Blog
The notes from last Monday Night’s study with Rich Johnson
Last Monday night Rich Johnson taught from Mark 12. Click here to download the notes in Word Document form (this includes all his references).
Here’s some challenges he offered to end:
These commandments are all-containing. Everything else in our lives should be a result of loving Him. We are not free of the other commandments, but this is merely a summation of all of them and how to fulfill all of them. Love for God is everything. It will cause us to do all the other things. If you love me keep my commandments (John 14:15).
If we find ourselves unwilling to do something for the Lord or unwilling to give something up it is because we do not love Him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength and we need to fix it.
2 Peter 3:10-18. Notes from last night.
Last night we finished our study through 2 Peter. Here are the notes:
3:10
This is a fact: the end will come. What we currently see has a limited time. Everything we now know will be totally changed, some destroyed, and even physically altered. Everything will ultimately be exposed before God…
3:11-12
Since – we’re headed for a shift in reality, since one day all will be evaluated and judged by God, What kind of people should we be?
Seven Christian responses to the coming end of our current age:
1. Holy lives. (conduct that is holy)
2. Godly (see 1:3, 1:6)
3. Waiting for, actively pursuing the new heavens and Earth. (Notice: v.12-13 : no the burning we’re waiting for, but what lies beyond it. New Universe. “Looking for” see 3:12, 3:13, 3:134.)
3:13
“New heavens and a new earth” is from Isaiah’s prophecy. See Isaiah 65:17 In response to the fact that the world we know will soon pass away (2:3, 9; 3:7), we stay holy, since wickedness is passing away but righteousness is eternal (What kind of people..? 1:3-11). “Promise” frames the whole letter: see 1:4
3:14-16
What will come in the future affects how we live now. (Ex: Brides and Grooms to be) Since – we’re waiting for the new eternal earth, be:
4. diligent to be in peace (diligence: 1:5, 10) Is 26:2-4
5. diligent to be spotless and blames (holy)
6. thinking rightly about our time here. The delay in god’s final rescue leads to salvation – ours and others’ (“consider, count” 3:9) (if this is true, shouldn’t it affect the way we see all our time spent here?)
7. knowing and using the scriptures rightly. Ignorant and unstable people twist bible verses…instead of taking time to understand rightly Their destruction: 2:1-2, 3:7
3:17
know this…and watch out for these errors promoted by lawless people…
Ravi Zacharias and a Founder of Hamas
Everyone loves Ravi for his intellect, but you have to love his boldness too. Check out what he said to one of the founders of Hamas:
HT: Justin Taylor
What kind of people should we be? (A preview of tonight)
Here’s a couple nuggets from my study of the end of 2 Peter, which we’ll dive into tonight. This is from the commentary on 2 Peter and Jude by Peter Davids, and he’s discussing 2 Peter 3:11:
There is no reason to adjust one’s life to the values and mores of this age of the world, for this age is coming to an end.
It would be like investing in a firm that was about to crash.
Rather, one ought to be living now the lifestyle of the promised coming age, a lifestyle that will mark one out as a person who belongs to that age and will make the coming judgment a welcome event rather than a dreaded one.
The other commentary I’m reading says it in one sentence:
Since the present world, the scene of human wickedness, is to disappear completely and be replace by a new world, the home of righteousness…be the kind of people who will be able to live in that new world.
Christianity: “Bookish” from the beginning.
Here’s some more gleanings from my study of the New Testament Canon.
One idea that floats around about modern Christianity is that it’s too much about “a book.” (One time I read this kind of criticism of “Bible-anity” on a musician’s blog.) Along with this idea usually comes the assertion that the first Christians were all about passing along an oral message; the growing attention to a book was a betrayal of the roots of our faith.
I’m finding all kinds of historical studies that show that this concept of early Christianity just isn’t accurate. for instance, here’s this piece by Michael Kruger, called “Manuscripts, Scribes, and Book Production Within Early Christianity.” He points out that the actual evidence we have from the first few generations after Christ shows a very different story:
At its core, early Christianity was a religion concerned with books. From the very beginning, Christians were committed to the books of the Hebrew Scriptures and saw them as paradigmatic for understanding the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.
