Greg Beale in A New Testament Biblical Theology (Baker, 2011) —
Jesus’ life, trials, death for sinners, and especially resurrection by the Spirit have launched the fulfillment of the eschatological already-not yet new-creational reign, bestowed by grace through faith and resulting in worldwide commission to the faithful to advance this new-creational reign and resulting in judgment for the unbelieving, unto the triune God’s glory. (163)
Greg Beale in A New Testament Biblical Theology (Baker, 2011) —
The Old Testament is the story of God, who progressively reestablishes his eschatological new-creational kingdom out of chaos over a sinful people by his word and Spirit through promise, covenant, and redemption, resulting in worldwide commission to the faithful to advance this kingdom and judgment (defeat or exile) for the unfaithful, unto his glory. (162ff)
Reading theology proper has a way of exposing our deficiencies in personal holiness.
I’ve been working my way through Scott Oliphint’s God With Us. It’s my favorite kind of book: all about God and thoroughly Christological (perfect for Advent reading). I love the doctrine of God’s aseity. I love how it blows our mental capacities, how we realize that we’re just standing on the seashore, that the ocean of the knowledge of God is only wetting our feet. God is greater than that which we can imagine. And then bigger than what we can’t imagine him to be.
It is so precious to feel his bigness, to be swallowed up by it, to close your eyes and weave together some special effects in your mind of what it looks like to be engulfed by the mystery of his fellowship, to be drawn into his communion, to consider the miracle of how we can know anything true about him.
And being immersed in this vastness affects how we think about personal holiness — namely, we realize the disparity between God and ourselves. We are more enthralled by this God to Whom (and by Whom) we have been reconciled. Little thoughts that may have gone unchecked are now rotten. There is an increasing impatience that the finished work of Jesus be more prevalent in the moments of our day. We want our union with Jesus to make more of a difference.
It’s an Isaiah 6 sort of thing. Not that we’re trying to merit a relationship. A God like that won’t be impressed with our unclean lips. We see him more clearly, we see ourselves in his light, and we’re stunned by the death and resurrection of Jesus all over again.
Since 1863, on the fourth Thursday of November, families and friends in the United States have gathered to commemorate an old tradition linked back to the early European settlers.
You know the story: The pilgrims and Native Americans came together for a happy feast to celebrate the harvest and forge new friendships. A few hundred years later, this event became a legislated holiday and got Norman Rockwelled into the fabric of American life. We call it Thanksgiving.
It’s interesting that we name a national holiday after an emotion — a very good emotion. In fact, an emotion for which the apostle Paul aimed his ministry. He tells it like this in 2 Corinthians 4:15:
It is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.
“It is all for your sake.” What’s he talking about? In short, “it” refers to Paul’s gospel proclamation along with its accompanying ethos of suffering and persevering faith (2 Corinthians 4:13–14). Or, said a little longer, “it” refers to Paul’s gospel proclamation flowing from an ethos in continuity with the Old Testament writer of Psalm 116 — an ethos that perseveres in the midst of affliction by faith in the resurrection.
This is Paul’s character. This is how he does it: afflicted, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed (2 Corinthians 4:8–9). He went about as a missionary, taking the gospel from one city to the next, carrying in his body the death of Jesus, looking to the eternal weight of glory. And he did it for our sake.
He did it for our sake so that as the gospel continues to advance among all peoples, it mayincrease thanksgiving, to the glory of God. As grace extends to more and more people, it makes more and more people grateful. And this whole act of extending grace and responding in gratitude glorifies God.
And it’s a particular kind of gratitude. There is nothing generic about it. It is thanksgiving for the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God incarnate, who came to save his people from their sins. This is the kind of thanksgiving that the apostle is aiming for. The kind that no holiday can manufacture.
While we do have some writings from the early pilgrims, we don’t really know the full details of the “thankfulness” present when the original attendees huddled around that now-famous meal. Were their hearts inclined to God in some vague sense? Did they call him Providence or Jesus? Were they just glad to have some food? We don’t know, and for our purposes it doesn’t really matter.
But what does matter is how we will huddle around our meal today.
Here’s a plea that we look along the beams of delicious turkey and good football to see Jesus, crucified for us, dead and buried for us, raised for us on the third day. For his grace has been extended to us. We’ve heard the good news. Paul (or one of the apostles) told someone who told someone who told someone. And eventually one of these “someones” told us. This grace has extended to “more and more people.” It has extended to you and me.
So in the midst of our many thanksgivings, may we be mainly thankful for that — for Jesus and all that he is for us. And in so doing, may we fulfill Paul’s goal, the increase of thanksgiving, to the glory of God.
