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Koinonia this Monday
This Monday we’ll take communion together and have a night of prayer and worship. Who knows, maybe we’ll even grill afterwards… Hope to see you there.
Helpful responses to today’s big issues
Russel Moore, who has been elected President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, gave a C-Span interview on Friday which is well worth the 45 minutes to watch. He responds to many of the big questions of the day, and presents an excellent model for how to think through and talk about many of these issues.
Specifically, I appreciated how Dr. Moore consistently witnessed to Christ, kept his speech saturated with scripture, and spoke directly to the questions at hand, all while maintaining a tone and demeanor which invited discussion and thought rather than exciting hostility and contention.
The video is below:
The Trinity and Humility: Notes from last Night
The notes from last night’s study (most likely) finishing up our look at the Trinity are short, but here they are:
Matt 11:25-30
v.27 – The Son reveals the Father (John 1:18)
v.28 – The Son humbly offers rest…
The way to understand God is to see Jesus—that is, the Son who is sent by the Father, in the Power of the Spirit. Jesus shows us God is a loving Father, who loves us precisely by sending His Son, and offering us this rest.
1 Peter 5:5-6
We are called to the same qualities as the Son. This humility is God-like in that it is like the Son. Why does God resist the proud? Because it’s fundamentally out of character for Him. There’s no pride in God. There’s only love!
Pride turns you away from God and severs the relationship you could have with Him Thought experiment: What would pride be…in God?
Gal 5:22 – The Spirit bears this fruit of Christ’s character in us. (Col 3:12)
Romans 8:29 – Our calling and destiny: to be conformed into the image of the Son. Anything less is to fall short of what we were created for.
The Mass Audience and the Loss of Individualism
I am in the very beginning of what I hope will be a long a fruitful conversation with Justin Grow (leader of our Levittown Post-YA home fellowship–talk to me!). The topic is the nature of modern media and the effects it has on us–specifically, on humans as individuals and Christians as people who are both made in the image of God and redeemed by the death and life of Christ. For instance, here is one thing that seems worth exploring: We often focus our discussions of these things on content–is it sending good or bad messages, is it portraying immorality in a positive light, is it promoting a Godless agenda, etc.–but what about the media themselves (itself?)–have we, as Christians, taken the time to examine what these things are that we watch, listen to, and carry around in our pockets, and how they, just being what they are, affect us? There’s so much more behind these opening questions, and it seems like we’re quickly approaching a time when Christians will need to seriously consider them in light of Christ’s call on our lives.
I shouldn’t be surprised that others are thinking these thoughts too, but I was when I found a link to an article that contained these thoughts:
To separate the mind or soul from the body is to mime death. It is generally accepted that any separation of the two, mind and body, results in death. Electric media disturb the natural union of mind and body at the deepest level. They take the user out of nature in a pantomime of death. The new sensibility brings a new fascination with death and the hereafter increasingly seems here and now, not hereafter, and encourages the growth of nihilism and amorality…Doesn’t this illuminate somewhat our culture’s present infatuation with euthanasia and abortion? …The new reality, which we all accept without question, is this: on the air, on the telephone, on the Internet, you are, you have being in many places simultaneously. These are literally out of body experiences and they are casual, utterly unremarkable features of everybody’s everyday life: and they pull the rug out from under individualism. Cyberspace is the home of the group, not the individual; its natural mode is the hive.
It’s from an article called The New Nomads: Eight Characteristics of the Electric Mass Audience, and was originally part of a speech given by Eric McLuhan at Wheaton College. I recommend reading the whole thing.
Here are some of his characteristics of what we call “The Mass Audience.”
Electric media profoundly challenge the very foundations of individual identity each time they transform us into mass audiences. The base of private identity is rapidly becoming irrelevant to contemporary experience throughout the west…
1. The Mass Audience is invisible. Composed as it is of de facto intelligences with no bodies. The average person daily uses interactive media from telephone to Internet by being transformed into bits of electric information. This disembodiment parodies the condition of angels, and it contributes to the disorientation that people feel in the material world.
2. Minus the physical body, the user of electric media can be in two or two dozen or two million places simultaneously — everywhere the Internet reaches, in fact. The electric crowd lives as if already dead. Consequently it finds nihilism natural. Death as a way of life, has a familiar ring to those who follow the news. The enabling environment for the electric crowd is the totality of electric media present and operating via broadcast, or network, or satellite, and so on. So there is the radio crowd, and the TV crowd, and so on. All of these are, as it were, dialects of the mass audience.
