by HARVEYOPP | Mar 26, 2016 | Kevin DeYoung
It is sometimes said that Jesus was killed on account of his inclusion and tolerance, that the Jews hated him for hanging out with sinners and tax collectors. This is the sort of sentiment which has a bit of truth to it, but only a tiny bit. No doubt, Jesus upset many of the Jewish leaders because he extended fellowship and mercy beyond their constricted boundaries. But it is misleading to suggest that Jesus was hated for simply being too doggone loving, as if his inspiring tolerance were the cause of his enemies’ implacable intolerance.
Take Mark’s Gospel, for example (because it’s the one Gospel I’ve preached all the way through). By my reckoning, Jesus is opposed once for eating with sinners (2:16), once for upsetting stereotypes about him in his hometown (6:3), a few times for violating Jewish scruples about the law (2:24; 3:6; 7:5); and several times for “blaspheming” or for claiming too much authority for himself (2:7; 3:22; 11:27-28; 14:53-64; 15:29-32, 39). As Mark’s Gospel unfolds, we see the Jewish leaders increasingly hostile toward Jesus. Although the fear of the crowds stays their hand for awhile, they still try to trap Jesus and plot his destruction (8:11; 11:18; 12:12; 12:13; 14:1: 15:3, 11). There is a lot the Jewish leaders don’t like about Jesus, but their most intense, murderous fury is directed toward him because he believes “I am [the Christ, the Son of the Blessed], and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven” (14:62).
The four Gospels, as we might expect, emphasize different aspects of the Jewish opposition. Luke, for instance, makes more of Jesus’ identification with the society’s cast-offs as an issue for the Jewish leaders, while John makes more of Jesus’ unique status as God’s equal. But the basic outline is consistent in all four accounts. As Jesus’s reputation as a healer and miracle worker spreads, the crowds come to him in larger and larger numbers, prompting the elites to despise him more and more. As a general rule, Jesus was popular with the masses (the exception being in his hometown of Nazareth), and as his popularity increased with the crowds, so did the opposition from the Jewish leaders.
The Jewish leaders disliked, and eventually grew to hate, Jesus for many reasons. Mark 15:3 says the chief priests “accused him of many things.” They were angry with him for upsetting their traditions and some of their scruples about the law. They looked down on him for eating with sinners and associating with those deemed unclean or unworthy. But most of all, they hated Jesus because he claimed to be from God, and as time went on, dared to make himself equal to God.
That’s why they hated him; that’s why the crowds turn on him; that’s why Jesus was put to death. The Jewish leaders could not recognize Christ’s divine authority and identity. Jealousy was no doubt part of it (Matt. 27:18). But deeper than that, they simply did not have the eyes to see or the faith to believe that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the living God. That’s why in all four gospels, when the opposition against him reaches its climax, Jesus is not charged with being too welcoming to outsiders, but with being a false king, a false prophet, and a false Messiah (Matt. 26:57-68; Mark 14:53-65; Luke 22:66-71; and less clearly in John 18:9-24). They killed Jesus because they thought he was a blasphemer.
In the end, it was the implicit and explicit claims Jesus made to authority, Messiahship, and God-ness, not his expansive love, that ultimately did him in. This is not an excuse for our own hard-heartedness or a reason to distance ourselves from today’s “sinners and tax collectors.” We need Jesus’s example to set us straight. But we must put to rest the half-truth (more like a one-eighth truth, really) that Jesus was killed for being too inclusive and too nice. The Jewish leaders may have objected to Jesus’s far-reaching compassion, but they wanted him dead because he thought himself the Christ, the Son of the living God. If Jesus simply loved people too much he might have been ridiculed by some. But without his claims to deity, authority, and the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, he likely would not have been executed.
