If the Bible Says it Once, It’s True

Some Christians believe in annihilationism, that is, that those who do not receive Jesus will not suffer in  hell, but will actually cease to exist.

But Matthew 25:46, plain as day, says that people will be punished forever if they are not saved.  It would be hard to reconcile annihilationism with these words of Jesus.  In his Systematic Theology, Wayne Grudem wrote, “The Bible only needs to say something once for it to be true.”

Eternal punishment in hell is a terrible doctrine, indeed.  But if the Bible teaches it, then we must believe it, and hard as this seems, learn to love it in a God-honoring, Christ-exalting, non-vengeful way.

Don’t Get Any Leviticus on My Chicken, I Like Mesquite.

If you are in the Canton, North Carolina area next week, you might want to check out the the Bible burning hoedown on Halloween.

According to the church, the King James Version is the only true version of God’s word and that other versions are “perversions” and “Satanic.”  I mean, it makes perfect sense that a Bible, originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, that was translated to English in England in 1611 is the most authoritative Bible in the history of the world.  Who can argue with that logic?

Furthermore, many popular Christian books will be up for a roasting as well. Authors include, among others, John Piper, Billy Graham, Bill Bright, Chuck Swindoll, and some guy named Mark Driskol.

The website, however, did not say they would be burning the English Standard Version of the Bible or C.S. Lewis books.

Oh, and don’t eat beforehand.  They will be serving “bar-b-que chicken, fried chicken, and all the sides.”  So bring your appetite, lighter fluid, and a fire extinguisher — just in case the kiddos get to close to the flames.

Preaching This Sunday on The Gospel and Suffering

This past week a pastor that works at Beam Development Center kindly asked if I would be willing to preach at his church before I leave for home.  I graciously accepted.  I’ll be speaking there this Sunday, October 25 at 10am (3am American Central Time).

I’ll be preaching from Romans 5:1-5.  The title will be “The Gospel and Suffering.”  The health and wealth mindset reigns down here, and I would miss a great opportunity if I didn’t try to dispel this false teaching by speaking on what the Bible really says about God’s sovereignty and suffering.  As you finish reading this post, please take a minute to pray for these things:

• That God would say “Let light shine!” and that the blinding work of the devil would be overcome so that people would see Jesus and believe the gospel (2 Cor. 4:4-6).
• That God would work mightily so that the demonic “prosperity (false) gospel” would be exposed.  It is held tightly by so many poor, black, African congregations.  I want to preach “Christ and him crucified” and not a gospel of comfort and convenience.
• That God would speak clearly through me and the pastor, Ludwig, who will be translating my message.  It doesn’t take a linguistic expert to know that speaking with a translator is never easy.  And no matter what your view on speaking in tongues is, no one can deny that, in fact, I’ll be speaking in a tongue (American English) and Ludwig will be interpreting my message to the congregation’s native tongue (Tswana).  We know that the Bible says this is difficult and so we should pray for power to interpret (1 Cor. 14:13).  Pray for clear, powerful, Christ-centered exaltation of the word of God.

Thank you!

Did Jesus Heal One or Two Demon-Possessed Men in the Gadarenes?

What do we make of passages like Matthew 8:28-34, which says that Jesus healed two demon-possessed men in the country of the Gadarenes, while Mark 5:1-20 and Luke 8:26-39 record Jesus healing one?  An agnostic, atheist, or even a Jew might cry, “CONTRADICTION!  The Bible is false!”  A closer look with some critical thinking, however,  will reveal otherwise.

There are at least three reasons why I don’t think these passages are contradictory:

1. In narrative accounts — even non-biblical ones — there are always different aspects of a story that authors choose to focus on. Mark and Luke focus on the man who desired to follow Jesus and the command given to him to be a missionary at home rather than a traveling one with Jesus (Mark 5:18-19; Luke 8:38-39).  Matthew focuses on the fact that Jews in the nearby town rejected him by begging him to leave their region (8:34).   This fits well into the context because Jesus had just said that “many will come from east and west [that is, Gentiles] and recline at the table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom [that is, the Jews] will be thrown into the outer darkness” (8:11-12).  Remember that Matthew’s account is the most “Jewish,” in that its goal is to present and proclaim Jesus as Israel’s Messiah.
2. Mark and Luke never say that Jesus healed only one man. Both write that Jesus met “a man” who was possessed by demons.  By choosing to ignore the second man mentioned in Matthew they do not deny his existence in the story.  Rather, perhaps Mark and Luke focus their attention on the one because he was compelled to follow Jesus, unlike the other.
3. There seems to be a difference in the particular kind of demon-possession both men experienced. Mark 5:15 says, “And [the townspeople] came to Jesus and saw the demon-possessed man, the one who had had the legion, sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid.”  Why would Mark write “the one who had had the legion” if there was only one man healed?  Wouldn’t he have just written that they “saw the demon-possessed man,” and left it at that?  He would have — unless there were two men with different types of demon-possession.  Further, Luke 8:30 tells us that the name of the demon in this man was “Legion,” because “many demons had entered him.”  Perhaps the other man only had one or two and not a multitude.  It makes sense then that the man in Mark and Luke would be the one to follow Jesus.  For he loved much because he was forgiven much, “but he who is forgiven little, loves little” (Luke. 7:47).

ESV Proverbs Wordle

Teaching the Bible at Beam

One of the great (new) joys I have here in South Africa is to teach the Bible along with my friend Rylan Reed to four guys who work at Beam Africa, a local development center for township children, here in Pretoria.  Last week we talked about new birth and what God has done to make us dead sinners alive in Christ.  This week, we discussed grace, faith, and good works from Ephesians 2, James 2, and Abraham’s life.