The apostle Paul was so immersed in the Old Testament writings that he even conceived of the resurrection of Jesus “according to the Scriptures” (1Cor 15:3–4).1 The Pauline use of books (particularly Old Testament books) in the course of his ministry is borne out in passages like 2 Timothy 4:13 where Timothy is urged to “bring…my scrolls, especially the parchments.” Moreover, gospel accounts like those of Matthew and John, as well as books like James and Hebrews, exhibit similar indebtedness to the Old Testament, often citing from it directly and extensively. Such intimate connections between the earliest Christian movement and the Old Testament writings led Harry Gamble to declare, “Indeed it is almost impossible to imagine an early Christianity that was not constructed upon the foundations of Jewish Scripture.”
Of course, it was not only the Old Testament books that mattered to early Christianity. At a very early point, Christians also began to produce their own writings—gospels, letters, sermons, prophetic literature, and more… Indeed, Christianity was distinguished from the surrounding religions in the Greco-Roman world precisely by its prolific production of literature and its commitment to an authoritative body of Scripture as its foundation. Even by the end of the second century, a core collection of “New Testament” books was functioning as Scripture within early Christianity and was being read in public worship alongside the Old Testament writings (Justin Martyr, 1 Apol. 67.3).6 So prominent were these scriptural books for Christians that even their pagan critics—like Lucian of Samosata in the opening quote above—noted the Christian predilection for writing (and using) books and thus were forced to reckon with these books in their anti-Christian attacks. All of these factors indicate that the emerging Christian movement, like its Jewish counterpart, would be defined and shaped for generations to come by the same means: the production and use of books.
He ends with this:
… earliest Christianity was not a religion concerned only with oral tradition or public proclamation, but was also shaped by, and found its identity within, a vivid “textual culture” committed to writing, editing, copying, and distributing Christian books, whether scriptural or otherwise. When the form and structure of these books is considered, and not just the content within, a more vivid picture of the early Christian literary culture begins to emerge. From a very early point, Christians not only had an interest in books, but had a relatively well-developed social and scribal network— as seen in conventions like the codex and nomina sacra—whereby those books could be copied, edited, and disseminated throughout the empire.
Indeed, it is just this rapid transfer of literature that set early Christians apart from their surrounding Greco-Roman world, and set the early church on the path toward eventually establishing a collection of “canonical” books that would form the church’s literary foundation for generations to come.
You can download the whole thing to read here.
Remember “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife”? Seems like a fake…
Back in September I posted the news and reaction to a discovery by Harvard Professor Karen King of a papyrus document which quoted Jesus as referring to his wife. It unleashed a lot of news coverage, as these things usually do. Here was an ancient source showing that Jesus had a wife.
What went completely unnoticed by the media (I hadn’t even heard) was the growing consensus on the final verdict on this document: It’s a fake. And not even an ancient fake. It’s probably a modern fake.
In this detailed study of the document by Andrew Bernhard of Oxford University, he gives these observations:
The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife (Gos. Jes. Wife) appears to be a modern forgery created using Michael Grondin’s Interlinear Coptic-English Translation of the Gospel of Thomas. Grondin’s Interlinear is a page-by-page, line-by-line edition/translation of the Gospel of Thomas (Gos. Thom.) known from Nag Hammadi Codex II (NHC II).
General Observations:
-
The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife borrows the framework for a simple dialogue between Jesus and his disciples from Gos. Thom. 12.
-
All decipherable words in Gos. Jes. Wife appear in Gos. Thom. with a single exception: “my wife.”
-
The words of each line of text in Gos. Jes. Wife are found in close proximity to each other in Gos. Thom.
-
The forger has slightly redacted Gos. Thom. by making masculine pronouns feminine and (attempting to) transform affirmative/negative statements into their opposites.
-
More than half a dozen notable textual features in Gos. Jes. Wife can be attributed to a forger’s dependence on Grondin’s Interlinear.
He then goes on to say:
I think it is now fair to begin openly describing Gos. Jes. Wife as a modern forgery. Although it is admittedly a novel type of forgery,4 its text can be explained too easily and too completely as a “patchwork” of words and short phrases drawn from the Gos. Thom. by a forger relying on Grondin’s Interlinear. The possibility that Gos. Jes. Wife is a genuinely ancient writing seems extremely remote.
The forger’s “fingerprints” are discernible in every line of text that has more than one word in it. In line 1, the forger has reproduced a typographical error from Grondin’s Interlinear (the omission of a direct object marker) … it seems clear that a forger tried to compose the line of Coptic while thinking in English…
In the end, only a single Coptic word in Gos. Jes. Wife could not have been copied directly from Gos. Thom. This word, which instantly transformed Gos. Jes. Wife into an international sensation, appears near the center of the small papyrus fragment. It is a compound of a possessive article and feminine noun that could easily have been formed by anyone using Grondin’s. Interlinear and the most widely available Coptic-English dictionary in the world..[the word for] “my wife”.