So as we approach another Holy Week, let’s certainly talk about the compassion and love of Jesus (how could we not!). But if we don’t talk about his unique identity as the Son of God, we have not explained the reason for his death, and we have not given people reason enough to worship.
by HARVEYOPP | Mar 26, 2016 | Scott Henry
Good Friday is a day when believers remember the suffering and death of our Lord Jesus Christ. It’s a day we remember how Christ became a curse on the cross (Gal. 3:13) for all those given to Him by the Father (John 6:37) in order that through His atoning work they might receive the blessing of God. On Good Friday, we remember how Jesus suffered during His whole life on earth, how He endured the reproach of sinful men, and how He suffered the physical torture of being beaten and nailed to the cross. But the greatest of His suffering was when Jesus was forsaken by His Father.
On the cross, Jesus Christ experienced the inexpressible anguish, pains, and terror of eternal death in order that those who would believe in Him might receive everlasting life. That’s the truth behind Christ’s cry from the cross, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46). It was at this time that Christ became a curse for sinners (Gal. 3:13) and was cast out by the Father for every sinful thought, word, and deed of all He came to redeem (Matt. 1:21). “For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21).
The Day of Atonement described in the Old Testament foreshadows, in great detail, the substitutionary work of our Lord Jesus Christ. In the 16th chapter of the book of Leviticus, Aaron the High Priest was commanded by God to bring two goats before the Lord at the door of the tabernacle of meeting. Aaron then cast lots for the goats: one for the Lord and the other for the scapegoat. The goat on which the Lord’s lot fell was presented before the Lord as a sin offering and its blood was sprinkled on the mercy seat as a symbol of cleansing from sins. But the other goat was presented alive before the Lord to make atonement upon it.
Aaron would place his hands upon the head of the goat and confess all the sins of Israel upon its head, symbolically imputing the sins of Israel to the scapegoat. The scapegoat was then sent into an uninhabited land symbolically bearing the sins of Israel upon it. The significance of the ceremony was twofold: the first goat signified the cleansing of all the sins of God’s people, and the second goat, the scapegoat, signified the truth that all the sins of the people were cast away from them and would never return. The truth behind this Old Testament ceremony is that it foreshadowed the work of Jesus Christ on behalf of His people.
Jesus was both the sin offering who cleansed His people with His blood (Heb. 9:14; Heb. 10:10), and the scapegoat upon whom the sins of His people were imputed (Rom. 5:8-11). On the cross, Jesus was the One banished far into the uninhabited wilderness in order to redeem His people from their sins. That’s why Jesus is called the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). Because of Christ’s sin-atoning work, believers can have the blessed assurance that their sins are really and truly cast as far as the east is from the west, never to be remembered against them again (Psalm 103:12). Why? Because on a Friday afternoon, over 2,000 years ago, Jesus Christ became our sin-offering and our scapegoat in order that God’s wrath might be turned away from us, and we become favorable in God’s sight.
That’s the truth we embrace as we remember the work of our Savior, Jesus Christ, on Good Friday. Is your trust in Jesus as the only One who could ever wash away your sins by His atoning work? Scripture is very clear: “There is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men, by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31).
by HARVEYOPP | Feb 16, 2016 | CARL TRUEMAN
It’s that time of year again: the ancient tradition of Lent, kick-started by Ash Wednesday. It is also the time of year when us confessional types brace ourselves for the annual onslaught of a more recent tradition: that of evangelical pundits, with no affiliation to such branches of the church, writing articles extolling Lent’s virtues to their own eclectic constituency.
Liturgical calendars developed in the fourth century and beyond, as Christianity came to dominate the empire. Cultural dominance requires two things: control of time and space. The latter could be achieved through churches and relics. The former was achieved through developing a calendar which gave the rhythm of time a specifically Christian idiom. It remains a key part of Roman, Orthodox and later Anglican church practice.
The rise of Lent in non-Roman, Orthodox or Anglican circles is a fascinating phenomenon. I remember being on the campus of Princeton Theological Seminary a few years ago on Ash Wednesday and being greeted by a young man emerging from Miller Chapel with a black smudged cross on his forehead. That the bastion of nineteenth century Old School Presbyterianism had been reduced to this – an eclectic grab-bag of liturgical practices – struck me as sad. Old School Presbyterianism is a rich enough tradition not to need to plunder the Egyptians or even the Anglicans.
