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I want to preach Christ. And I want to do it from everwhere. Jesus says he’s everywhere in the Bible, so when I preach, I want to find him, and make him clear to people. 

Sometimes, this is easy. Turn to Mark, and it’s fairly easy to see Jesus. Turn to Esther, and it’s not so easy (whoaoh there cowboys! Don’t rush ahead to the comment bit yet…).

Or in Job. This Easter I thought I’d be a smarty pants. Job 19 -  ”I know that my Redeemer lives”. Piece of cake, thought I. Jesus = The Redeemer, He lives. Easy. 

Until I started working on it. Who was this Job? Job in the opening chapter, we’re told, is a good God fearer - makes sacrifices for his family and has lots of cows. Sounds like Abraham, probably one of his contemporaries. Which means he’s proper early in the Bible story. Pre-exodus, and importantly, pre-law of Moses. That’s important because it’s from the Law that we get all our understanding of the Redeemer that Jesus ultimately fulfills. So the question I started asking (and am still asking) is ‘what did Job mean when he said ‘Redeemer’?’ And as much as I tried, I couldn’t answer with ‘the same as us’. 

See, I know that Jesus is our kinsman redeemer because a redeemer had to be like the one that he was taking the place of, or avenging. As Jesus came in the likeness of sinful flesh to redeem us from the curse of the law, he was like us, and did for us what we couldn’t do. I see how Jesus fulfills the Redeemer thing. But if Israel was not going to have any idea about what a Redeemer was meant to do for another few hundred years what did Job mean… and don’t even get me started on Job not even being an Israelite…

Two things over-ride my thinking. First is this ‘progressive revelation’ thing (a posh way of of saying that as the Bible story developed, people learnt more about Jesus). I think it’s real. To me, it makes perfect sense that Adam knew less than us, Abraham knew less than us, Moses knew less than us… Isaiah knew more, but still less than us. Now, as Jesus goes ‘no one gets to the Father except through me’ it’s clear that they were all saved by Jesus. But whether they knew that as we do? I seriously doubt. 

Which brings me back to Job. It’s clear that he trusted God. It’s clear that he was vindicated by God. and that he spoke to God. And all of this, looking back, I am convinced is Jesus. Lookinh via the cross, I know that Job 19 is about Jesus. I just don’t have a clue whether he knew this at the time.

The other factor is that I want to be true to the text. I don’t want to go all Spurgeon on anyone. I know “he was greatly used by God” and that I should pray for a bit of what he was given… but he’s no model for explaining the text  is he? (Except for the Treasury of David for some reason…). 

But maybe I’ve gone too far over to the dry side. All word and no spirit, that’s what they call it. The more I tried to find Jesus legitimately in Job, whilst fighting my temptation to see him as I see him, before seeing him as Job saw him… the less I could see anything. Are you confused? Good. So was I.  

In the end, I cut my loses. And went after Romans 1 instead.      
 

For some reason, the word obedience has a hard time in todays society. Most people, I should imagine, on hearing the word would be put off imedieatly whatever was being discussed. Obedience implies submission (another ‘dirty word’) which implies authority (just usinig the ‘a’ word today probably gives this post an 18 certificate) and as a result is something to be scoffed at by today’s postmoderistical outlook.

But what’s interesting for me is the central role obedience should play in our Christian lives. Last Wednesday I took the final installment in what seems like a marathon of Bible studies (which have lasted since last September) on the ‘Sermon on the Mount.’

Jesus really hit it home for me how much obedience should be a normal part of our Christian lives, if not a key part. And it got me thinking. Essentially sin is disobedience, that’s the problem! Essentially what seperated Jesus from every other human that’s lived was…obedience, he did, always, the will of the Father.

When Jesus says on the day of judgement, “Away from me I never knew you.” We should all be on the recieving end, becuase anyone who doesn’t obey the will of the Father, no matter what they say or do, is actually a reject.

If you’ve ever read the sermon on the mount hopefully you’ve realised that this obedience malarky is impossible for you or I. Jesus knew this and that’s why his first beattitude was “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”

Luckily, because of the Saviour Jesus was, we don’t get judged on that final day as to whether we are obedient or not because Christ was, more so than we could ever be. BUT, now we are saved, the Sermon becomes an example of obedience that the Spirit is working in us to achieve (it’s called sanctifictaion).

how do you measure spiritual growth? I’m going to venture it’s by obedience to the will of the one who sent Him.