3. The Electric Crowd, composed as it is of new nomads, who haunt the metaphysical world, cannot have distant goals, or directions, or objectives. Those matters pertain to becoming, and the nomad is involved rather with being. Being is not an objective or a goal. With no outer physical body, the mass audience shifts its focus inward. For example, for over forty years youth have consistently rejected long-range goals and objectives as irrelevant. This move inward also appears disguised as narcissism, but it is the narcissism or the selfishness of one without a self — rather different from the selfishness that attends private individualism. Fixed goals and becoming belong to incarnate existence; the electrified nomad is wrapped in the ecstasies of sheer being, bereft of all traditional ties to the natural world and to natural law. In other words, we are floundering, we are disoriented. Each new technology represents one or another modulation of our humanity.
4. People without physical bodies use participational imagery to generate the emotion and the aesthetics of being — the only reality left after leaving the physical body and the physical world behind. Advertisers a generation ago shifted their attention from products to image, from hard selling of things to participative forms such as lifestyle ads. These provide life fantasies and group identities for all. Mass audience is not characterized by rationality, although individual members of it may be rational. Online or on the air, minus your physical bodies, you put on the corporate body, you wear all mankind as your skin. Under these conditions, a private sensibility would be a terrible liability.
5. The quality of image adjusts the degree of participation. A “good” image allows a lot of participation in depth, by a big diverse mass. For this it must be virtually devoid of content. The aesthetic of these circumstances derives from manipulations of being. Each new electric medium brings with it a new mode of group being, a new we. Hybrid energy bring the biggest kicks of all, and it is in the nature of electric media to hybridize endlessly. Each new medium collects older ones as what we call features, even as it becomes included in the others as a feature, a process that will continue until all have become features of each other. Their future is features. Gadgetry. Narcissism for the self-less.
6. The crowd of electrified nomads has no natural boundaries. It o’erleaps all natural and physical limitations. It is exempt from natural law.
7. The Mass audience was coined, the term, to denote broadcast crowds. Sheer speed makes the mass, not numbers. At electric speed there is no moving to or fro, the user just manifests here or there, having left the body behind. “There” might be the other side of the room or the other side of town or the other side of the world – it makes no difference, it’s all the same. You function in more than one place at once. On the air, you can have your being in thousands or millions of places simultaneously. Physical laws no longer apply once you leave the physical body. There is nothing on which to base them. You become information. You become an environmental image. Anyone who goes online becomes thereby, a de facto node of the worldwide network. This is not an unfamiliar form. Our worldwide net then has its center everywhere and its margin nowhere…
Interesting thoughts for the beginning of some important discussions. You can read the whole thing here.
The Trinity Makes it Possible for Us to Pray: Notes from Last Night
Here are the notes from last night’s study on how prayer is essentially a Trinitarian activity:
Prayer and the Trinity
What is prayer and why is it real?
“The Spirit unites us to the Son, who reconciles us to Father, and we pray back along that line: to the Father, through the Son, by the Holy Spirit.”
1. How we get reconnected to God.
Heb 10:15-22 – The way to God is opened for us—Through Christ.
Eph 2:13+18 – But how do we go to the Father “through Christ”? By the Spirit!
This answers the question, “How does what Jesus did 2000 years ago have anything to do with me?” Answer: The Spirit indwells us and applies Christ’s work to us.
In other words: When Christ atoned for our sin, He removed the barrier separating us from God, and the barrier keeping us from receiving the Spirit of God. The Spirit is the Spirit of adoption, and when He’s in us, we are fully children of God, fully united to Him by His indwelling of us. When we have so, the Spirit is our actual union with God, and with Christ the Son. Just as He is in us, we are now “in Christ.” (Just as the members of the Trinity indwell each other.)
Romans 8:15-16, 26-27, 34 – The Spirit is in us praying, the Son is with the Father praying for us.
2. What’s really going on when we pray.
John 11:41-42, 12:27-29; 17:1 – Jesus shows us, in His earthly life, that He has a constant “running dialogue” with His Father. Since Jesus is our fullest revelation of who God is and what God’s like (John 1:18), this tells us that there is, and has always been conversation between the Father and the Son (and the Spirit).
Luke 22:31-32 – Jesus’ prayer shows us how this relation in God works. The Son asks and the Father grants. As the man Christ, He is the link between our asking and His asking as the Son. So prayer works because God has always been talking. Prayer is in the very being of God. We enter the sons praying.
Luke 11:1-2 – We’re invited into the conversation, and we’re invited to take up the Son’s place in the conversation. We’re invited into the Sonship of Jesus.