I can understand Anglicans observing Lent. Hey, I can even approve of them doing so when I am in an exceptionally good mood or have just awoken from a deep sleep and am still a little disoriented. It is part of their history. It connects to their formal liturgical history. All denominations and Christian traditions involve elements that are strictly speaking unbiblical but which shape their historic identity. For Anglicans, the liturgical calendar is just such a thing. These reasons are not compelling in a way that would make the calendar normative for all Christians, yet I can still see how they make sense to an Anglican. But just as celebrating July the Fourth makes sense for Americans but not for the English, the Chinese or the Lapps, so Ash Wednesday and Lent really make no sense to those who are Presbyterians, Baptists, or free church evangelicals.
What perplexes me is the need for people from these other groups to observe Ash Wednesday and Lent. My commitment to Christian liberty means that I certainly would not regard it as sinful in itself for them to do so; but that same commitment also means that I object most strongly to anybody trying to argue that it should be a normative practice for Christians, to impose it on their congregations, or to claim that it confers benefits unavailable elsewhere.
The imposition of ashes is intended as a means of reminding us that we are dust and forms part of a liturgical moment when sins are ‘shriven’ or forgiven. In fact, a well-constructed worship service should do that anyway. Precisely the same thing can be conveyed by the reading of God’s Word, particularly the Law, followed by a corporate prayer of confession and then some words of gospel forgiveness drawn from an appropriate passage and read out loud to the congregation by the minister.
An appropriately rich Reformed sacramentalism also renders Ash Wednesday irrelevant. Infant baptism emphasizes better than anything else outside of the preached Word the priority of God’s grace and the helplessness of sinlful humanity in the face of God. The Lord’s Supper, both in its symbolism (humble elements of bread and wine) and its meaning (the feeding on Christ by faith) indicates our continuing weakness, fragility and utter dependence upon Christ.
In light of this, I suspect that the reasons evangelicals are rediscovering Lent is as much to do with the poverty of their own liturgical tradition as anything. American evangelicals are past masters at appropriating anything that catches their fancy in church history and claiming it as their own, from the ancient Fathers as the first emergents to the Old School men of Old Princeton as the precursors of the Young, Restless, and Reformed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer as modern American Evangelical. Yet if your own tradition lacks the historical, liturgical and theological depth for which you are looking, it may be time to join a church which can provide the same.
I also fear that it speaks of a certain carnality: The desire to do something which simply looks cool and which has a certain ostentatious spirituality about it. As an act of piety, it costs nothing yet implies a deep seriousness. In fact, far from revealing deep seriousness, in an evangelical context it simply exposes the superficiality, eclectic consumerism and underlying identity confusion of the movement.
Finally, it also puzzles me that time and energy is spent each year on extolling the virtues of Lent when comparatively little is spent on extolling the virtues of the Lord’s Day. Presbyterianism has its liturgical calendar, its way of marking time: Six days of earthly pursuits and one day of rest and gathered worship. Of course, that is rather boring. Boring, that is, unless you understand the rich theology which underlies the Lord’s Day and gathered worship, and realize that every week one meets together with fellow believers to taste a little bit of heaven on earth.
When Presbyterians and Baptists and free church evangelicals start attending Ash Wednesday services and observing Lent, one can only conclude that they have either been poorly instructed in the theology or the history of their own traditions, or that they have no theology and history. Or maybe they are simply exhibiting the attitude of the world around: They consume the bits and pieces which catch their attention in any tradition they find appealing, while eschewing the broader structure, demands and discipline which belonging to an historically rooted confessional community requires. Indeed, it is ironic that a season designed for self-denial is so often a symbol of this present age’s ingrained consumerism.
by HARVEYOPP | Feb 16, 2016 | Scott Henry
“But concerning brotherly love you have no need that I should write to you, for you yourselves are taught by God to love one another…” (1 Thessalonians 4:9).
