alone as our ultimate source of authority. Catholics, on the other hand, are people of the Church and the sacraments, of grace infused, not merely accepted rationally. Scripture is but one piece of the puzzle for them, whereas for us it is the puzzle. That said, the Roman Catholic Church stands strongly on the inerrant, authoritative word of God. In fact, growing up a Catholic gave me an inherent respect for the Bible, so that when I was presented clearly with what it said, I believed it was in fact authoritative truth about the nature of reality, including how we are saved.

Which brings me the first of what I think are my more Catholic perspectives, salvation. As Evangelical Protestants, we believe in the primacy of propositions. If you believe in X, Y, and Z, you shall be saved. If you only believe in X and Y, and are not quite sure about Z, or ignorant of it, it’s iffy. If you only understand X and don’t get the others, you’re out! I don’t buy this anymore. I know this will send my Protestant brothers and sisters into a tizzy, but it shouldn’t. I came to believe a long time ago that there will be no theology test to get into heaven, or to receive our new resurrected bodies when Christ returns and death, the final enemy, is destroyed. As I became less dogmatic in my certitude about things, realizing I’m finite and in the cosmic scheme of things know pretty much next to nothing, I even told a friend we might get there and find out, to his horror, that the Roman Catholics were right!

As I came to have a more capacious understanding of salvation I never changed my basic theological convictions. I was a Calvinist then and I’m a Calvinist now. Only now, I don’t think everyone who disagrees with me is going to hell. In fact, I now believe anyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, even if they don’t quite understand what they are calling on. The opposite holds true as well. Someone can believe all the right things, have every proposition down and intellectually assent to them all, and still be headed for hell. Mere intellectual assent is not the basis of salvation, trust in a person is.

Which brings me to John 3, and Jesus analogizing the process of salvation from sin on the cross to Moses and the snake in the desert:

14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”

As modern, post-Enlightenment people, when we see the word believe we immediately think, one who intellectually assents to something. The Greek, however, doesn’t mean that at all. It doesn’t preclude it, but it only tells part of the story. The word means trust, to put your faith in something or someone. Of course one has to have some understanding of the object of our faith or trust, but we don’t have to fully understand it to believe, to trust, to entrust our self to it, him, or her. I can trust getting on an airplane without understanding anything about physics or aerodynamics. I simply believe, trust, that the plane will get me safely to my destination. We exercise faith, or trust, every single day of our lives in ways too many to count. It is the glue that hold families and societies together.

We read the story of the bronze snake in Numbers 21. As with much of what we read in our Bibles, it’s a bizarre story. The Israelites are in the desert on the way to the promised land and they are complaining. They figure, Moses brought them out into the desert to die. A rebellion ensues, and God sent venomous snakes into the camp as a judgment against them. They quickly realize the error of their ways, repent, and ask Moses to pray to the Lord for them. The Lord tells Moses to fashion a snake and put it on a poll, so that, “anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” I guess Moses melts some bronze, makes a snake, puts it up on a poll. “Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived.” They were to look up to an image, a symbol, of the thing that is killing them? How strange is that! You can imagine the people saying to themselves, that’s it, just look up and we’ll be healed? Did they understand anything about how or why it worked? Nothing. They just trusted Moses’ words, and were desperate enough that instead of looking down at the injury, they would look up and be healed.

Now Jesus tells us the cross and the salvation it brings is analogous to this. How much do we really need to understand the nature of soteriology, or the how and why of it all, to be saved? Most Christians could agree nobody understands 100 percent, but is 80 percent good enough? How about 60 percent? Forty or 20? For all of Christian history until the 19th century, not only were most people illiterate, few people outside of the church owned Bibles. Even after Guttenberg, Bibles were hugely expensive until mass printing in the 20th century. The vast majority of Christians heard it read and preached on Sundays. Most of these could likely not explain the intricacies of salvation and the gospel, but trusting Jesus to forgive them and give them eternal life, that they could understand.

All of this is why I believe my mother, for example, will be with Jesus when she dies. She couldn’t explain the gospel very well, and as a Catholic of 92 years of age, a personal relationship to God is an abstraction she has a hard time grasping, but I keep giving her hope that she just needs to trust in Jesus for what is often difficult to believe and understand, and she does as best she can. As I said, I’m convinced there will be no theology test to get through those pearly gates, which I why I always just encourage people to look to Jesus, and get to know him and his word if they at all can. Hopefully, the understanding will come along in due course.

Lastly, do we intellectually assent to something before we believe or trust? Or can the assenting to something as true come after trusting? A wonderful movie with Mark Whalberg about the life and faith of Father Stuart Long opened my eyes to how powerful the Catholic approach to faith and trust can be, as well as the testimony of Shia Labeouf in his interview with Bishop Barron. Neither of these men would have become Christians with an Evangelical, intellectual first approach. Rather, as those who had yet to believe, they were invited to participate in the sacraments, which in turn created faith in them as their understanding was illuminated by what stood behind those sacraments. To we Protestants, that’s all but heretical. Nope, you have to understand and accept before we’ll let you do any of this Christian stuff.

Now, on to the minor topic of the nature of reality.