Here are some pictures from our time together today:

Question of the day: “How do we know if someone has true faith?”

From the left: Ludwig, Brian, and Ronney.

I promise you I’m talking, not sneezing.

Rylan talking about the relationship between faith and works in James 2 (the guy on the right is Blessing).

1 & 2 Samuel Bible Studies

One of the more helpful resources people have found on this blog are the small group studies I have written for 1 & 2 Samuel (published by Campus Crusade’s Centerfield Productions).  I wanted to bring these links to your attention in case you are studying these books in a small group, on your own, or even if you just like to gather resources.

• Download 1 Samuel Bible Studies
  
• Download 2 Samuel Bible Studies

Was Noah Righteous Before He Found God’s Favor?

I got a question from a friend yesterday.  It was about Noah.  This person asked if Noah should really be grouped with the wicked people of Genesis 6:5, “The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”  The reason she asked was because verse 9 says, “These are the generations of Noah.  Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generations.   Noah walked with God.”

Here was my response (with edits for clarification):

Thanks for your question.  It’s a good one, and important.  One of the basic rules of Scripture interpretation is to let Scripture interpret Scripture.  In this case we can see a chronological progression in Genesis 6 that interprets this for us.   Genesis 6:5 says that every man was wicked and that all of his thoughts and intentions were only evil.  In 6:8, it says that Noah “found favor” with God, or in other words, God had grace on Noah.  That is Noah’s changing point, his salvation, his new-birth if you will.  That was his justification, where his legal (not day-to-day actual) “righteousness” began, and it started process of sanctification (day-to-day, practical holiness).  Because of that, the next verse (6:9) says, “Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation.”  You are right, “blameless” doesn’t mean perfect, but it means, “unable to be blamed.”  This “righteousness” is the legal transaction in which God gives Jesus’ righteousness in exchange for Noah’s sin (see Rom. 3:23-26 for how God declared OT saints righteous; cf. 2 Cor. 5:21; Phil. 3:1-11).  Because of God’s favor (i.e. grace), Noah was unable to be blamed for sin.  We can compare that to Romans 8:33, “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect?  It is God who justifies.”

Every man is counted with that wicked, sinful group at one point, but many men (like Noah) get grace and are declared righteous when they believe God (just like Abraham, see Rom. 4:1-12).  Ephesians 2:1-4 says that before this favor we find, we were dead in our sins and were “children of wrath.”  The change in identity happens when God comes “rich in mercy” and has “great love” (that’s a like having “favor”) for us and saves us.  What happened to Noah was like what happened to the Corinthians: “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?…And such were some of you.  But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11).  There was a fundamental change in Noah’s and the Corinthians’ identity.

So Noah was wicked, but God had grace on him.  The righteousness Noah had wasn’t practical, day-to-day perfection from sin (though he was empowered by God, just as we are, to kill sin).  Noah’s righteousness was the legal act of God in which he forgave his sin, declared him righteous, and imputed Jesus’ righteousness to him.

The Wall Has Been Broken Down

How is a person made right with God? What removes the sin, condemnation, and curse that we made for ourselves? Paul tells us in Galatians 3:13, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us — for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’.”

Paul takes this saying from Deuteronomy 21:23. The context is that if a man has committed a crime punishable by death, and he is hanged on a tree, he should not remain there overnight. Rather, the body should be buried that same day. Paul now applies this to Jesus. Jesus was hanged on a cross (made of wood from a tree; Peter refers to the cross as a “tree” in 1 Peter 2:24 and in Acts 5:30). This tells us that Christ was crucified to become a curse for us. He didn’t just take on a curse, he became a curse. It was as if Jesus was the one who committed “a crime punishable by death” instead of us, so that we might become his righteousness (cf. 2 Cor. 5:21).

This imputation of man’s sin (every person!) into Christ’s inner man, his spirit, happened for this reason: “So that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith” (Gal. 3:14).  If justification were only through the Law, Gentiles could never be saved because they were not given the oracles of the Law.  Christ came and died, however, to break “down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in the place of two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility” (Eph. 2:14-16).

What is Paul referring to? For centuries there was hostility between God and the Gentiles as well as the Jews and the Gentiles. Paul reminds the Ephesians of this: “Remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh…were at that time separated… alienated… strangers… having no hope… without God” (Eph. 2:11-12). Yet he continues: “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ (v. 13).

Hallelujah! Christ had to die in order to fulfill God’s promise of “all the families of the earth” being blessed. Without his death and resurrection, there would be no chance for all the families to be blessed, because not all the families had received the law! There would be no opportunity for salvation. And because we know that no one can keep the law, even the Jews would have been eternally separated from God.  How awesome is God’s wisdom and providence.

We know then that one of the Father’s purposes in the Son’s death (among thousands), was to make Abraham “the father of all who believe without being circumcised…and to make him the father of the circumcised who are not merely circumcised but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised” (Rom. 4:11, 12).

Jesus Didn’t Die for Nothing

In Galatians 2:21, Paul writes, “I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.”

If Jesus didn’t exchange our sin for his righteousness (as 2 Corinthians 5:21 tells us he did), then why did he die?  Some would say to be an example of the ultimate act of love.  This is unconvincing and Jesus didn’t really leave us this option, though.  If that is so, then Jesus’ so-called “act of love” really didn’t accomplish anything. When someone makes a sacrifice, it is done so that someone or something else does not need to be sacrificed.

In other words, Jesus is not just an example for us, but our substitute Savior.  He lived the life we couldn’t live and died the death we deserved to die. If we could be declared righteous (i.e. justified) without his substitutionary death, then Jesus really lived a tragic life and died an even more tragic death.  Praise God this isn’t the case.

“Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them…Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Gal. 3:10, 13).