I’ve found that boys and girls have very different tastes, every orange wednesday this becomes clearer to me. It was my choice to watch Blades of Glory, it was Jenny’s to watch Freedom Writers. Next week, we’ll go and see the U2 film (that’s my choice), this week it was Jenny’s with Juno (and secretly, I was very pleased, because it would have been mine too).
It’s a film about a teenage pregnancy. Here’s the trailer.

As far as the film goes, you sort of see it coming. Girl gets pregnant / girl tells boy / girl (thankfully) bottles out of an abortion / girl decides to give the baby up / girl wrecks a marriage / girl has baby / girl gives away baby / girl sings a song with baby’s dad. And even though what I’ve just typed looks more like a particularly dark episode of Byker Grove, it is really funny. All of it. Her telling him having warmed him up by complimenting his mum’s detergent? Funny. Her telling her best friend that she’s ‘for shiz prego’? funny. Her parents admitting that they’d rather she be on hard drugs? (Dark, but) funny. It made me laugh. So as far as a comedy goes, it’s job well done Juno.

Go and see it. It’s funny. But, maybe there’s a lesson or two to learn from it. They could have disowned her, but Juno’s parents’ reaction to her being pregnant calms and they stand by her - that’s a lesson. And as the 9 months tick by, you see Juno becoming more and more leperised by her classmates, and the reaction of those that walk with her is inspiringly counter-cultural. As I watched it, I thought of how I might react if a sixteen year old I knew got ‘caught out’. Which one of her classmates would I be most like? “For shame Juno, how could you..?”

And the thing is, it would be so easy to now make this blog about guilt. ‘Teenage pregnancy happens in churches, so be more like Juno’s good friends, and less like the bullies that give her a hard time.’ And that would look like a good thing. Externally, that’d be the right thing to do. But internally, that’s another matter. It may look like the right thing to do, but it’s not the gospel. It’s just moralising.

You see, it’s not just doing that right thing that’s important. It’s doing it for the right reason, with the right motivation. And our reason is always the cross. It’s only when we see ourselves in Juno that we’ll be changed ‘internally’. Before God, we’re all Junos - we’ve all been caught out and should be every bit ashamed. But the gospel is that Jesus, who in dying on the cross became the ultimate Juno - bearing the ultimate shame - our shame. Mark 15 shows Jesus being mocked by everyone, even sworn enemies united to shame him. And as they did, he was taking our place, and feeling our shame. When we get this, we’ll see that we have nothing to hide behind when a Juno walks in our church. We won’t want to help simply because ‘it’s the right thing to do’ but because ‘we can because Jesus dealt with our shame and loved us when he should have chucked us in the skip, and we have no right to see her as any different to us’.

It has got faults, of course it does. The biggest one being that it downplays the reality of the situation it describes. It glamorises a child having a child. And at the end of the film, I was left thinking ‘that was one hairy year in the life of Juno McGuff, thank goodness it’s all over now, and she can get back to playing the guitar with her boyfriend’; that’s not a good thing. But I stilll don’t think that that’s no reason to not go and see it. Don’t get all reformed and precious about making light of sin. Take your friends, and use it. This film will be seen by millions, lets make the most of it.

So, the good wife and I have returned from the University of Warwick Christian Unions annual ‘mission week’. I was informed while I was there that it was my 6th consecutive mission at Warwick (4 as a student, the last to as an “Assistant Missioner” Next year I’m determined to get us T-Shirts which say, “I A.M.”…too far?)

Anyway, back to the point in hand. This year’s mission was branded, “Priceless” to see the website with all the info go here (it really was well put together). The buzz phrase they were banding around in advertising it was, “It may be free but it wasn’t cheap” (a big golden star whoever lets me know where they stole that from, it’s far too clever for the Oxbridge rejects that congregate at Warwick).

Something different happened this year, we got payed to be A.M’s. Payed? It was after all only a token amount, but why on earth should we get payed? (For the record I didn’t raise this at the time, I took the money and ran). After my very first conversation with someone about the gospel I thought to myself, “I should be paying them to allow me this opportunity to obey and serve God!”

Pile on top of this Lewis’ reasonably inspiring story of the girl on the bus, it got me thinking, could we ever put a price on sharing the gospel with someone? How about a price on getting along side and already christian whose struggling at Uni and encouraging them to fight the fight and stand up for Jesus? How about getting along side a fired up Christian and spurring them on to not just a Uni life with Jesus, but the rest of their lives serving Him, becoming increasingly satisfied in him?