Reality is a Lot Messier and More Complex Than We Think
This one is a bit harder to explain, or maybe a lot harder. An allusion to a hit movie might help. We live in the Matrix, in a world, a universe, of information and data so infinite in magnitude and complexity that it makes all the AI data centers and computing power in the world look like a child’s sandbox. We can take our blue pills and pretend what we see is what we get, reality obvious, right in front of us, or take the red pill and go down the rabbit hole. The Protestant mind tends to the more rational, logical, explainable, and I’ve found over the years the more I know, the more confounding reality becomes to me. Maybe it’s a more mystical take, a less buttoned down, I’ve got reality figured out take. Like I said, this isn’t easy to explain.

It seems to me Catholic thinkers, and the Catholic worldview in general, tend to see a more seamless connection between the eternal or heavenly non-material world, the Matrix, and our material world than Protestants do. This became especially true as conservative Protestant Christianity grew more Pietistic and tended toward a Gnostic dualism in their understanding of spiritual and material realities, upstairs and downstairs if you will. Catholics tend to see the world as more enchanted, more connected to that which is not of this world, which is why praying to saints is plausible to them and anathema to Protestants. They see the vail between the two worlds as more permeable, a water wall rather than a brick wall.

Regarding this, I heard Bishop Barron, I’m sure the Catholic thinker I respect most, explain praying to saints using Hebrews 12:1, that “we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses.” Building on chapter 11, the great Hall of Fame of faith, this cloud of those who have gone before us is not off on some other planet with an unbridgeable gap between us, but all around us, invisible to our five senses, but there all the same. I couldn’t buy his argument, but at least it was plausible given how Catholics perceive the world we live in. So no, I haven’t started praying to the saints, and after all, Scripture is clear, every Christian is a saint, a holy one set apart to God.

On an intellectual level, Catholics going back to Augustine through Aquinas and many others, have developed a much more robust and broad intellectual tradition trying to apply their Christian worldview to every nook and cranny of existence. I think they got much wrong, but they also God much right. Conservative Protestant Christianity, now called Evangelicalism, has been anti-intellectual for some two hundred years. Add to that anti-theological and ahistorical. In fact, historian Mark Noll, an Evangelical, wrote a best-selling book in 1995 called, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. I began to understand this in my early Christian walk through Frances Schaeffer, and learned more as I embraced Reformed Theology in my 24th year. The Reformed tradition is much more intellectually robust, but we’re a small portion of the greater Evangelical church.

Art is another area where a Catholic and Protestant worldview diverge because of The Matrix. The Reformation gave us iconoclasm, taking the Second Commandment against making images and bowing down to them and worshipping them as a commandment against making any kind of images. Catholic Christendom gave us the most amazing art and architecture the world has ever seen, and Protestantism rejected all of it. That’s why if you go into Evangelical churches there is no art, and of course, no statues. By contrast, if you go into Catholic churches it’s usually a visual feast, something that inspires the worshipping soul to connect with a different world to which the art points.

Having said all this, I’m no less a Reformed Calvinist than I’ve ever been, only that after well over four decades following Christ I’ve come to appreciate the Catholic Christianity that gave us birth. I came to realize a while ago that I can disagree with my Christian brothers and sisters theologically, and still see them among the great cloud of witnesses to our glorious Lord and Savior. To put it crassly, we are on the same team, and together we are doing our best to obey the Lord Jesus when he taught us to pray, Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

The Wide and Narrow Road Reconsidered

The Wide and Narrow Road Reconsidered

Jan 21, 2026 | Theology

If you’re not active on Twitter, you likely won’t know about the big blow up about Kirk Cameron that happened some weeks back. On his podcast he was having a conversation with his son about the topic of Hell. They questioned the concept of Eternal Conscious Torment (ETC), and Christian Twitter went nuts. Words like heretic and apostacy were thrown around like confetti at a New Year’s Eve celebration. The other option for conservative Christians who believe in hell but question or wonder about the eternality of conscience torment is annihilationism. At some point after God’s “judgement of the living and the dead,” these people will cease to exist, they will die, forever. So the punishment is eternal, forever, but the person is not consciously being punished in misery forever. They’re dead.

I have no desire to debate or explore the topic because I believe God is just, and whenever difficult issues arise in life, or death, I lean on Moses’ declaration in Deuteronomy 32:3 I will proclaim the name of the Lord.

3 I will proclaim the name of the Lord.
    Oh, praise the greatness of our God!
4 He is the Rock, his works are perfect,
    and all his ways are just.
A faithful God who does no wrong,
    upright and just is he.

That is the hill I live and die on, and to which I give my life, my fortune, such as it is, and my sacred honor.

One of the many comments about this was regarding the wide and narrow gate and road Jesus speaks about in Matthew 7:

13 “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. 14 But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

The person who commented was affirming that most people will go to hell and not be saved. For all of my Christian life until August of 2022 and my embrace of postmillennialism, I believed that too. From Jesus’ words it seems obvious this is the case. I’ll never forget hearing for the first time the idea that more people will be saved than damned to hell. It sounded so strange to me, but it sounded so right given everything I was learning about my newfound optimistic eschatology. I’ll get into that below, but first let’s see why a la Vizzini in The Princess Bride, I don’t think that passage means what you think it means.