(Originally published at Desiring God)
In 1976 John Piper wrote an article asking a two-part question:
This is ultimate. We are in deep water. And yet the reasoning behind such a question is quite simple: in Jesus we are God’s children and children want to know their Father. Pastor John explains,
[Y]ou don’t really know a person until you know what moves him most deeply. It makes no sense to say that we know God when we are not acquainted with his strongest desire and with the goal that guides all his actions. But if we don’t know him, then we can’t worship him and we can’t imitate him. In other words, if we are to be faithful children of our heavenly Father who worship him and imitate him as we ought, then we must answer [this question].
The entire article, “The Glory of God as the Goal of History,” has been recently transcribed and made available at Desiring God. It’s one of Pastor John’s earliest writings where the foundational pieces of Desiring God began to coalesce. It’s particularly interesting how the command to love our enemies (Piper’s Th. D. dissertation) is connected to the ultimate end of God’s glory.
(Check out the original post.)
Hebrews 7:3 —
He is without father or mother or genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but resembling the Son of God he continues a priest forever.
Melchizedek resembled the Son of God. But Melchizedek appear quite a while before Jesus came to earth. How is it that a past figure can be said to “resemble” (aphomoioo) a future figure? Jesus doesn’t resemble Melchizedek, Melchizedek resembles Jesus.
This fits right in line with the copy talk of Hebrews (Heb. 8:5) and it underscores the telic magnitude of Jesus Christ. He is the definite end. He is the point. He is the one to whom all the Old Testament Scriptures have pointed. And the one to whom all will bow.
He is the walk-off homer.
Here are some notes regarding the relationship between sanctification and mission, or say it another way, our being satisfied in God and our spreading a passion:
I recently spent a whole day tucked away at a local library. It was a golden spot. Quiet. Secluded. I sat beneath a shower of grace: an open Bible, a hungry soul, a copy of Owen’s “The Glory of Christ.” I spent good hours there reading and praying and preparing for a sermon about Jesus and his glory.
I left that spot and within an hour found myself in the clutter of a defiant three year old and her younger sister who really needed a diaper change. I would have longed for the tiny cell back in the library, except it dawned on me that this is where I really live. In fact, this is where most everyone lives, and if the glory of Christ doesn’t land on us here then we’ll spend our real lives oblivious to its wonder.
Our lives are not polished and shiny and set up on a mantle. They are messy and complicated and we get tired. The preeminence of Jesus can’t be an “out there” sort of thing. We’ve got to bring this home. One of the simplest ways to do that is to talk about Jesus, a lot.
We should talk about Jesus often and be clear about his identity, resisting every temptation to make him peripheral, secondary, or assumed. Here are two reasons why: the gospel and the glory of God.
It’s important that we talk about Jesus a lot because the gospel is not, first and foremost, the mechanics of some design that we attempt to helpfully articulate. But the gospel is, first and foremost, a Person.
A person, Jesus Christ, is the one who suffered in our place, who was raised on the third day. Jesus, the Person, was the one who though he was rich, yet for our sake he became poor so that we in his poverty might become rich. The gospel is about a person and that person is Jesus.
It’s important that we talk about Jesus a lot because the glory of God is not an abstract idea or motivation that we aspire to live for. But the glory of God is a Person
A person, Jesus Christ, is the one in whom all the fullness of deity was pleased to dwell. Jesus, the Person, is the Word of God made flesh as the ultimate revelation of the triune God—the revelatory action of God who embodies and supremely expresses the LORD’s intratrinitarian majesty. The glory of God is a person and that person is Jesus.
This simple: there is no gospel and there is no glory of God apart from Jesus Christ.
So talk about him.
John Webster writes:
Holiness is a mode of God’s activity; talk of God’s holiness identifies the manner of his relation to us. For if the word ‘holy’ is a shorthand term for a pattern of activity, if it indicates—as von Rad put it—’a relationship more than a quality’, then the holy God is precisely God manifest to humankind in his gracious turning.
‘God’s holiness’, wrote Bavinck, ‘is revealed in his entire revelation to his people, in election, in the covenant, in his special revelation, in his dwelling among them.’
What, then, we may ask, is the force of faith’s language of God’s holiness? What particular aspect of the unified identity of the triune God’s being, works and ways is indicated by this language? We may answer thus: Talk of God’s holiness denotes the majesty and singular purity which the triune God is in himself and with which he acts towards and in the lives of his creatures, opposing that which is itself opposed to his purpose as creator, reconciler and perfecter, and bringing that purpose to its completion in the fellowship of the saints.
Holiness, because it is the holiness of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ now present in the Spirit’s power, is pure majesty in relation. God’s holy majesty, even in its unapproachableness, is not characterized by a sanctity which is abstract difference or otherness, a counter-reality to the profane; it is majesty known in turning, enacted and manifest in the works of God. Majesty and relation are not opposed moments in God’s holiness; they are simply different articulations of the selfsame reality
For if God’s relation to us were merely subordinate to his primary majesty, then God’s essence would remain utterly beyond us, forever hidden; and if God’s relation to us were not majestic, then that relation would no longer be one in which we encountered God.
(Holiness, 41-42, paragraphing mine)