The week really was priceless, for me, for the CU, for the people who heard the gospel for the first, second, hundredth time! And why? Because the gospel is priceless!!! And any work done in that framework must be priceless too!

So it’s 2008, year of the Beijing Olympics, Liverpool’s first ever Premiership title and the time for all sorts of new resolutions and new starts.

It’s wonderful isn’t it, 2008 offers us all a clean slate and a chance to really focus the mind on making the changes in our lives we’ve been to afraid to make in 2007. But how should the Christian view it?

Well I think that New Years is a bit like the Gospel. Gasp, what could I mean? People, in general, view it as a chance to start afresh, the Gospel tells us that we have fresh lives in Christ. People view it as a chance to persue their dreams with renewed vigor, the Gospel tells us to turn around and run toward Jesus.

CJ Mahany’s “Cross Centred Life” (a great quick read) remined me that the gospel is for every day, not just for Sundays, not just for Easter or Christmas or New Years, every single day.

My thoughts, for what they’re worth, are that every day for the Christian should be a very merry little ‘new year.’ Every day should start with the knowledge that we have a ‘clean slate’ a renewal in our minds that God’s Grace and Christ’s Sacrifice are sufficent to cover yesterdays transgressions. Every day should start with a new resolve to love God with all our heart and to love our neighbours in the same way we love ourselves. Jesus IS for Christmas, Jesus IS for New Year, but much better than that is that Jesus IS for everyday, we’d be fools to leave Him be!

I’ve been thinking about the Facebook thing. Interesting isn’t it? Gossip, flirt, stalk. Or find old friends and keep in touch with family around the world. Or maybe a bit of both. The choice is yours.

Choose friends, ignore friends, control what other people can see about you. Choose what information you give out, and manufacture a profile. Add to your friends, look popular. Communicate with them as often as you wish (which may be never) but you can still have a look at their holiday pictures. A virtual community for a virtual generation. Virtual relationships have been epidemic for a while, but now they just got global.

Isn’t Facebook terrible? No, not really. At least, not if the concept of demand and supply has any truth in it. At the end of the day we will put it to whatever use we feel the greatest need of. Facebook is popular because it gives people what they want. If anyone is to blame then it’s uncomfortably nearer home. I’m not sure we need to blame anyone actually, it’s hardly the purge of our generation. But it’s an excellent snapshot of it.

On a different note, I came across a couple of Facebook groups the other day which worried me. I’ve referred to one already, (in the comments on my ‘Golden Compass’ blog). The second group which worried me is called ‘Let’s get Tim Hughes to number one‘, and it’s reason for existence is as follows:-

Firstly, can I be very clear that I have nothing against Tim Hughes at all, he has written some great songs that we would do well to use in our churches for the building up of God’s people. Secondly, I really, really don’t want to be a heresy-hunting, grace-killing, sniping critic of brothers and sisters in the Lord. I sincerely believe that the organisers of this group have the very best of motives. But at the same time, I do see a lot here to worry me. I have some questions:-

• Precisely why is it “about time some Christian music was all powerful in the charts and therefore on our national airwaves“?
• Why have we chosen Tim Hughes and why is this song deemed most suited?
• How exactly does this qualify as a “mission“?
• Is quoting Colossians 3 v 23-24 as justification for this venture, really a great use of Scripture?

I imagine I’m preaching to the converted here, but in all seriousness, does this kind of thing help to present the gospel to people? Or does it make Christians look rather… well… ‘cult-ish’? Unless I’m mistaken, what is being proposed here is the manipulation of the music charts to prove… to prove… well what exactly?

It’s tempting to rant about what alternative charitable use 5,000 x 79p’s could to be put to, but my own failure in stewarding money would make me a hypocrite.

But here’s an idea… How about we all got our heads out of the Christian music ghetto for 5 minutes? What if we got 5,000 Christians to spend 79p on iTunes to download a song their work-colleagues are loving, spend a bit of time thinking about how it relates to the gospel, and trying to start a gospel conversation? (Now we might start using Colossians 2 in a bit of context…)

The ghetto might be a lovely place to hang out, but nobody else is listening.

