Satan’s Determination to Undermine Revelation

“There is nothing truer to the portrayal of Satan than a determination to undermine the word of God, to get people to live on any other basis than revelation.”

- J. A. Motyer Look to the Rock

A Brief Overview of Redemptive History

“The idea of a holy, spiritual, self-revealing God, the free Creator of the world, and its continual Preserver. As correlative to this, and springing out of it, is the idea of man being made in God’s image, and capable of moral relations and spiritual fellowship with his Maker; but who, through sin, has turned aside from the end of his creation, and stands in need of Redemption. In the heart of the history, we have the idea of a Divine purpose, working itself out through the calling of a special nation, for the ultimate benefit and blessing of mankind. God’s providential rule extends over all creatures and events, and embraces all peoples of the earth, near and remote. In view of the sin and corruption that have overspread the world, His government is one of combined mercy and judgment; and His dealings with Israel in particular are preparative to the introduction of a better economy, in which the grace already partially exhibited will be fully revealed. The end is the establishment of a kingdom of God under the rue of the Messiah, in which all national limitations will be removed, the Spirit be poured forth, and Jehovah will become the God of the whole earth. God will make a new covenant with His people, and will write His laws by His Spirit in their hearts. Under this happy reign the final triumph of righteousness over sin will be accomplished, and death and all other evils will be abolished.”

~ James Orr, The Christian View of God and the World (Vancouver, Regent College Publishing, 2002, reprint of the 1893 edition), 14

Story-Shaped Lives

“The same impulse that makes us want our books to have a plot makes us want our lives to have a plot. We need to feel that we are getting somewhere, making progress. There is something in us that is not satisfied with a merely psychological explanation of our lives. It doesn’t do justice to our conviction that we are on some kind of journey or quest, that there must be some deeper meaning to our lives than whether we feel good about ourselves. Only people who have lost the sense of adventure, mystery, and romance worry about their self-esteem. And at that point what they need is not a good therapist but a good story. Or more precisely, the central question for us should be, ‘What personality dynamics explain my behavior?’ but rather, ‘What sort of story am I in?’”

~ William Kilpatrick, Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong (New York, NY; Simon & Schuster, 1992), 192.

Dorothy Sayers on the Doctrine of Hell

“[T]here seems to be a kind of conspiracy, especially among middle-aged writers of vaguely liberal tendency, to forget, or to conceal, where the doctrine of Hell comes from. One finds frequent references to the ‘cruel and abominable medieval doctrine of Hell’ or ‘the childish and grotesque medieval imagery of physical fire and worms . . . ‘ But the case is quite otherwise; let us face the facts. The doctrine of Hell is not ‘medieval’: it is Christ’s. It is not a device of ‘medieval priestcraft’ for frightening people into giving money to the church: it is Christ’s deliberate judgment on sin. The imagery of the undying worm and the unquenchable fire derives, not from ‘medieval superstition,’ but originally from the Prophet Isaiah, and it was Christ who emphatically used it. . . . [O]ne cannot get rid of it without tearing the New Testament to tatters. We cannot repudiate Hell without altogether repudiating Christ.”

~ Dorothy Sayers, “Introductory Papers on Dante“

(HT: Justin Taylor)

Jesus Did Not Arrive Unannounced

“The prophets searched. Angels longed to see. And the disciples didn’t understand. But Moses, the prophets, and all the Old Testament Scriptures had spoken about it — that Jesus would come, suffer, and then be glorified. God began to tell a story in the Old Testament, the ending of which the audience eagerly anticipated. But the Old Testament audience was left hanging. The plot was laid out but the climax was delayed. The unfinished story begged an ending. In Christ, God has provided the climax to the Old Testament story. Jesus did not arrive unannounced; his coming was declared in advance in the Old Testament, not just in explicit prophecies of the Messiah but by means of the stories of all of the events, characters, and circumstances in the Old Testament. God was telling a larger, overarching, unified story. From the account of creation in Genesis to the final stories of the return from exile, God progressively unfolded his plan of salvation. And the Old Testament account of that plan always pointed in some way to Christ.”

~ Tremper Longman III & J. Alan Groves (foreword) in George M. Schwab, Hope in the Midst of a Hostile World (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2006), x.