The Context of Matthew 7 and Jesus’ Ministry
People forget that Jesus was a Jewish Messiah sent to “the lost sheep of Israel,” and not to anyone else. When a Canaanite woman came to Jesus to heal her daughter (Matt. 15), first he ignored her, then replied: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” Her response to Jesus’ rejection so impressed him that he healed her daughter. Here we see both dynamics in play. On the one hand he is telling us his first mission was to Jews only, but also confirming the Old Testament witness of the blessings of God extending to all peoples and nations. Jesus used the same phrase in Matthew 10 when he sent out the Twelve, “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. 6 Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel.” We get off track when we think Jesus’ words always apply equally and always to all people in all times. That is not the case.

We must remember that Jesus came in fulfillment of 2,000 years of redemptive history through the people of Israel. The promises and commandments while in some sense universal, were as Paul says about the gospel, “first to the Jew, then to the Gentile” (Rom. 1:16). As we know, he would always go to the synagogue first when he visited a city, and if they rejected him, which they often did, he would go to the Gentiles. Many Jews didn’t like that, at all. But God’s plan of salvation was never only to the Jews. It took a while for early Jewish Christians to figure this out. Even Peter had to see a vision from God and then be reminded, and even be rebuked by Paul, because he so easily forgot that it may have been the Jew first, but it was always also to the Gentile.

From the beginning, the blessings of salvation from sin were intended for Gentiles, as can be seen from God’s first calling of Abram in Genesis 12. He picked only one man on earth and said to him, “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you,” and this promise is reiterated two more times to Abraham, and then to Isaac and Jacob. In Genesis 46 and 49, the Lord tells us that his servant will be “a light to the Gentiles” (42:6 and 49:6), and the latter passage adds, “that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” The same word translated Gentiles in these verses is also used in the great Incarnation passage of Isaiah 9. We’re all familiar, in the elegant language of the King James Version, with verse 7:

6 For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

We’re generally not familiar with the verse that introduces the transforming life of this child, which talks about God now honoring “Galilee of the Gentiles.” As we know Jesus was from the Nazareth in the region of Galilee. Most translations, for some reason translate Gentiles as nations, but it’s the same Hebrew word as Isaiah uses the in the previous two verses. The point is that the Gentiles are part of God’s redemptive plans, but their salvation will only come through the Jews. In the metaphor Paul uses in Romans 11 of the olive tree, the Gentiles are the ones needing to be grafted in. In another conversation with a non-Jew, although not a Gentile, the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4), Jesus tells her that “salvation is from the Jews,” but because of that encounter with her, many of the Samaritans came to believe in him. Salvation is from the Jews, but not only for the Jews. It is for all peoples and nations.

When we come to the context of Matthew 7, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is speaking to Jews and for Jews. Yes, there are universal principles throughout, but he is communicating to Jews in a Jewish context because that’s why he came as their Messiah. They are the lost sheep he is going to find. Chapter 5 very much has a Jewish flavor as he directly discusses the law of Moses, the Ten Commandments and other laws from that period of their history. Chapter 6 is mostly universal, but in the last passage about worry he contrasts the Jews he is speaking to with the pagans. Chapter 7 again is more to the Jews because he speaks of false prophets and disciples, and it is here that we read of the wide gate and the broad road that leads to destruction.

Seeing how Jesus’ life and ministry played out, his declaration about the few definitely applied to the Jews. After his resurrection and just prior to Pentecost, there are only 120 among what Luke calls “the believers.” That means every other Jew in the Roman Empire did not believe in Jesus as their Messiah. You can’t get much smaller and narrower than that! The road to destruction for the Jews was indeed broad and many entered through that gate. Even after 40 years of the ministry of the Apostles at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70, Christian Jews were a tiny minority. Taking Jesus’ prediction about only a few finding life as applying to Gentiles cannot be inferred from this text. It may be true, but Jesus isn’t saying that here.

To me, whatever the nature of hell, and it exists, God would never allow Satan to win more souls to send there. No way, no how. I used to believe that He did allow that because I didn’t understand the context of Matthew 7.

The Redemptive Plan of God and His Mighty Saving Power
Many Christians, most I dare say, believe God is stingy with his mercy and grace. I’ve often heard Christians referred to as a remnant, a reference to the few Jews saved from Israel’s rebellion in the Old Testament. I get it, the world can be a horrific place, and if we do the math in our head solely based on appearances, and history up to this moment, Satan definitely has the lead. However, we’re not at the end of the story yet, and instead of judging by what we see, I suggest we go to God’s word to see what he says about the salvation Jesus accomplished for His people on the cross.

The first thing we notice is that multitudes will be saved, and in the word God used with Abram, be blessed. The Lord uses three images to give us a sense of the magnitude of His saving work as he communicates his covenant promise to His people: stars, dust, and sand. We read of stars in Genesis 15:

4 Then the word of the Lord came to him: “This man will not be your heir, but a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir.” 5 He took him outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”

And dust in Genesis 13:

16 I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring could be counted.

And after the Lord changes his name to Abraham and introduces him and his household to circumcision, he adds sand (Gen. 22):

17 I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, 18 and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.”

The Lord reiterates his multiplication promise to his son and grandson. To Isaac he says (Gen. 26):

4 I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and will give them all these lands, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed.