Prayer is a main way we fully enjoy this union with God, by speaking to God as people fully in fellowship with Him, with His very Spirit in our hearts. (Sanders: “Christians are people who talk to God like they’re Jesus.”)
3. Why we pray the way we do.
John 14:13-14, 16:23-24 – So, we pray in the Spirit, in the Name of the Son, to the Father.
In the Name of Jesus: Eph 5:20, John 15:16,
Praying in the Spirit: Eph 6:18
I’ll try to post the Andrew Murray quote I read last night soon…
Let’s think about…the Millennium
A little while ago I posted a study guide for the Rapture. Today, I figured I’d share a study guide I use for my classes on the Millennium. The main points are below (I recommend looking up all the passages to go with the short explanations), and if you’d like a fuller list of scripture passages to look at for yourself, download the whole thing: Study Guide for the Millennium (Word)
Revelation 20: The Millennium—The 1000-year reign of Christ on the Earth
How we know it’s coming:
First, God made promise to Abraham and David that haven’t been fulfilled:
1. In Genesis 13:14-17, 15:1-21, and 17:1-8 He promised Abraham that his descendants would possess a certain area of land forever (Gen 13:15, 17:8), and He gave the dimensions of the land (Gen 15:18-21).
2 . In 2 Samuel 7:8-16 He promised David that his royal house (his family), his kingdom (Israel) and his throne (his royal power) would last forever. It is reiterated in many places, including Jeremiah 33:17-26.
Second, the Old Testament is full of predictions about this time. You could say the whole Old Testament is looking forward to this time.
See passages like: Ezekiel 37:21-28, Isaiah 11:1-11, Isaiah 60, Micah 4:1-8.
Third, the New Testament teaches that Jesus will fulfill these Old Testament prophecies. The writers of the NT picked up the OT themes and prophecies and showed how they would be completed. They finish the story.
See passages like: Luke 1:29-33, Acts 1:1-8, Acts 13:21-33, Romans 11:25-27, 1 Corinthians 15:20-25
What it will be like:
1. Jesus will be reigning on Earth. (Isaiah 9:6-7, 11:1-5, Jeremiah 23:5-6, Psalm 2, Daniel 7:13-27)
2. Israel will be the chief nation in the earth. (Isaiah 49:22-23, Isaiah 60, Zechariah 8:20-23)
3. Resurrected saints will reign with Christ. (Daniel 7:18 & 27, 2 Timothy 2:12, Rev 5:10, 1 Cor 6:2-3)
4. It will be a rule of righteousness, holiness, justice, and truth. (Isaiah 32:1, Zechariah 14:20-21, Isaiah 59:16-20, Isaiah 61, Micah 4:1-8)
5. The reign of Christ will be full of glory, and the Holy Spirit. (Isaiah 4:2 & 11:1-2)
6. Satan will be bound and gone for the entire time. (Revelation 20:1-3)
7. The curse on the earth will be removed. (Genesis 3:17-19, Isaiah 35, Isaiah 65:25)
8. The Nations will obey Christ, but unbelief will be possible. (Revelation 20:7-10)
Final Thought: Though something better is coming after it, this kingdom will be almost too great for words. Check out this final Old Testament picture of this time: Jeremiah 31:3-14.
The Trinity and our Bible Reading: Notes from Last Night
Last night we continued our study of how God’s Triune nature affects our lives by looking at what is happening when we read the Bible. Here are the notes:
What we’re doing when we read the Bible. (Or, Why are Christians so hyped up about the Bible?)
The Bible, from the very beginning, reports that God is a speaking God, and gives the long history of his speech to humans and what He has said.
- Genesis 1:1-3 – The pattern: God speaking, the Word is what He spoke, the Spirit energizing
- Gen 1:29 – God spoke to the first humans
- Gen 12:7 – God appeared to Abraham and spoke
- Exodus 24:1-3 – God told Moses to write. So, not only did God appear to people ad speak to them, but at a certain time, He told them to start writing down what He said. They did, and these written documents held the same authority as His audible voice.
- 2 Samuel 23:1-2 – The Spirit of God spoke “by” David, and He wrote it down (Luke 1:70). This is a new level of God’s speaking to Humanity. David is typical of the prophets, who were people who God not only spoke to, but also spoke through. The Holy Spirit, in these people, spoke in such a way that at certain times, what the prophet said was what God was saying. The prophets words were God’s words.
- Heb 1:1-3 – God’s final and full revelation is in a person – his Son. This is yet another level of God’s speaking. In Jesus, we have God the Son not only speaking to a human, or through a human, but becoming human. His words and actions are a complete, perfect revelation of who God is.