The Danger of Evidence Divorced from Revelation

“In evading the knotty problem of revelation, the strategy of adducing evidence for faith from human experience only reinforced the typically modern suspicion that the Christian religion was simply the product of the human imagination.”

~ Craig M. Gay, The Way of the (Modern) World (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 1998), 311.

Moving Towards a Deeply Comic Climax

“For the biblical writers, history is moving toward a deeply comic climax in which all wrongs are righted, all tears dried, and all loses regained with interest. Pain and the cross remain indelibly embedded in the narrative, and there is real waste and loss which is felt absolutely to be waste and loss. Yet, the final telos of the biblical story is absolute joy, peace, justice, and love. For the biblical writers, God’s victory is without question a victory in the ‘exterior world,’ for the Fall took place in this world, Israel was called in this world, Jesus was born, died, and rose again in this world, the Spirit came into this world, the gospel was preached to the nations in this world, and the new creation is a transfiguration of this world.”

~ Peter J. Leithart, Deep Comedy (Moscow, Id.: Canon Press, 2006), 33-34.

The Gospel in Context

“The gospel is integrally tied to the Bible’s story-line. Indeed, it is incomprehensible without understanding that story-line. God is the sovereign, transcendent and personal God who has made the universe, including us, his image-bearers. Our misery lies in our rebellion, our alienation from God, which, despite his forbearance, attracts his implacable wrath. But God, precisely because love is of the very essence of his character, takes the initiative and prepared for the coming of his own Son by raising up a people who, by covenantal stipulations, temple worship, systems of sacrifice and of priesthood, by kings and by prophets, are taught something of what God is planning and what he expects. In the fullness of time his Son comes and takes on human nature. He comes not, in the first instance, to judge but to save: he dies the death of his people, rises from the grave and, in returning to his heavenly Father, bequeaths the Holy Spirit as the down payment and guarantee of the ultimate gift he has secured for them—an eternity of bliss in the presence of God himself, in a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness. The only alternative is to be shut out from the presence of this God forever, in the torments of hell. What men and women must do, before it is too late, is repent and trust Christ; the alternative is to disobey the gospel (Romans 10:16; 2 Thessalonians 1:8; 1 Peter 4:17).

This story-line, and its connection with the gospel, could be fleshed out in a number of ways. But the point is simply this: the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ makes sense in the context of this story-line and in no other. If, instead of this world-view, this storyline, some other is adopted, the good news of Jesus Christ no longer makes sense or is so badly distorted it is no longer the same thing. For instance, if one adopts a pantheistic world-view, then ‘sin’ takes on an entirely different configuration and there is no transcendent God to whom to be reconciled. In that case, the ‘good news’ cannot be the announcement of God’s reconciling act in the death and resurrection of his Son, by which he bore his people’s penalty. If one adopts some naturalistic world-view, something similar could be said. If one holds that history is going nowhere or in circles determined by impersonal fate, then the notion of final judgement and ultimate division between bliss and the abyss is incoherent—and so too the good news that Christ reconciles rebels to their Maker, prepares them for glory, enabling them even now to enjoy foretastes of the kingdom still to be consummated.”

~ D. A. Carson,“The Biblical Gospel.” Taken from For Such a Time as This: Perspectives on Evangelicalism, Past, Present and Future, eds. Steve Brady and Harold Rowdon (London: Evangelical Alliance, 1996).

(HT: Justin Taylor)

Christian Theism & Biblical Authority

“The credibility of Christian theology is . . . essentially tied to the credibility of biblical revelation. . . . In the end, the self-authenticating character of divine revelation is the only ground upon which a distinctively Christian theism can be established.”

~ R. Albert Mohler, Jr., Atheism Remix: A Christian Confronts the New Atheists (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2008), 85.

Looking & Living Along the Text

“There is no more vital task facing Christians today than responding faithfully to Scripture as God’s authoritative speech acts — not because the book is holy but because the Lord is, and because the Bible is his Word, the chief means we have of coming to know Jesus Christ. Those who interpret the Bible rightly — those who look and live along the text, following the written words to the living Word — will have rightly ordered loves and rightly ordered lives.”

~ Kevin J. Vanhoozer, First Theology (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 41.