Peter Williams, Warden of the Research Library Tyndale House in England, published these thoughts:
What now?
The story is not finished. At this point, it is unclear whether the Harvard Theological Review, the scholarly journal which was originally supposed to publish the fragment, will in fact do so. There are still tests on the ink to be completed.
Nevertheless, even if the non-invasive tests on the ink turn out compatible with an ancient origin of the script, such tests would only tip the balance of arguments slightly in favour of authenticity. The very serious objections, of which only a selection have been given here, would remain.
Of course, even in the unlikely scenario that these objections were overcome and the scrap deemed ‘authentic’, all we would be left with would be an undated fragment representing the thoughts of an unknown writer some stage before the ninth century when papyrus went out of use. In such a case, even King herself admits that the manuscript would tell us nothing historical about Jesus.
Christians have been quick to point out that, in the Book of Revelation, Christ does have a bride – the church. So it looks like the orthodox rather than the heretics were the first to attribute romance to Jesus, but of a different kind from that for which our culture itches.
What do we learn from all this?
First, we see a number of layers of spin in this tale. Dr. King’s original decision to call the media and to label the fragment a ‘Gospel’ just set the ball rolling. Soon media reports copied each other, and started to suggest that this was a discovery to revolutionise or challenge Christian teaching. By the time this arrived at popular perception, the transformation was complete: a piece of historical evidence suggested that Jesus actually had a wife. The majority impression given by the media was that this was an authentic piece, and the message that, even if genuine, the fragment was of little historical consequence was not heard. Public attitude will have been affected for the worse. So we are reminded that the secular media appear incredibly powerful at getting false messages across which it is hard for us to redress.
Secondly, it could have been worse. To her credit, from the beginning Dr. King released high resolution photos and the technical information she had. This enabled quick scrutiny. Had the person responsible for the fake been better at his or her job the story could have had yet more negative impact…
2 Peter 3:1-10 (Notes from Last Night)
Here’s the notes from last night’s study:
Chapter 3:
1-2 He wants us to remember the Prophet’s predictions (OT) and Apostles commands (NT) (1:12-13)
3 Notice that the false teachers bring an intellectual argument (v.4) but in reality, they are dealing with spiritual issues (v.3).
- They are scoffers. They have a mocking, arrogant attitude towards the promises of scripture.
- They live according to their own lusts. (see 2:10) Their way of life is driven by, and shaped by, their own, selfish desires.
4 The gist of what these false teachers are saying: they mock the promise of Jesus return. (Notice 1:4 – it is these “promises” that enable our entire life of Godliness… see also 3:13). But let’s examine their argument:
Assertion: Jesus won’t come back.
Evidence:
- He hasn’t come back yet.
- Since the beginning of history, the world has gone on the way it always has.
Conclusion: It will continue to run on, with the natural course of events working themselves out forever. Hence, Jesus won’t/can’t come back.
This is the prevailing view of our time. God is not actually present in any meaningful way in our universe. He does not, or can not affect events in any sort of meaningful way.
5-6 There are two things they “willfully forget”. Not that everyone always knows they are forgetting these things, but that in order to maintain their position (that Jesus won’t come back), they must ignore evidence to the contrary. (See Romans 1)
The two flaws in their reasoning:
- They ignore that God started it all with His word. (Q: How did the world begin?) You can’t avoid this question.
- They ignore that God has already destroyed the earth once before.
7 This same “word” (logos) which created the world, destroyed it in the flood, and maintains it now, has decreed that it will be destroyed when God decides. The uniformity we see in nature, scientific law, is actually the word of God.
8 His delay is a matter of perspective (Ps 90:4). His perspective is eternity. (Not lateness)
9 His delay is a matter of mercy. (Not lack of power.)
10-11 But the end will come.
Summing this up:
- In light of these things, there are moral imperatives for us if we claim to believe them. (3:11)
- We should be shocked by people who think the idea of Jesus coming back is stupid.
- Our guard against these things is to let our minds be shaped by the word of God.
- We need to see that the scriptural account of reality is completely opposed to any account based on the assumption of a universe without the God described in scripture. The world is not held together by unchanging, impersonal forces, but by the decision, and the word, of God.
- Just as the world had a beginning, it will have an end. But the Gospel tells us that this does’t have to be bad news. Christ took the wrath of God so that it doesn’thave to destroy us or everything that is truly valuable for us. We can escape the wrath of God and pass into eternal life through faith in Christ.