- John 12:49 – Jesus speaks the Father’s words. So this man Jesus spoke perfectly what God the Father spoke. His words were God’s words.
- John 14:26 – The Holy Spirit taught the Apostles what to write. After Jesus left, the Holy Spirit came and indwelt the Apostles, so that they remembered correctly what Jesus taught, spoke correctly what Jesus said and did, and interpreted it correctly for their hearers. Like the prophets, what the Apostles said about Jesus was what God said.
- 1 Peter 1:10-12 –Peter says the Holy Spirit was in the Prophets, and in those who preached the Gospel.
- 2 Peter 1:12-21 – Peter says the Apostles didn’t only speak, they also committed their teaching to writing, so that Christians would “always have a reminder” of what they taught. And this wasn’t merely a human process, for the Spirit “carried” the writers of Scripture along. (See also 1 Cor 14:37)
- 2 Timothy 3:16 – So… Scripture is God-breathed. (“Inspired” means God created an identity between what a Prophet wrote or said and His own words.)
- 1 Cor 2:9-12 – We have the same Spirit in us. When we read these words which the Holy Spirit used the prophets and apostles to write, we have the Holy Spirit who inspired the words living in us as well (indwelling us) and speaking to us, in us, teaching us the truth of these words.
Summing it up: God speaks, and has spoken finally by giving us His Son. Jesus said and did things that we all need to know, because they are what God says and does. The Holy Spirit lived in the hearts of the Apostles to guide them in their writing of Scripture about Jesus. What they wrote is what God says. When we read scripture, with the Holy Spirit in our hearts, He is speaking, to us, the words on the page. And what does He speak? Primarily, He tells us about the Son, who reveals the Father. In other words, “the words of the Father are delivered by the Son, in the Power of the Spirit.” Or you might say, the Father speaks the Word through the Spirit. When You read the Bible, God is with you, in the Spirit, speaking the Father’s word about Jesus to your heart. So reading the Bible with faith and the Spirit in our hearts is the clearest, most reliable way to hear the Word of God.
Finally, see Acts 10:36-44. God’s main word is: Jesus shows us God. He lived the life we haven’t lived and died the death we deserved, in our place. Whoever believes in Him has forgiveness for their sins.
Along these lines, here’s the bit of logic I was working with last night, taken from John Frame’s book The Doctrine of the Word of God.
- God is Lord, which means He is all authority.
- When God speaks, His words carry all the authority that He is in Himself.
- When someone (like a Prophet) hears those words and faithfully repeats them, the words the prophet speaks are as authoritative as if God were speaking the words Himself.
- When a prophet writes down God’s words, the written words are as authoritative as God’s very speech.
- And when those words are faithfully copied (and even translated) and I read them thousands of years later, what I read is as authoritative as if God Himself stood in my room and spoke them to me audibly. In other words, the Bible is God speaking to us.
We know more than we can ever tell
Here’s a helpful thought about how we can know the Triune God without necessarily being able to explain the Trinity:
A child by the age of five has learned, we are told, an astonishing amount about the physical world to which he or she has become spontaneously and intuitively adapted – far more than the child could ever understand if he or she turned out to be the most brilliant physicists. Likewise, I believe, we learn far more about God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, into whose Name we have been baptised, within the family and fellowship and living tradition of the Church than we can ever say: it becomes built into the structures of our souls and minds, and we know much more than we can ever tell. This is what happens evangelically and personally to us within the membership of the Church, the Body of Christ in the world, when through the transforming power of his Word and Spirit our minds become inwardly and intuitively adapted to know the living God. We become spiritually and intellectually implicated in patterns of divine order that are beyond our powers fully to articulate in explicit terms, but we are aware of being apprehended by divine Truth as it is in Jesus which steadily presses for increasing realisation in our understanding, articulation and confession of faith. That is how Christian history gains its initial impetus, and is then reinforced through constant reading and study of the Bible within the community of the faithful.
Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God, how the Trinity Changes Everything, page 50
How could six squares be one cube?
I’m still finding helpful things to add to our Monday night studies of the Trinity. For instance, I saw this online over the weekend–Using shapes and dimensions to illustrate, C.S. Lewis gives a very helpful analogy explaining why our minds might struggle with the idea of three persons in one God.