And then to Jacob (Gen. 28):

14 Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring.

And He further clarifies the nature of these peoples (Gen. 35):

11 And God said to him, “I am God Almighty; be fruitful and increase in number. A nation and a community of nations will come from you, and kings will be among your descendants.

We can’t necessarily infer a majority from these passages, but images of stars, dust, and sand don’t exactly bring to mind God as a grinch miserly with his saving grace. Why do I, and specifically we postmillennialists, believe God will in fact save more people than he allows to be lost? Because the word that best describes God’s redemptive plans on earth is what his mighty saving power is accomplishing—victory.

An Eschatology of Victory
That is the title of a book by J. Marcellus Kik I read in the early days after my embrace of postmillennialism. I found this new theological journey I had embarked on after almost 44 years as a Christian changed not only my perspective on “end times,” but on everything. In 2024 I had the privilege of being invited to do a podcast on a YouTube channel called Eschatology Matters, which says it perfectly. What we think about “end times” shades our perspective on everything in life—past, present, and future. Eschatology, the study of end things, does indeed matter, a lot.

Prior to this shift, not only did I think more people would be lost than saved, but I believed the devil had the upper hand “down here” in this fallen world. When I was born again in the Late Great Planet Earth late 70s, I naturally embraced the dispensationalism that was everywhere at the time. Rapture theology was common. Things were getting worse, and Jesus was coming back soon. Not exactly an “eschatology of victory.” After I got burned out on such “newspaper eschatology,” I became an eschatological agnostic, what I came to call pan-millennialism because everything will pan out in the end. The Bible, or so I thought, doesn’t give us clear guidance on “end times,” so why worry about it. By the way, I put that phrase in quotes because it became dominant in the 70s to refer to what happens at the end of time, to the end of the world as we know it, as the end times. The 90s into the 2000s had the Left Behind phenomenon, so “end times” became even more engrained in the culture.

I’m generally not a negative or pessimistic person, so for most of my pan-mill life I believed we could change the world for the better, and even though I thought the devil would win on earth, Jesus would come back to save the day and usher us into eternity. As the creed says, “He will come again to judge the living and the dead.” When I embraced amillennialism in 2014 because I learned the Bible does indeed say something about eschatology, I found that it turned me into a pessimist. Either I learned or came to believe that sin and man’s rebellion were a more powerful force in a fallen world that I mistakenly believed belonged to Satan. In August of 2022 I started to understand just how wrong I had been. On this earth, in this fallen world, the gospel declares in the words of another book I read early on, Victory in Jesus. This one by Greg Bahnsen, and the subtitle says well the nature of this new eschatological perspective I now have: The Bright Hope of Postmillennialism.

I had for decades believed postmillennialism was a secular distortion of the biblical record, turning it into a belief in unending human progress, and specifically because of man’s efforts. It had nothing to do, or so I thought, with the gospel. Given the track record of us humans over the millennia, I considered it unworthy of even considering, a joke. What really surprised me was that it only took me listening to a YouTube video on a walk one Saturday afternoon to convince me it was likely true, that I had been wrong all these years, pre, pan, or a-mill.

My objective here isn’t to convince anyone of my now optimistic eschatological convictions, but to convey that how we interpret something like Jesus talking about wide and narrow gates is not only determined by the context as I argued above, but also by our eschatology, even if we don’t think we have one. We do!

 

 

The Dominion Mandate for Today

The Dominion Mandate for Today

Jan 14, 2026 | Theology

For most of my Christian life the Dominion Mandate was not something I gave any serious thought to. For me what counted was what some call the Cultural Mandate. From early in my Christian life, I always thought we should bring our Christian worldview and thinking to bear upon all of life, but that didn’t have anything to do with “dominion,” or so I thought. Both of these mandates come from the same place, Genesis 1, but they are two different perspectives based on two different theological understandings of the church’s role in the world. For those focused on it as a cultural endeavor, it is primarily an intellectual exercise of applying a Christian perspective to the world and what we do in it. Dominion, on the other hand, implies rule and authority, not just influence. it’s taking over, becoming the boss, so to speak.

There is a third option where neither culture nor dominion is relevant, and that is the basic Pietistic Christianity of the vast majority of Evangelical Christians. For most Christians their faith is primarily a personal affair with little relevance to the wider world. I’m not talking about being personally pious, but a movement in 17th century Germany as a reaction to a dry scholastic form of Christianity. Eventually through the two Great Awakenings, revivalism, and fundamentalism, by the mid-20th century Evangelical Christianity became culturally irrelevant. Christianity was now about personal spirituality, and cultural or societal transformation was beside the point. Plus the world would get increasingly worse and Jesus would come back soon to consummate all things. This is slowly changing, but it still dominates the church. What I’m talking about here is a completely different orientation for the Christian life.