The newest best book to help you sort out questions about the bible.
I’ve quoted from this book several times here already, but I just finished it over the weekend and wanted to make a real recommendation. Vern Poythress’ Inerrancy and Worldview is the new book I will recommend to anyone who:
- has questions about the Bible’s trustworthiness
- wants to get a good handle on how worldview affects their thinking, and the thinking of the nonbelievers in their lives
- wants something not too difficult to read, and not to “thick”
- has time only for one book to read about these issues
In a style that is very “to the point,” Poythress tackles all the ways current thinking casts doubt on the Bible’s truthfulness and trustworthiness. But instead of taking the reader through detailed discussion of every “problem passage” or issue, he looks at a few test cases, and then goes behind every challenge to the Bible’s authority to show the assumptions hidden in the discussion. The result is that he help us see, from the ground up, how our culture does not actually have the case against our Scriptures which it often claims to.
Working through this book from front to back will give you a good working knowledge of how to see all these things from a Biblical perspective. I found it to be an exceptional “training for the mind” which offered a way of thinking I could clearly understand and take away for future use.
Best of all, Poythress shows a real heart for Christ and people all throughout the book. By the end he is simply pleading with us to place our full trust in the God who has spoken in His word. So in that sense, even though this book is very tightly reasoned, it is in no sense “heady.” You could say it’s “all heart.” (A very smart heart–Poythress has six earned degrees, including two doctorates–in Mathematics and Theology.)
I really can’t recommend this highly enough. And I can’t stress how much we as a community of younger believers need to make sure we aren’t wasting our time and our minds. God gave us our days and our brains to use to know Him and to spread that knowledge. It’s by no means the only thing we need to be doing, but reading and thinking through a book like this is way better than simply entertaining yourself for a few more hours.
Best of all, if you don’t want to drop the few bucks for the book, Poythress gives his stuff away for free. Click on the title below to download the pdf of the whole book:
Inerrancy and Worldview by Vern Poythress (pdf)
And if you just want a quick, 8-page dip into it, try the last chapter. Here it is to download: Chapter 36 – Scripture and Worldviews (pdf)
Finally, here’s a great section from that last chapter that sums up a lot of the book’s heart:
In short, the inhabitants of modern cultures—what the Bible calls “the world”—think that the Bible is merely human. To many, this view seems “obvious.” And yet it is a gigantic social illusion. We are corporately, as a whole society, captive to a counterfeit. The counterfeit is the idea of impersonal instead of personal laws, impersonal instead of personal divine governance of the universe. That substitution of the impersonal for the personal conforms to the description of Romans 1:18–25. It is a form of idolatry. It is false religion. But as a society we have found a way of concealing from ourselves its religious roots. It does not seem to be religious, but merely noncommittal.
People captivated by this illusion can still offer remarkable insights and remarkable triumphs in knowledge, especially in the natural sciences. Why? Scientific investigation still “works” because when it holds to an idea of impersonal laws, it still mimics the truth that God rules the world by his personal law. Scientists may borrow enough of the truth to succeed in many cases.
As a result of our modern atmosphere, many people are tempted to regard the Bible as one more book on religion. In their judgment it is merely human, and so they pay no attention to it. But other people may still be attracted to its message. So they may try to find a way not to give it up completely, but to make it fit in with what our modern society and our modern scientific results allegedly “know” about the world.
A person can subject the Bible to his modern assumptions by postulating a god who acts indirectly. This person assumes that human action is closed off from God. So he postulates—contrary to the Bible’s own claims—that the Bible must be language-bound and error-prone in the same ways as other human products. But a god can still meet people mystically and personally in the depths of their being when the Bible is read, because this so-called god somehow comes to people in the depths of their being. This meeting with god must be related in a paradoxical manner to scientific analysis of history, language, and society, because in those public realms no god can be allowed to appear.
A person who holds this view may also argue that such a god is pleased with humanity as we moderns now understand it. Human beings live their lives in history, in language, and in society because this is the way this god made it, and he cooperates with what he has made. Allegedly he has no wish to appear or speak directly, but only through the indirect media of history, language, and society as modern sciences have analyzed them.
A person may travel by this means through a series of steps until he reaches a position similar to [what is known as] neoorthodox theology. He need not ever have heard of classic neoorthodoxy. It does not matter. Neoorthodoxy makes a good fit to modernity because it need not break with the assumptions of modernity, but is in fact in harmony with them. It adds a god as an extra dimension, while leaving essentially unchanged the results of secular historical, linguistic, and sociological analysis. Meeting with a god is defined as personal and mystical, beyond normal categories of understanding. So modernity is safe. Divine meeting allegedly takes place through a Bible that is human in the modern sense. The merely human Bible becomes a channel for the mystical divine meeting.