I warned you that Theology is practical. The whole purpose for which we exist is to be thus taken into the life of God. Wrong ideas about what that life is, will make it harder. And now, for a few minutes, I must ask you to follow rather carefully. You know that in space you can move in three ways to left or right, backwards or forwards, up or down. Every direction is either one of these three or a compromise between them. They are called the three dimensions. Now notice this. If you’re using only one dimension, you could draw only a straight line. If you’re using two, you could draw a figure: say, a square. And a square is made up of four straight lines. Now a step further. If you have three dimensions, you can then build what we call a solid body: say, a cube a thing like a dice or a lump of sugar. And a cube is made up of six squares.
Do you see the point? A world of one dimension would be a world of straight lines. In a two-dimensional world, you still get straight lines, but many lines make one figure. In a three-dimensional world, you still get figures but many figures make one solid body. In other words, as you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you don’t leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels; you still have them, but combined in new ways in ways you couldn’t imagine if you knew only the simpler levels. principle. The human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings just as, in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who don’t live on that level, can’t imagine. In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a
cube is six squares while remaining one cube.
Of course we can’t fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do we are then, for the first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of something super-personal something more than a person. It is something we could never have guessed, and yet, once we have been told, one almost feels one ought to have been able to guess it because it fits in so well with all the things we know already. You may ask, ‘If we can’t imagine a
three-personal Being, what Is the good of talking about Him?’ Well, there isn’t any good in talking about Him. The thing that matters is being actually drawn into that three-personal life, and that may begin any time tonight, if you like.
What I mean is this. An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God; God, so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing beyond the whole universe to which he is praying the goal he’s trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers. The man is being caught up into the higher kind of life what I called Zoe or spiritual life: he is being pulled into God, by God, while still remaining himself.
And that is how Theology started. People already knew about God in a vague way. [We might argue with Lewis here–That He had revealed a lot about Himself to Israel, but the main point stands…]Then came a man who claimed to be God; and yet He wasn’t the sort of man you could dismiss as a lunatic. He made them believe Him. They met Him again after they’d seen Him killed. And then, after they had been formed into a little society or community, they found God somehow inside them as well: directing them, making them able to do things they couldn’t do before. And when they worked it all out they found they’d got the Christian definition of the three-personal God.
Adopted into the Trinity: Notes from last night
Last night we began looking at the practical effects of God’s Triune nature for us by thinking about our Adoption–the Bible’s teaching that those who trust in Christ are now children of
God. Here are the notes:
1. There is, in God, Father, and
Son and Spirit.
John 14:31 – Son loves the Father
John 15:26 – The Spirit proceeds from the Father
John 17:24 – Father-Son relationship in God
Jesus’ “Father/Son” language shows this can be characterized in some ways as a “familial” relationship. Because God’s Unity is a relational Unity, we can say, “God is love.” (1John 4:8)
2. The Son came on a mission, and became One of Us.
John 1:14 – A Human is God’s Son. John 3:16 – The Father Sends the son. John 14:31 – The son’s mission is from love for the father.
3. The Spirit also came
on a mission
Galatians 3:13-14 – The Son cleared the way for the Spirit to come in to our hearts.
Galatians 4:1-7 &
Romans 8:12-17 – We have the Spirit of Adoption
John 16:27 – The Father Himself loves you.
Eph 1:3-5, 1 John 3:1
How it works:
Out of love for the world, the Father sends His Son. Out of love for the Father, the Son comes to show us the Father’s love for us. He becomes one of us, and lives and dies in our place. He lives the perfect life of total connectivity to the Father (which we have never lived), and then dies our death and takes our punishment (which we deserve). He becomes a representative and head of a new family—a new human race. Now, by being “in Christ” (part of the family) we can be redeemed (1 Cor15:22). The result? We can now be adopted into the family: in the Son, we relate to the father as He does. We are included in the Father’s love for the Son. The Father loves us because He loves Jesus.
Application:
- Behind is everything is God—the Father, Son and Spirit loving each other. The universe is essentially meaningful. And so are you.
- We’re invited into this love. Without Christ we are estranged from it now–Separated from the God who is love by our sin. But we don’t have to be…
- What do we really need? Not things–We’re lonely, We need love, We need family. God is rich enough in love–he has what we need!
Two Struggles:
- No Father/Bad
Father? – God’s answer is Himself. You are adopted into the eternal family. Jesus’ Father is your Father. You are adopted as a child of God. Bad Father? Look at how the Father loves the
Son. See how much God loves Jesus. This is His love for you. God’s
method for healing you is to give Himself to you. He adopts you into the family and gives you Himself as your Father. - Loneliness? – The Father knows that you are not meant to be alone. You were created to be in community, with others and with God. You were created to enjoy relationship.
His answer? – You are adopted into the Father’s love for the Son, and share kinship with everyone who is.