I was inspired to write this because of a book I’m reading by a new friend of mine, David Bostrom, Get Dominion: You’ve Been Called to Fulfill a Mission. The paradigm shift from a personal, Pietistic Christianity to a dominion mindset is dramatic. As I discovered, it can also be dramatically different from a worldview, cultural influence perspective. I like David’s definition of dominion: “to fulfill a mission,” a mission to accomplish. Speaking of which, the movies, and the old TV show, Mission Impossible, give us some sense of the momentous task before us. When he was given a mission, Peter Graves would listen to a small reel-to-reel tape recorder which would self-destruct after it explained the mission. He was told, “You’re mission, Jim, should you decided to accept it . . . .” and then the tape would self-destruct in five seconds. Finally, he was wished good luck. We don’t need luck! We have a mandate from the Living Creator God, Christ having redeemed the world and taken it back from Satan, and the Holy Spirit living in and through us to transform creation as Adam and Eve were supposed to do. Most importantly, the Dominion Mandate is theologically grounded in the ascension of Christ now sitting at the right hand of God “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come” (Eph. 1).

What Exactly is the Dominion Mandate?
The Dominion Mandate comes from the charge God gave Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 1.

26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

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.”

This is the NIV translation which uses the word rule, as do most modern translations. The term dominion mandate comes from the King James which translates rule as “dominion over.” According to Strong’s, the word means, “make to have dominion, prevail against, reign, bear; to tread down, i.e. Subjugate.” Like I said, become the boss.

For most of my Christian life I didn’t think this mandate to rule, to “have dominion over” applied to Christians; it fell after the fall, never to rise again until the second coming. This is because like most Christians I tended to over spiritualize my faith, even as a worldview Christian. Basically I thought the world belonged to the devil, and only at Christ’s second coming would he take it back. I was wrong. In fact, Christ came at his first coming to take the world back. He began an inch by inch, step by step, brick by brick process of transforming the world by extending his reign over it, and advancing his kingdom in it. Both John the Baptist and Jesus said the exact same thing as they were declaring his coming ministry: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” At his death, resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost, it fully came. His life on earth was the foundation upon which his kingdom would be built, and his church, his body, would carry out his reign throughout the earth, just as we’ve seen over these last two thousand years.

But that doesn’t get to the question of exactly what this mandate is, how it works, how we are involved. David in his book does a great job of making it practical for every one of us, and it is for all Christians. When we trust Christ, our salvation from sin doesn’t just reconcile us to God, but it gives us a mission to fulfill on this earth, to “have dominion over” it. Because of the rise of both secularism and Pietism, people today are adrift in the world. They are looking for meaning, hope, and purpose, but are stuck as Henry David Thoreau said, leading “lives of quiet desperation.” As Christians that shouldn’t be us! Not only has Christ given us a holiness mandate, but a dominion mandate in his creation as well. Here is how David begins his introduction:

Are you having a hard time figuring out where you fit in this world? Are you frustrated because your efforts don’t seem to have a significance you think they ought to have? Do you know deep down there’s more to life than what you’re experiencing, but can’t seem to get a handle on what it is? Does a lack of meaning or vision for your life make you feel like you’re dying inside?

It doesn’t have to be this way because Jesus imbues everything we do in this material world with spiritual significance.

The Priesthood of All Believers
In the Middle Ages prior to the Reformation, there was a stark societal dualism between the clerical class and the laity, what Martin Luther called the “temporal” and “spiritual” orders. The religious professionals, priest, monks, nuns, etc., did the spiritual stuff, and everyone else just survived and did their spiritual stuff on Sundays and holy-days. Martin Luther changed all that. The Reformation he unwittingly started began a transformation of the lives of everyday, average people, and ended up transforming the world. The dominion mandate for the most part had been lost, and now was found. We need to find it again.

In his Address to the Nobility of the German Nation (1520), Luther criticized the traditional distinction between the two orders—the laity and the clergy— and he puts his argument this way:

It has been devised that the Pope, bishops, priests, and monks are called the spiritual estate, princes, lords, artificers, and peasants are the temporal estate. This is an artful lie and hypocritical device, but let no one be made afraid by it, and that for this reason: that all Christians are truly of the spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them, save of office alone.

The Apostle Peter agrees:

9 But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.

In other words, there is no difference between the religious professionals and everyone else, except the calling we’ve received from God and how we serve others. Luther says it beautifully:

A cobbler, a smith, a peasant, every man, has the office and function of his calling, and yet all alike are consecrated priests and bishops, and every man should by his office or function be useful and beneficial to the rest, so that various kinds of work may all be united for the furtherance of body and soul, just as the members of the body all serve one another.

In our current day this could be expressed as, “A plumber, a doctor, a lawyer, a builder, a homemaker, has the office and function of his or her calling, and yet all alike are consecrated priests and bishops . . . “ In 1520 this was insane. No wonder the church and the government of the Holy Roman Empire wanted him dead. This would turn the world upside down! Just like the Apostle did.

Most of us in the daily grind have difficulty perceiving what we do as a “spiritual estate” of any eternal value. Part of the reason is that we have reverted to a Middle Ages mindset before Luther’s Nobility address, mainly because of the Lutherans who came in the century following his death who developed the Pietism I referred to above. Building a house, or selling a product, or fixing a car, doesn’t seem “spiritual” to us, but everything human beings saved by Christ do is spiritual! Everything we do, every single thing, is done unto the Lord (Col. 3:23). Paul puts it this way in I Corinthians 15:58 in a verse I used to read dualistically:

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

Certainly my work as a carpenter, or sales guy (what I do five days a week), or nurse, or trash collector, or you name it, is not “labor in the Lord,” right? The labor that will last forever are things like evangelism, or prayer, or Bible reading, or church, or fellowship with other Christians, but surely not grubby old work. Nope, it’s all spiritual, all labor in the Lord, and none of it is in vain. The reason is the Dominion Mandate tied to the life, death, resurrection, ascension of Christ, and Pentecost.

