Tag Archives: glory of God

Reading as an Episode in the History of Salvation

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What is the setting of biblical interpretation?

The setting is best described by use of soteriological, ecclesiological and pneumatological teaching: the Christian interpreter is ‘reconciled to God, drawn into the fellowship of the saints and illumined by the Holy Spirit’. Of the soteriological and ecclesiological aspects, much has already been said: the Christian interpreter is one who has been extracted from the darkness of sin by the judgement and mercy of God, and set in the sphere of the church, the chosen race, the royal priesthood, the holy nation which is what it is by virtue of the divine call out of darkness into light.

Christian interpretation of Holy Scripture is determined by this setting; the ‘hermeneutical situation’ (that is, the constitutive elements of the business of scriptural interpretation, God, text and readers, and the field of their interactions) is not an instance of something more basic but an episode in the history of salvation. At every point it is defined by the fact that it involves this God (the one who is light and who in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit is luminously present), this text (Holy Scripture as the assistant to that presence), and therefore this reader (the faithful hearer of this God in and through this text).

John Webster, “Biblical Theology and the Clarity of Scripture,” Out of Egypt, italics and paragraphing mine

“…an episode in the history of salvation.” This is how we should think about what it means to read the Bible. Before dawn, over midmorning coffee, during your lunch break, at 2:30 in the afternoon, at the dinner table, before you go to bed at night–whenever your time is. Whenever it is that you open the Holy Scripture and read, at that moment, something miraculous is happening. You are reading because God has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Your reading is not separate from his saving activity but is in the same stream. The energy of your reading flows from the electing grace of the Father before the foundations of the world, demonstrated in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the fullness of time, being perfected now by the work of indwelling Holy Spirit. Your reading is another scene is the grand story of God’s saving fellowship. Your reading is miraculous.

The Primacy of the Word in Worship

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… And the full revelation of God is absolutely clear: if there is no salvation apart from Jesus Christ, then faith in Jesus Christ is certainly the basis of worship…

Worship begins with the response to divine revelation. But if little time of attention is given to the revealed Word of God, read, proclaimed, or taught, then to what do people respond? The result is that worship becomes superficial or sentimental. If the church is truly interested in recapturing the spirit and nature of the prophetic and apostolic ministry of the Word in worship, then there will have to be a greater emphasis placed on reading, teaching, and preaching the Word of God, but it has to be with clarity, accuracy, power, and authority.

Allen P. Ross, Recalling the Hope of Glory, 419, 429

The Epitome of Folk Religion

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But we will do everything that we have vowed, make offerings to the queen of heaven and pour out drink offerings to her, as we did, both we and our fathers, our kings and our officials, in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. For then we had plenty of food, and prospered, and saw no disaster. But since we left off making offerings to the queen of heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have lacked everything and have been consumed by the sword and by famine.” And the women said, “When we made offerings to the queen of heaven and poured out drink offerings to her, was it without our husbands’ approval that we made cakes for her bearing her image and poured out drink offerings to her?” (Jeremiah 44:17-19 ESV)

The people of Judah do not get it. Jeremiah has been pouring himself out in warning them of coming judgment. They have forsaken the God who created them and called them his own. How hideous. We can’t get this picture. We don’t know what it means for our creation to replace devotion to us for headlong affection for that which does not satisfy. It is atrocious. It deserves wrath of  a kind that we cannot fathom.

And here is the people’s logic: “Hey, when we worshiped the queen of heaven we had enough food to eat and weren’t threatened at all. Therefore, in order to have enough food to eat and not be threatened at all, then we must worship the queen of heaven.”

We are prone to revert to his mentality often. It is a human thing. We are dumbly pragmatic. The people of Judah should have looked beyond the transient logic of their current situation and instead listened to God’s Word. But that is exactly what they did not do. Over and over the Book of Jeremiah tells us that they did not listen, very reminiscent of Deuteronomy (Jer 6:10; 7:13, 26-27; 13:11; 16:12; 17:23, etc.; cf. esp. Deut. 28). The calling is to hear the word of God despite what our immediate circumstances may look like. This is what faith is.

And in order to have that, it takes a certain kind of heart (Jer. 31:33; Deut. 30:6).