So I’ve been thinking about this Golden Compass thing. I should say at the outset that I haven’t read Pullman’s books but not out of any sense of conscience. My Christian friends who have read them divide into two groups; there’s the “don’t read them, they’re horrible” bunch and the “great stories, Pullman has some serious issues” crowd. (Actually even those who are positive agree that the standard of writing goes steadily downhill after book 1…)

Obviously I can’t comment. But what concerns me with the above article is the call to boycott this film. Before anyone says “ah yes, but this is a Catholic group”, remember that Evanglicals have been similarly agressive with boycotts over this and other artworks in the past, too.

What concerns me here is the attitude of (if I understand it correctly) “don’t let anyone watch this film because they may then go and read the books and then they might become atheists…”

When we consider that many evangleicals share this attitude, I have to ask the question, is our message so fragile that we daren’t read an atheist in case we find him more convincing? Is our confidence so low? Shall we present this blinkered attitude to a world who is looking for consistency? If the gospel is true then we have confidence, if it isn’t then why are we afraid that people might leave our religious club anyway?

Or here’s an idea… how about we read this stuff and engage with it? Paul didn’t walk blindfolded around Athens. Neither did he organise picket lines. But neither did he observe the city’s religious life without reference to the gospel. How about we work at reading Pullman through the lens of Biblical truth? What can we affirm? What do we disagree with and why? How do we best enter into dialogue with Pullman and those who share his world view? How about we read this book with our kids and help them to do the same?

These are massive questions and need great wisdom in most cases. Of course, it’s so much easier to ignore what Pullman is expounding, or to oppose it aggressivley or even hyper-defensively. But I’m not sure that that’s the Biblical response.

For those who haven’t been reading proGnosis for that long or who haven’t read every post we write, a while ago I posted on how some old Church leader from the 2nd Century, Irenaeus, proposed that Jesus probably died in his late forties (and had to to save people who are in the latter stage of life). But the main focus of the blog was how we assume that Jesus started ministry at age 30 and died when he was 33, but how we don’t actually know that. If you want to read the post, click here.

But after a Greek lesson translating John 2:13-22 of all things, it seems there has been some good research into the question of how old Jesus was. If you want to read the full article, by Andreas Köstenberger, click here. But I’ll summarise very briefly now. Jesus was born about 5BC (and there is no year 0, apparently!). John the Baptist started his ministry in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, as Luke 3:1-3 which was 29AD. Jesus started his ministry soon after John the Baptist and Luke tells us further that he was about 30 when he started his ministry. According to the evidence we’ve seen he would be more accurately, about 33 years old when he actually started ministry (not when he died).

Now for how long he was in ministry. John records three Passovers (and one happens each year) and then the synoptics (Matthew, Mark and Luke) record one more. Four passovers equals three and a half years, and for a Passover to happen on a Friday, Jesus could only have died in the year 30AD or 33AD. So 29AD plus about three and a half years equals 33AD, which makes Jesus about 36 or 37 when he died. Comprendez vous?

The great thing to remember here is that all the evidence in different gospels ties in to other historical records, such as Josephus’. If it was made up, surely they’d get dates confused and the stuff in Luke wouldn’t match the records in John nor the historical records nor the recent research stuff about stars and all that. The stuff in the gospels actually happened!

Yesterday, in our module on the study of Christ, we had a lecture on Mary the Mother of Jesus and the Virgin Birth and the contribution to Jesus’ humanity. We heard about all sorts of different things including about these Jewish Rabbis at the time of the gospel writings who would take one small verse of scripture and go off on one about all the different fanciful meanings, which made me and Lewis look at each other as if to say, Croeso i Gymru!¹

We finished the lecture quite abruptly as lunch was upon us. So in our next lecture, after we had been fed with a roast dinner, he started by asking if there were any questions from the last lecture, to which I asked, “what about all the Roman Catholic teaching that Mary had to conceive Jesus perfectly?” (Which is formally known as the Immaculate Conception.) Our Lecturer, Bob Letham, had only hoped question time to take 5 minutes but alas the next half hour was taken up addressing the subject to the detriment of our knowledge of the humanity of Christ (as that was what the lecture was supposed to be on!).

So the big question was this: How could Jesus be born of a human and be fully human without inheriting Mary’s sinful nature. I think there are four possible and reasonable answers, some more heretical than others!

1. The Catholic View.
This view comes from a good place, since when it was ‘invented’, it was done so to try and preserve a high view of Jesus’ deity. This view is that Mary, by special grace of God, was conceived without original sin in her. This way, when she conceived Jesus by the Holy Spirit, her contribution was not tainted with Sin. There is nothing biblically to suggest anything to do with this view.