This approach has many attractions, culturally speaking. Its main difficulty is that it must remake God and the Bible after its own conceptions. Since those conceptions have no firm basis, the whole project offers only a man-made god.
2 Peter Chapter 2: Notes from Last Night
Last night we continued our study of 2 Peter by working through chapter 2. Here’s the notes:
First, we worked our way in to the second chapter, to see how it fit into the overall message Peter was trying to convey.
1:3-15 — Peter wants us to be constantly growing in our knowledge of God, and our experience of the things God has freely given us. his will benefit us eternally.. See 3:18
3:17 — He wants us not led away in error.
3:1-2 — He wants us to remember the Prophet’s predictions (OT) and Apostles commands (NT) (1:12-13)
1:16-18 — …because they preach the truth from God—they saw the promises before they happened,
1:19-22 — …which lined up with and confirmed the OT, which was from God.
2:1 — …But, just like when those OT prophets spoke from God, and there were false prophets right next to them, so now there are false teachers right next to the Apostles.
So in Ch 2 we have a pitfall described in 3:17 – the error of the wicked which we must watch out for.
1-3
There are such things as false teachers.
The issues:
v. 1 They’re not from God. (parallel with False Prophets, not the Apostolic message). They deny God. They will bring destruction on themselves.
v.2 They gather followers, leading to destruction. They cause the true way to be looked down on
v.3 They deceive and exploit
4-9
The “angels who sinned” – see 1 Peter 3:18-20, Jude 5-6, Gen 6.
The point is v. 9. – God delivers the righteous and punishes the wicked.
- Even angels were judged for sin (v.4)
- Noah’s time: world judged for evil, Noah delivered (v. 5)
- Lot’s time: Cities destroyed, Lot delivered (v.6-7)
10-16 …those under judgment are: arrogant, ignorant, lustful, and dangerous. ( Here’s the quote I read from Richard Bauckham’s commentary on the false teachers’ pagan skepticism in 2:10-11: “It is not likely that the false teachers slandered the [angles]…The most plausible view is that in their confident immorality the false teachers were contemptuous of the demonic powers. When they were rebuked for their immoral behavior and warned of the danger of falling into the power of the devil and sharing his condemnation, they laughed at the idea, denying that the devil could have any power over them and speaking of the powers of evil in skeptical, mocking terms. They doubted the very existence of supernatural powers of evil.” (p. 262))
17-19 they have only empty promises
20-22 The end of their teaching, and of their own lives, if they don’t turn, is bondage and destruction. They came to know he way of righteousness, and experienced Jesus’ freeing power …but turned from the “holy commandment” (see 3:2) – the true (Apostolic) message about Jesus. See Matthew 12:43-45, Matthew 24:48-51; Luke 12:47-48
Final Thoughts:
- This language is shocking in our day. But we need to keep taking in scripture to get a clear picture of God.
- The Apostles knew they had the true message about Christ. They could clearly see how serious it is to mess with that message….
- See Genesis 3:15. If you don’t know Christ: This is a whole world-view that is totally different than what is typically believed today. It assumes there are things we can know about what is spiritually, eternally true, and that those things matter. It recognizes that there is much more to life than just what Science can describe or what we may experience on a “typical” day. And if there is…you must come to know it.
- We shouldn’t be surprised by different teachings about Christ.
- Teaching matters. Getting the message right matters. How? Keep checking it against the written record of what the Apostles taught about Jesus, and the prophets in the OT. Try to stay as close to it as you can. It has practical effects for our life now, and eternal consequences.
“What the Spirit is saying to the churches…”
I made this chart for a class I’m teaching on the book of Revelation. It shows the seven letters to the churches in Revelation 2 and 3, broken down into their common sections, so you can read vertically to see what Jesus says to each individual church, or horizontally, to see what He says in each section, to all the churches. I think it helps to visually arrange all His words in a way that we can let our minds see connections and development across the letters.
The more I look at it, the more I want to spend some serious time with it to let everything He’s saying sink in. Do we know what the Spirit is saying to the churches? Are we hearing His voice in our lives individually and as a family? He walks among the lampstands. He searches the hearts and minds.
Click on the pdf below to download and print out the chart for your own meditation.
And let’s be those who redeem our time by thinking deeply about Christ’s word to us, while we actively let it shape our living.