Paul told the Thessalonians, “But concerning brotherly love … you yourselves are taught by God to love one another” (1 Thess. 4:9). And in verse 10 the Apostle Paul further exhorted the Thessalonians to grow in their love for one another when he wrote, “But we urge you, brethren, that you increase more and more…” There is always room for believers to love one another more comprehensively. Nevertheless, if we are truly redeemed by Christ then we will show genuine love because the love of God has been shed abroad in our heart by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5). Concerning love, Jesus said, “By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). If we are truly Christians, we will “fervently love one another from the heart” (1 Peter 1:22).
Love is a test of our genuine faith, and the Bible teaches that genuine love demonstrates that we have passed from darkness to light (1 John 3:14-15), are truly born of God (1 John 4:7), and that God abides in us and we abide in God (1 John 4:12-13). The Apostle John also described the characteristic of love as being sacrificial and practical when he wrote, “By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us. And we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him? My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth” (1 John 3:16-18).
Do you love other believers in practical ways or are you cold and indifferent when you see others in need? Are you willing to part with your time, talents, and treasures to care for other members of Christ’s body? Do you look forward to having fellowship with other believers in order to edify and encourage one another? Our love towards others will not be perfect in this life, nevertheless genuine love wrought in the heart by the Holy Spirit will, without a doubt, manifest itself to others. Do you have genuine faith that is manifest by a genuine love towards others? “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another” (John 13:34).
by HARVEYOPP | Jan 26, 2016 | TIM SAVAGE
‘In him (Jesus) we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us” (Ephesians 1:7-8).
One definition of the word ‘forgiveness’ is ‘the canceling of a debt’.
We, as humans, have accumulated a massive heap of debt. Every time we trespass against the law of God, we go further into debt. Every time we do our own thing — every time we try to make a life for ourselves apart from God, we go into debt. And every time we sin, our debt increases. But to whom are we indebted? We’re indebted to God! We owe him. Big time.
Every time we sin, we are taking something away from God. We are assaulting his holiness – taking for ourselves some of the glory that so rightfully belongs to him.
Here is the bad news. There is nothing we can do to pay off that mountain of debt, because there’s no payment big enough to compensate a holy God for even one of our sins. That’s to say nothing about our mountain of sins against him.
In fact, the only way to stop this debt from accumulating is by our death, both physical and spiritual. That’s the only plausible recompense. We’re in a really bad place.
But God.
God steps in and cancels our debt, paying it off in blood. God’s infinite love counts the death of Jesus as sufficient to stand in the place of our own, the price of our redemption. The Oxford Dictionary defines ‘redemption’ as, ‘Regaining or gaining possession of something in exchange for payment, or clearing a debt.’
Essentially, this verse says that God regains possession of us (he adopts us back into his family) by making a payment for us. His death, instead of ours, brings us out of debt and into the family of God.
‘We have redemption through his blood.’
God used the blood of Christ as currency to deliver us back to himself. The blood of God’s own son was the price for redeeming us into a divine family. Think about that. The God to whom our debt is owed did what we could never have done. He paid off our debt by shedding his own blood in the person of Jesus Christ. And Jesus is none other than God himself. So by his own death God pays himself off for the debt of our sins. And we are redeemed for his family and reconnected to him in love.
How can it be that we should receive such a gift from God? Romans 6:23 says, ‘The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’.
Why would God do this for us? ‘according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us.’
The Greek word here ‘lavish’ means ‘to overflow’. How do you explain it? We were in a heap of trouble but now we’re not! He’s taken our penalty upon himself to set us free. And not only that, but the storehouses of grace in heaven are opened up for us. God is an overflowing God — pouring his infinite riches into us.
Why? Because that’s who he is. He’s a God of grace and a good Father.
Have you received his grace? Have you accepted his free gift of redemption through the blood of Christ? Have you experienced salvation through the forgiveness of sins?
What can wash away my sins? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. Have you received this gift of cleansing by faith? What do you have to do to receive it? Nothing. It’s a gift of grace. There is nothing you can do with a gift except to receive it. Give him your life and ask him to cleanse it. Trust him to do it, and he will.
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