2. The Denial of Original Sin view.
One possible answer that we didn’t discuss yesterday but which did pop into my head, and I almost gave just to be heretical, is that we do away with the doctrine of original sin. That is that we all, in a way, inherit sin as a ‘disease’ from our fathers traced right back to Adam and Eve. Because of this we are all born with sin. If we simply deny this then that means that every human is conceived and born without sin and that Jesus could be conceived and born without sin. But of course, that means denying a significant and seemingly clear teaching of the Bible.

3. The Reformed Rational view.
This one was where it got overwhelming in a confusing sense for me, but I’ll do my best to explain. We all sinned in Adam, but Jesus came as a second Adam. So just in the creation of the world the spirit hovered over the waters, so in Jesus creation, I guess you could say that the spirit hovered over Mary’s waters or something (is that going too far?!). And then it all started to sound like a bit of forcing of logic a bit like how the Catholics did, requiring special grace and all that, but not that Mary was conceived without sin, just Jesus. It seems to me like a forcing of human logic upon something which is something else and of course it seems to go ever so slightly beyond what the Bible actually says.

4. The Orthodox view.
I put Orthodox in italics because as far as I know this isn’t the actually view of the Orthodox Church on this particular matter (in fact in practice, they’re pretty much Catholic on this particular subject). This view just smacks² of a lot of the tendencies of Orthodox Church theology, as far as I know. So this view is that I don’t know - it’s a mystery - but it works. Jesus was fully human but he was conceived without the taint of original sin. How that works out practically, I dunno, it’s something of a mystery!

And this is where the Orthodox Church attracts me. They often explain things in terms of mystery whereas the Western churches (Catholic and Reformed/Protestant) try and force reason and make these overwhelming doctrines rational. I suspect this is one of the throwbacks of having that enlightenment thing all those years ago (even though there are hints that it stems from right back to the early church where the Western churches would talk more in terms of black and white whereas Eastern churches would be more vague).

Although our faith is reasonable, I would suggest it goes beyond human reason to a place we can’t go. So although some things are clear to us, such as Jesus being fully God and human, but other things can’t be forced into human rationality, such as exactly how Jesus became fully man. When we have this attitude, it makes us less arrogant, more accepting of others and gives us a greater sense of awe for our great God who is far greater than we can conceive. Allow yourself to be overwhelmed with God rather than just verging on it!

¹ For those who are so ignorant of Welsh that they don’t know what it means, well, shame on you! It means “Welcome to Wales”!
² For those who are so ignorant of the English language, to smack of something is to have hints, flavours or essences of that said thing.

What are us evangelicals banging on about at the minute? That’s right, atonement. I’m going to resist the temptation to tag Chalke in this post, but it’s because of this fella that this post really exists.

As we’ve discussed, at quite some length at proGnosis, exactly what is wrong with ‘liberal’ Christians theology we’ve come up with some quite varied answers. Some of us think just screwy Cross theology, some think screwy Christology, others that it’s down to a misunderstanding of the nature of sin…or God. Me, I think it comes down to authority, and the authority of scripture at that.

So me and Grudem were snuggled up in bed the other night and I thought, “Hey, let’s check out the preface, see what drives a guy to right ‘Systematic Theology’.” Interestingly enough Grudem had this to say:

“I do not think that a true system of theology can be constructed from within what we call the ‘liberal’ theological tradition- that is people who deny the absolute truthfulness of the Bible… this does not mean that those in the liberal tradition have nothing valuable to say; it simply means that differences with them almost always boil down to differences over the the nature of the Bible and its authority.”

It’s like this, if two people come together to play rugby, one decides he’s playing by union rules, the other by league rules, they’ll never agree as to whether a try was scored or not because they aren’t starting from the same place. And it’s the same with people who slam Jesus and what He did for us. They cannot be coming from the same place with regards to the authority of scripture. The same is true for all manner of areas of theological concern. Unless we agree on the inspired, infallible, absolute authority of the Bible, we aren’t going to see eye to eye on much.

In fact, I think that authority issues play a bigger part in this, after all isn’t sin an authority issue? Instead of letting God be in control man wants to be in control himself. It’s idolatry. And so with the Bible, people don’t want to be ‘told how it is’ by a dusty old book, no they’d prefer to remain in the driving seat. So, their morals lead them or some arbitrary framework leads them, anything other than an outside authority.

When it’s the root of sin, no wonder it’s the root of slander against the cross.