The Fall to the Ascension, Pentecost, and Dominion
Lastly, let’s see how the spiritual significance of everything we do is rooted in Christ’s mission on earth, and how that connects to the Dominion Mandate. At creation, Adam and Eve had everything they needed to fulfill the mandate the Lord had given them, but at some point Adam allowed Satan to slither his way into the garden as a serpent, and he broke it into a million pieces. Christ came to accomplish what Adam couldn’t. Two thousand years later and a very lot of water under the bridge, God became a man because as he says through Isaiah (63:5):

I looked, but there was no one to help, I was appalled that no one gave support; so my own arm achieved salvation for me, and my own wrath sustained me.

I write this in the season of Advent in which we celebrate the incarnation, God the Son coming down from heaven, born of a woman, becoming man, to be “pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities.” In that prophecy from Isaiah 53, we’re told that although “he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth,”

10 Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days,
and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand

In other words, because of what Christ accomplished, the Dominion Mandate can now be fulfilled. We are his offspring, and because of his accomplishment, his obedience unto death, the Lord’s will for us to rule, to have dominion, will prosper in his hand. Dominion is not our work, but the Lord’s will working through us.

Most importantly, is what the ascension means for us, his people on earth, those he left behind to fulfill his mission, and to take dominion over the earth. Before Christ ascended to heaven, he told his disciples (Matt. 28) that “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go . . . .” Paul tells us in Ephesians 1 that when Christ was seated at God’s right hand in the heavenly realms, he had achieved a position “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.” This authority is what gives the Dominion Mandate its power. Christ ascended that he might send his Holy Spirit at Pentecost that he might be with us always, to the very end of the age (Matt. 28:20)

What the ascension enabled was God the Holy Spirit acting through His people to do and accomplish significant things for the advance of God’s kingdom on earth. But what cements this concept in the heart of God’s people is what Paul says a little later in Ephesians about our own spiritual resurrection from the dead (Eph. 2):

4 But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. 6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7 in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.

Think about that. We are seated with him, meaning we partake of his authority in this age, and in the age to come! When we’re trying to hammer the 2×4 on the frame of that house, it’s not just a hammer and nail and a piece of wood—it’s us in Christ taking dominion! Serving that customer? We’re taking dominion!

The ancient world became the modern world because of Jesus enabling his people, his body on earth, to accomplish what Adam could not. This has profound spiritual and material implications because these are one and the same. Whatever God accomplished spiritually for His people as he reconciled them to Himself in Christ, will always have material implications. Rejecting any kind of false dualism, we need to be about fulfilling the mission we were given when we placed our trust in Christ. Everything we do is imbued with profound eternal meaning and purpose and hope. As Jesus said in John 10:10:

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

 

 

The Miracles of Jesus and their Meaning

The Miracles of Jesus and their Meaning

Dec 31, 2025 | Parents and Family, Theology

I was inspired to write this post because of an unpleasant Twitter interlocutor who claimed to know things about me from one sentence I wrote in a comment: “Jesus’ healing ministry was a metaphor for spiritual reality.” He came back in so many words with, why do you hate Jews? What? He used the word “literal” a number of times as if my statement somehow implied I didn’t believe Jesus physically, “literally” healed Jews. Not too many responses in and it was clear he was not interested in a conversation. Such is part of the downside of social media and interacting with sinful human beings, but alas I get to flesh out here what I did in fact mean, and why I think it’s important.

As a Reformed Christian I embrace the doctrines of grace, which refers to a Calvinist understanding of how God saves sinners. Man is unable to save himself because he is dead in his sin, not merely sick or crippled, but on the bottom of the pool dead. That was the metaphor I was presented the first time I was introduced to Calvinism. For my young Christian life up to that point, over six years, I believed all people had the ability to decide to believe in and follow Christ. Jesus died for everyone, and those who choose him will be saved. Instead of being at the bottom of the pool, dead, they were flailing around in the water yelling for help. Jesus was the life preserver, and anyone is free to grab it, or not. I remember thinking, Calvinism is upside down from how I had conceived the Christian faith, but it made sense logically; more importantly, it made sense biblically. I went home and reading the Bible I saw it everywhere, thinking, how could I have missed this?

You might already see where I’m going with this. If someone is blind, he can’t make himself see. Only Jesus can do that. Deaf, lame, or crippled? Only God can heal that. Not to mention literally (there’s the word) bringing someone back from the dead, which included Lazarus and Jairus’s daughter. All these healings, and almost all of them were Jews, point beyond the healings, to a much more important spiritual healing to come. First, Jesus didn’t heal people to show off his power, but as evidence of his authority to fulfill God’s covenant promise to save His people from their sins (Matt. 1:21). Jews were expecting a different Messiah than Jesus turned out to be, which is why he could never have been made up by Jews. They were looking for a Davidic king who would finally end their oppression, the Romans only the latest of their tormentors. What Jesus the Messiah came to bring was a transformation in spiritual reality by paying the ultimate price for sin that would eventually transform this material world.