‘To Be a Sinner’ to ‘To Be a Saint’

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Christian holiness is holy fellowship; it is the renewal of the relation to God which is the heart of holiness. To be a creature is to have one’s being in relation to God, for ‘to be’ is ‘to be in relation’ to the creator, and only so to have life and to act. To be a sinner is to repudiate this relation, and so absolutely to imperil one’s life by seeking to transcend creatureliness and become one’s own origin and one’s own end. This wicked refusal to be a creature cannot overturn the objectivity of the creator’s determination to be God with us, for such is the creator’s mercy that what he has resolved from all eternity stands fast. But the sinner’s failure to live in acknowledgment of the creator’s gift of life means that the creature chooses to torment and damage his being to the point of ruin, precisely by struggling out of the ordered relation to God in which alone the creature can be. To be a reconciled sinner is to be one in whom God’s mercy has put an end to self-destruction, one whose enmity has been authoritatively and irrevocably overruled, and one therefore restored to life in relation to God. And, therefore, to be a saint is to be a reconciled sinner, re-established in fellowship and so liberated and empowered for the works of holiness.

John Webster, Holiness, 85

His Beloved: On the Cost of ‘Salvation Through Judgment’

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In light of yesterday’s post, notice what J.G. McConville writes about the Book of Jeremiah:

The adoption language of new covenant, especially in Hebrews, draws attention to the promise in Jeremiah (and behind it Deuteronomy) that God himself would act decisively to bring about the salvation that had always eluded his people because of their hardness of heart. The coming of Jesus is thus presented as the culmination of that “incarnational” trend, already visible in Hosea and Jeremiah, in which God commits himself, at cost, to the salvation of his people.

(J.G. McConville, Jeremiah in “Theological Interpretation of the Old Testament,” 217ff, emphasis mine)

If salvation through judgment is a biblical-theological theme (and I think so, see Dr. Hamilton‘s article here on Acts), then we should view God’s cost in saving to involve some sort of anguish. What I mean is that we should not view the judgment aspect of salvation to be arbitrary, or to be a mere means to an end. It is a means, yes, but it is a real means. It really costs something. The LORD is not zapping lightening out of the finger tips of one hand while he polishes his nails on the other. He feels the weight of his wrath that is justly poured out. He knows more about it than we do.

‘Nor Did It Come Into My Mind’

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‘Cut off your hair and cast it away; raise a lamentation on the bare heights, for the LORD has rejected and forsaken the generation of his wrath.’

“For the sons of Judah have done evil in my sight, declares the LORD. They have set their detestable things in the house that is called by my name, to defile it. And they have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind.”  (Jeremiah 7:29-31)

The LORD’s judgment on Judah is inevitable. They have done evil in his sight. Detestable things, he says. They have defiled the holiness of his presence. They came together and decided to build some high places. The laid the foundation, cut the stones, and constructed this tower of sorts to serve one purpose–burn their sons and daughters. They didn’t snap their fingers and this thing just came to be. This calf didn’t pop out of the fire, either. They labored. They spent time. They poured out their sweat and energy.

How sick do you have to be? I just wonder that at some point, maybe at least on one day, a crew member asked his foreman, “So we’re going to burn our children right here? Should it be a little wider? You think this stone is durable enough?”

The atrocity that this is cannot be fully told. God was about to unleash his wrath. He was going to pour out his anger on individuals that he owned in his sovereignty. He was going to judge individuals for evil that he has the power to stop them from committing. And yet, notice what he says about their malicious activity–”which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind.”

He never told Judah to do that. This was their evil. Matter of fact, this evil did not even come into the mind of God. What does that mean? I think it is an anthropomorphism. It is the emphatic way that the LORD is saying that he is not the author of this evil. It never even crossed his mind.

QUESTION: how does that work? ANSWER: I don’t really know.

I don’t know how that works but I know that it does. God is sovereign in such a way and man left alone is in bondage to sin in such a way that man can commit evil for which he is morally culpable and of which God can say “nor did it come into my mind.”

