Mar 17, 2018 | Theology
Every Christian knows that being forgiven from our sins is Christianity 101. But if you ask most Christians what it means to be forgiven from our sins, I would wager that very few could answer with any confidence. I think a common answer would be something like a tautology: well, being forgiven from our sins means we’re forgiven from our sins. This was kind of how I felt having attended a church for many years where a corporate confession was done weekly, and it was always announced after that our sins were forgiven. I always appreciated that this was included in every service because I don’t think it’s done in a lot of Evangelical churches, but I always wondered why it was never explained that there was more to the point than just forgiveness.
I didn’t realized just how much was missing until I heard Dr. Kim Riddlebarger, Pastor of Christ Reformed Church in Anaheim, CA, say on a White Horse Inn broadcast something I thought I already knew. Having a masters degree from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, I surely should have known it, and did, but for some reason it wasn’t at the forefront of my understanding of my relationship with God. Keep in mind that the key word in the phrase is almost invisible in most Evangelical circles. It is implied because of the centrality of the cross to our religion, but it is rarely spelled out. Dr. Riddlebarger simply said, and in passing:
God’s wrath is fully satisfied in Christ.
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Mar 4, 2018 | Theology
Skeptics are fond of mocking the idea that Jesus Christ had to die for our sins to reconcile us to God. Why can’t God, I’ve heard some of them say, and write, can’t God just forgive us. It can’t be that hard; we confess, he forgives, we’re good, right? No, it doesn’t work that way. If it did, our relationship to a holy God would be ground in his unpredictable whim, and nothing we could count on. Sort of like the God is Islam, who bears no resemblance to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
I’ve done many things over the years to build into my children the plausibility of the Christian faith. Unless Christianity makes sense to them on a variety of levels, i.e., it’s plausible, why would I expect that they will embrace it when they leave mom and dad’s orbit? I wouldn’t. That’s why I’ve consistently explained to them how the crucifixion is at the center of our faith, and why it makes total sense in light of the reality we experience every day. How can I say that?
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Mar 2, 2018 | Theology
I often think of what a relationship with God means for me and those I love. I may be something of an aberration, but as far back as 12 or 13 years old I was wondering about my existence in this big vast universe and what it all means. Like many sinners (i.e., all human beings) I’ve always known I fall short, of what I was not always sure. But a favorite phrase of mine lo these many years later has become, we know we can’t even live up to our own standards, let alone a holy God. Why is that? Why do we all know we fall short? Maybe it’s because we actually do! Not a person on earth is immune to conscience, and we are all condemned by it. Even those who claim not to believe in God will admit they don’t live up to their own standards, but they will insist no real objective standards exist by which they can be judged. God’s word says differently.
Here is our dilemma vis-a-vis God: since we can’t live up to his standards, we are judged guilty, and the wages of what the Bible calls sin is death, both spiritual and physical. Like Adam and Eve after the fall, in our natural state when God comes “walking in the garden in the cool of the day,” we hide. By nature, we want nothing to do with our judge, jury, and executioner. The Apostle Paul says, by nature, by birth, we are enemies of God, and objects of his wrath. This is a problem, my friends, because we don’t seek to have a relationship with our enemies; we seek to defeat them, or run away. How can this problem be solved with our Creator? In a word, the gospel. What exactly is it, and how does it overcome the problem?
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Jan 16, 2018 | Theology
In my previous two posts (one and two) I argued that how we understand our origins, where we come from and why we are here, have implications for life that are all encompassing. If we, as Scripture declares, are creatures made in God’s image in God’s world, then we can know what “real reality” is, and live accordingly. The results will be positive because we can live according to the actual nature of things. If, on the other hand, all we are is lucky dirt that erupted for no reason at all with no cause but chance, a grand cosmic coincidence if you will, then the implications will be bad, very bad.
Things, of course, are generally never absolutely one way or the other, perfect good or perfect evil, because in fact, as is evident all around us, we live in a fallen world that was created by a God good. So we see evidence of fallenness and goodness in everything. But the logical implications of origins will eventually drive people one way or the other. This is very important and should not be missed: a person’s, or people’s, or country’s, or culture’s basic presuppositions about the world we inhabit and what human beings are, will eventually find its way into the culture.
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Jan 12, 2018 | Theology
In my previous post I argued that how we see our origins, where we and this universe comes from, have significant implications for how we see reality and live life, all-encompassing implications, both positive and negative. The reason this is important for keeping our kids Christians, as I said, is that our goal as Christian parents is to sell our kids on “real reality,” on existence as it really is, or in other words, as God created it to be. The lucky dirt people, as I called them, are those who see our origins in material chance, atoms that came together for no reason at all to “create” all that we see and experience. It is extremely easy, and I mean ridiculously easy, to persuade our kids that such a view of reality is totally absurd, because it is!
The consequences of the lucky dirt view are all negative, and I’ll focus on that more in the next post, but here I want to briefly focus on the positive effects of understanding the biblical view of our origins. I’ll do that with a story that highlights a concept called telos. It comes from ex-communist Whittaker Chambers, and his magisterial autobiography Witness: (more…)
Jan 6, 2018 | Theology
In the beginning God created . . . We know this famous passage from Genesis 1, the first words of our Bible. What we often fail to appreciate, unfortunately, is how profound these words are in their implications for all of human existence. How human beings understand the origin of their existence has everything to do with how they understand that existence, and how they attempt to live it. Everything. If, on the one hand, we believe that all we are is lucky dirt as a result of an astounding cosmic accident, that will have certain implications. It is easy to prove both logically and practically none of these are good. By contrast, if we are created by an almighty personal God in his image, the implications of the logic flow in an inescapably positive and constructive direction.
Why would this be significant for keeping our kids Christian? Simply put, we have to sell “real reality” to our children. I cannot adequately convey how crucial this is as an apologetic for our children. The world works a certain way because that is the way God made it to work. If our origins, where we came from, are in the mind and will and power of God, then the reality we inhabit will in every sense reflect this God, the God we learn about in the Bible.
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