The Material Implications of Jesus’ Healing Ministry
Using the word “spiritual” in the modern church context is a problem because of Pietism. I used that word with my unpleasant interlocutor, and he went on a rant that I was against being pious, or against a personal, experiential relationship with God through Christ in devotional Bible reading, prayer, and worship. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve never been as emotionally invested in my faith as I am now. What I do mean by Pietism is the 17th century German Lutheran movement that developed in response to a dry, overly intellectual approach to the faith called scholasticism. Through the First Great Awakening, Wesley, the Second Great Awakening, Revivalism, and fundamentalism, Pietism came to dominate the modern Evangelical church.

As a result, the word “spiritual” came to mean other worldly, heavenly, non-material. The word that best describes this state of mind is dualism, an upstairs/downstairs reality. Upstairs is the important, “spiritual” stuff, Bible reading, prayer, evangelism, worship, downstairs the not so important, mundane, material stuff like work and politics and cultural pursuits. My interlocutor was stuck in his dualistic perspective on spirituality, so when I wrote “spiritual” he interpreted it as having nothing to do with downstairs, physical, “literal” reality. In fact, biblical speaking, the “spiritual” has everything to do with the “material.” There is no dualism separating them in a biblical view of the world. This is why it’s good to immerse ourselves in the Old Testament because the Hebrews, then Jews, were a deeply this material world oriented people, and they saw salvation as connected to material reality. To them, spiritual meant material, and material meant spiritual. It was the Greeks who brought us dualism, and eventually that made its way into Christianity over many centuries.

Now that we have definitions out of the way, what exactly do I mean by these “material implications”? This is a paradigm shift for most Christians, so stick with me.

We’re familiar with the story in Luke 5 about the paralyzed man who is lowered through the roof because his friends were desperate to get him healed by Jesus. When God put in Scripture He had to have Hollywood in mind, it is that dramatic. Luke tells us:

19 When they could not find a way to do this because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and lowered him on his mat through the tiles into the middle of the crowd, right in front of Jesus.

The crowd must have been enormous. Luke says that people had come from “every village of Galilee and from Judea and Jerusalem.” The news of the power Jesus had to heal had gone far and wide, and now the show was ready to begin. What does Jesus do? The unexpected, of course:

20 When Jesus saw their faith, he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.”

What? I can imagine the people thinking, “What in the world does that have to do with healing a crippled man?” The Pharisees and teachers of the law were horrified because they rightly thought, “Only God can forgive sin.” To them Jesus was blaspheming. Then Jesus asks a question nobody could have made up, except Jesus of Nazareth:

23 Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’?

This is almost funny because it’s easy to say either one. The issue is, can you pull it off, whether you have the authority and power to do these things. Here is where we see an example of the material implications of a spiritual reality. So Jesus tells them:

24 But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So he said to the paralyzed man, “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.” 25 Immediately he stood up in front of them, took what he had been lying on and went home praising God. 26 Everyone was amazed and gave praise to God. They were filled with awe and said, “We have seen remarkable things today.”

If you’ve ever seen Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth, the 1977 miniseries, he portrays this episode masterfully. Nobody, most especially no Jews, could conceive of a Messiah who would have the authority to forgive sin. If he could, he would be God! Exactly. Jesus proved his authority to forgive sins by overcoming one of the consequences of the fall, disease of the human body.

Metaphorically, then, Jesus healing disease points to a powerful spiritual reality of the transformation of this fallen, sinful world, and a pushing back against the material effects of the fall. Contrary to what our Charismatic and Pentecostal brothers and sisters might believe, Jesus and the Apostles were not telling us that supernatural healing would be the common, normal way people would be healed. Rather, it would be the result of the permeating of the good news of the gospel into the dark, fallen world. The two parables that speak most directly to this are the parables of the mustard seed and leaven in Matthew 13. Jesus prefaces the parables with, “The kingdom of heaven is like . . .” The scope and extent of the spreading of gospel influence, i.e., God’s kingdom, will ultimately affect every square inch of reality like leaven or yeast through a batch of dough. The question is what this spiritual-material influence looks like.

The Christian Transformation of the World
We have to go back to the very beginning when God gave Adam and Eve the dominion mandate to rule God’s creation, to fill the earth and subdue it. When they rebelled, sin and death enter the world, and Satan took control of God’s creation. God’s plan was to take it back, and he promised the seed of the woman would strike or crush the serpent’s head. Then God in Genesis 12 promises Abram that “all peoples on earth would be blessed through” him. The word blessed is used some 65 times in Genesis because the whole point of redemptive history is for God to bless his creatures and his creation, to bestow his favor upon it, and not in dualistic “spiritual” terms, but in every way human beings interact with material reality. Look around you. Open your eyes. What do you see? Blessings!