Day 14: Holiness as God With Us

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It is difficult to overstress the importance of this relational character for grasping the nature of God’s holiness. It is fatally easy to think of God’s holiness simply as a mode of God’s sheer otherness and transcendence–that is, as the opposite of relational; as concerned, not with God with us, but with God apart from us. But to follow that path is radically to misunderstand the biblical testimony. The holiness of God is not to be identified simply as that which distances God from us; rather, God is holy precisely as the one who in majesty and freedom and sovereign power bends down to us in mercy. God is the Holy One. But he is the Holy One ‘in your midst,’ as Hosea puts it (Hos. 11.9); or as Isaiah puts it: ‘great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel’ (Isa. 12.6).

John Webster, Holiness, 45

He Who is their First Cause is Also their Last End

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God as an end for himself and the creature’s good are one in the same. God initiated the existence of his creatures with himself as the ultimate aim of their existence. The union that the creature enjoys with God is composed of this reality — the very existence of the creature is essentially the aim of God to make himself their final end. This ‘union of purpose’ is therefore a ‘relation of essence’, as it were. The essence of God to emanate his perfection as the final cause of all his activity is the cause of the Church’s existence. There is both a union and a derivative nature that the creature enjoys forever. The immeasurable riches of God’s grace that is poured out upon the creature to deepen their union will never arrive at a moment when that union is “infinitely perfect” (Edwards, End of Creation, 241). There is an eternal uniting and an incessant derivation.

A Two-Year Old and Her Questions

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“What’s Daddy doing?,” Elizabeth repeats with an inquisitive smile. We think that we are on the brink of entering her question-asking stage. She is putting things together. She is able to perceive a situation, detect a gap in her perception, and then formulate a question to fill the gap. What is most interesting to me is that all her questions deal with activity. She mainly wants to know what so-and-so is doing. And that so-and-so is mainly me. She wants to know what her daddy is doing.

A two-year old and her questions — you know we do the same. “What is going on?” We ask the question like issuing an order, “I’ll take my explanation with verbs, please. And a little adjective on the nouns.” We want to know what is up. What is happening? Life must have exegesis. We can’t go on without commentary. So it is with the nature of her question.

Now to whom her question is directed. Why, it’s me. She asks her daddy what he is doing. “She asks her daddy what he is doing” — does this sentence remind you of prayer? Have you ever prayed this way? You come to the Father and the only thing you can muster is the question: “Daddy, what are you doing?”

A variety of different circumstances can produce the same question. Maybe it is a painful blow that leaves us aching. Maybe it is goodness that makes us shake our heads in awe. Maybe it is both of those at the same time. Either way, we bring our Father a question. “Daddy, what are you doing?” This is a good question to bring him. We are not going the route of the postmodern glorification of doubt here. The goal of our question is not the question, it is the knowing. The goal is to know our Father and know what he is doing in Jesus Christ and by the Holy Spirit, for his glory and for our good. The question constitutes a part of our faith. We ask because we are not afraid. We ask because we’ve been given grace to believe that he is working for the sake of his name and our benefit.

I’m not sure exactly what my daughter expects me to say when she asks what I am doing. She asks because she has a question. She asks because she knows I’ll say something. And I think she asks because she knows that whatever it is I say, it will be for her good. A two-year old and her questions — yes, you know we do the same.

Two Foundational Sentences

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The Triune God’s ultimate purpose in creating, sustaining, judging, and redeeming the world is the mutual delight of himself and the Church in his identity expressed, in the accordance and realization of his eternal nature and pleasure.

The Triune God’s motive in creating, sustaining, judging, and redeeming the world is the pleasure he enjoys in expressing his identity as the abundant emanation of his infinite fullness, inseparable from his nature and pleasure as the utterly self-sufficient One who is essentially communicative.

Here are two foundational sentences improved, I think:

God’s ultimate purpose in creating, sustaining, judging, and redeeming the world is the welcomed delight of his identity expressed as it flows out of the delight he has for himself in the intra-trinitarian fellowship of the Father and Son, through the Holy Spirit, in accordance to and realization of his eternal nature and pleasure as the utterly self-sufficient One who is essentially communicative.

God’s motive in creating, sustaining, judging, and redeeming the world is the very delight that he enjoys in expressing his identity within the intra-trinitarian fellowship of the Father and Son, through the Holy Spirit, inseparable from his nature and pleasure as the utterly self-sufficient One who is essentially communicative.