One way I define blessing is with the idea of empowerment. When God blesses people He empowers, He enables, them to do a wide variety of things, to flourish. We easily see the blessings of “spiritual” flourishing in personal terms, in our own relationship to God, forgiven, loved unconditionally, living in harmony with others, but not so much in material terms, those we easily take for granted. Try to imagine living in a world without electricity. You can’t! Electricity empowers us to control our environment so we can live in a swamp like Florida or a desert like Arizona. Try counting the modern amenities electricity makes possible, and you would be at it for a while. Blessings! Prior to the late 19th century people couldn’t conceive of any of them. Petroleum used to be a nuisance in the ground, and the knowledge gained from science and technology has enabled us to transform civilization with it.

We would go on, but the material flourishing we live with every day is the spiritual reality of God’s covenant promise expressing itself in materially significant ways. In other words, what God promised Abram, and then confirmed consistently throughout redemptive history, and fulfilled in Christ, we’re experiencing right now in material blessing. That is spiritual! It is the result of what Christ accomplished on the cross. The Lord through Moses in Deuteronomy 8 tells is:

18 But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your ancestors, as it is today.

One of the reasons Jewish people have been materially successful wherever they’ve lived throughout the millennia is because wealth isn’t merely a material thing to them, but a sign of God’s covenant faithfulness to them, a result of God having established a relationship with them. This mentality got into the Jewish DNA so that even secular Jews have some kind of residual blessing effect in what they accomplish.

My last post was on developing an attitude of gratitude, and in it I compare life in the modern world to what it was like in the ancient world so we get a graphic picture of the profound blessings we have all around us and live with every day. I won’t repeat all that, but in the first century before science and technology and modern medicine, and the explosion of knowledge in the last two hundred years, life was extremely hard. English philosopher Thomas Hobbs describing life in his own time more than 1500 years later as living in “continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In the ancient world even more so. Life was terribly difficult until the 20th century, but in the ancient world it was positively brutal. Because of God’s promises to Abram and the Patriarchs it is so no longer.

What I’m trying to say is that when Jesus died on the cross, was buried, rose three days later, ascended to heaven and sent his Holy Spirit at Pentecost, material wealth and prosperity have been one of the many blessings of his saving work. We’re so caught up in that Pietistic and dualistic mentality that we limit Christ’s saving work to our own personal salvation from sin and personal holiness, but not saving the material world from the horrible effects of sin. Jesus has enabled us, his body, by the power of the Holy Spirit to fulfill the dominion mandate Adam could not. I’ve often referenced and quoted Tom Holland’s book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World here and in my books, and if you haven’t read it, it’s well worth the effort. He says in the preface:

So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that is has come to be hidden from view.

And this transformation from ancient and brutal to modern and civilized and wealthy is not merely from the ideas of Christianity, but from Christ defeating the devil and sin and death on the cross! Salvation from sin is not merely personal or relational or just for the church but for the entire world. As Isaac Watts says in his great Christmas hymn, Joy to the World, “He comes to make His blessings flow Far as the curse is found.”

I know how counter intuitive this is to most Christians today because our conception of “spiritual” is so other worldly. But God so loved this world that he gave his only begotten son for it. One day it will be fully transformed when Christ returns and sin and death are finally destroyed, but God began the transformation at Christ’s first coming, and it’s been slowly happening ever since, and will until he has put all his enemies under Christ’s feet (I Cor. 15:25).

One of my favorite passages pointing to Christ’s transformational power accomplished in the gospel is Isaiah 65. I used to think it applied only when he returns and transforms all things ultimately. This verse seemed to confirm that:

17 “See, I will create
new heavens and a new earth.
The former things will not be remembered,
nor will they come to mind.

How could this not be at his second coming? Now I realize given the rest of the passage, this is describing what is happening because of this first coming, his first Advent. It’s a metaphorical description of what Christ came to accomplish, and will be literal as well when he returns. Think about it. Can you even imagine a world without the gospel, without Christianity, without the multitudes of transformations, personal and societal, it brought? No! You can’t.

It’s clear from the rest of the passage this can only refer to our current fallen world where sin’s effects still exist, including death:

“Never again will there be in it
an infant who lives but a few days,
or an old man who does not live out his years;
the one who dies at a hundred
will be thought a mere child;
the one who fails to reach a hundred
will be considered accursed.
21 They will build houses and dwell in them;
they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
22 No longer will they build houses and others live in them,
or plant and others eat.
For as the days of a tree,
so will be the days of my people;
my chosen ones will long enjoy
the work of their hands.
23 They will not labor in vain,
nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune;
for they will be a people blessed by the Lord,
they and their descendants with them.
24 Before they call I will answer;
while they are still speaking I will hear.
25 The wolf and the lamb will feed together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox,
and dust will be the serpent’s food.
They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,”
says the Lord.

It is difficult to see how this refers to a sinless, perfected world where death and the effects of the fall are completely eradicated. Some will say the wolf and the lamb feeding together is certainly in the new heavens and earth, but it could also be a metaphorical account of harmony among us as God’s creatures, and what will happen when everything is made new again.

Also, because of my post-Covid health epiphany, I see the possibility of a hundred plus year healthy lifespan as a real possibility in the generations to come. I also love that the Lord is telling us because of “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17), we will “long enjoy” the work of our hands. As Paul says, our “labor in the Lord is not in vain” (I Cor. 15:58), both now and into forever. All of this is the gospel! All of it the good news! Proclaim it from the rooftops: Our God is the Lord Almighty!