"Just and the Justifier"

The most precious book ever written is the Bible. The most precious book in the Bible is Romans. The most precious chapter in Romans is chapter 3. The most precious verses in Romans 3 are verses 23–26. And the most precious four words in Romans 3:23–26 are "just and the justifier" (v. 26). So, then, the phrase "just and the justifier" are the most precious words and constitute the most precious phrase ever written in the entire history of the universe. And so, to understand the meaning of this phrase is (insofar as it means that a person understands the gospel) the most important single thing a person could ever do: more important than money, fame, family, happiness, friends, sex, education—indeed, than life itself. Let us now look at the phrase in its context.

23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. 26 It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. (Rom 3:23–26 ESV)

Taken in context, this phrase is an absolutely huge and sweeping claim about God, redemptive history, Jesus Christ, and salvation. Leading up to it, Paul asserts that "all," i.e., both Jews and gentiles, are inadequate before God in that they "fall short of the glory of God" (see 1:23; Jn 12:32). But nevertheless, says Paul in v. 24 and the first half of v. 25, God justifies such sinful and inadequate people "through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." Redemption was effected through Christ's propitiatory death (i.e., Christ was "put forward" by God as a sin-offering), which may be appropriated by means of faith.

"The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent" (Acts 17:30). See also Luke 18:14 and Galatians 3:11-13.

The Death of Lazarus and the Glory of God

Whenever some tragedy or great affliction occurs, or someone experiences suffering or the death of a loved one, I often hear Christians say of it, "God did not cause this, but He can still use it for good." However, such an attitude, while probably well-meaning, is unbiblical, and it actually undermines the very hope which it wants to create.

It is clear in Scripture that God causes suffering in order to display his glory. Consider, for example, Jesus' actions after learning that Lazarus was ill.

1 Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. 2 It was Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was ill. 3 So the sisters sent to him, saying, "Lord, he whom you love is ill." 4 But when Jesus heard it he said, "This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it." 5 Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. 6 So, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was. (John 11:1–6 ESV)

John Piper brings to light three amazing things about this passage:

1. Jesus chose to let Lazarus die. Verse 6: “So when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.” There was no hurry. His intention was not to spare the family grief, but to raise Lazarus from the dead. This is true even if Lazarus was already dead when the messengers reached Jesus. Jesus either let him die or remained longer to make plain that He was in no hurry to immediately relieve the grief. Something more was driving Him.
2. He was motivated by a passion for the glory of God displayed in His own glorious power. In verse 4 He says, “This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”
3. Nevertheless both the decision to let Lazarus die and the motivation to magnify God were expressions of love for Mary and Martha and Lazarus. John shows this by the way he connected verses 5 and 6: “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So [not “yet,” which the NIV wrongly inserts]…he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.”

Piper further says in response to the passage:

Oh, how many people today—even Christians—would murmur at Jesus for callously letting Lazarus die and putting him and Mary and Martha and others through the pain and misery of those days. And if people today saw that this was motivated by Jesus’ desire to magnify the glory of God, how many would call this harsh or unloving! What this shows is how far above the glory of God most people value pain-free lives. For most people, love is whatever puts human value and human well-being at the center. So Jesus’ behavior is unintelligible to them.

But let us not tell Jesus what love is. Let us not instruct Him how He should love us and make us central. Let us learn from Jesus what love is and what our true well-being is. Love is doing whatever you need to do to help people see and savor the glory of God in Christ forever and ever. Love keeps God central. Because the soul was made for God.

The ultimate purpose of creation is not human happiness or flourishing; indeed, since mankind is itself a part of the creation, such a notion is absurd. Rather, the universe was created by God to display His glory. And, indeed,

1 The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. 2 Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. 3 There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. 4 Their measuring line goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them he has set a tent for the sun, 5 which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy. 6 Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat. (Psalm 19)

Therefore, the Christian who suffers should (with Job) say things like, "Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord" (Job 1:21) and "Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?" (Job 2:10).

"No one is good except God alone"

I’ve been thinking about the logic of Jesus’ exchange with the rich young ruler (Luke 18, Matt 19, and Mk 10).

And a ruler asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.” (Luke 18:18–19)

Now, upon a superficial reading, Jesus might seem here to be implicitly denying his divinity. However, Jesus is doing exactly the opposite: in a very much Socratic fashion, Jesus is implicitly—and quite cleverly—affirming his divinity. When Jesus asks the ruler, “Why do you call me good?” he could be implying one of two things, which would have been easily conveyed in Jesus’ voice inflection and body language. Either Jesus was implying that the ruler was incorrect in his observation that Jesus was good, or he was implying that the ruler was correct.

A superficial and faulty reading might proceed thus:

1) Jesus says that only God is good.
2) Jesus does not think he is God (and/or is not God).
3) Therefore, Jesus is saying that he is not good.
4) Therefore, Jesus is implicitly saying that he is not God.

The problem with this reading is (2). Jesus does not say that he is not God, and to say such would be an unnecessary assumption foreign to the text. A better and more natural reading proceeds as follows:

5) Jesus says that only God is good.
6) Jesus does not deny that he is good, as the ruler says.
7) Therefore, Jesus is saying, in a clear but indirect and Socratic way, that he is God.

This would seem to basically amount to the following modus ponens argument:

8) Only God is good.
9) Jesus is good.
10) Therefore, Jesus is God.

In fact, Jesus is speaking in this way to try to make the ruler stop and consider what it might have meant to call Jesus good. Reading between the lines, we can hear Jesus saying to the ruler, “Truly, you speak more than you know.”

Although I shall not discuss it now, it might be worth considering the parallel accounts of this episode in Matt 19:16ff and Mark 10:17ff (Matthew’s account is worded slightly differently than the others'). Also, what exactly might “good” mean?

Pascal and Prayer

"Prayer is God's bestowing on humanity the dignity of causality."

God's love for Himself and for Sinners

Here is an excerpt from chapter one of John Piper's book Pierced by the Word: Thirty-One Meditations for Your Soul.

     For many years I have sought to understand how the God-centeredness of God relates to His love for sinners like us. Most people do not immediately see God’s passion for the glory of God as an act of love. One reason for this is that we have absorbed the world’s definition of love. It says: You are loved when you are made much of.
     The main problem with this definition of love is that when you try to apply it to God’s love for us, it distorts reality. God’s love for us is not mainly His making much of us, but His giving us the ability to enjoy making much of Him forever. In other words, God’s love for us keeps God at the center. God’s love for us exalts His value and our satisfaction in it. If God’s love made us central and focused on our value, it would distract us from what is most precious; namely, Himself. Love labors and suffers to enthrall us with what is infinitely and eternally satisfying: God. Therefore God’s love labors and suffers to break our bondage to the idol of self and focus our affections on the treasure of God.

A couple months ago, I got into an intense discussion with someone. I said that God is supremely concerned with glorifying His own name; he said that God was more concerned with loving us. In the above paragraphs, Piper argues—and I think he's right—that God's supreme act of love toward us is "giving us the ability to enjoy making much of Him forever." God and His glory are the most valuable things in all existence, and what a privilege to be allowed to worship and praise it for all eternity!

Read more from this and other John Piper books here.

The Jesus Seminar

Remember the Jesus Seminar? Ever heard of it? Occurring in the early 1990s, it was a highly-publicized collaboration and project by a group of uber-liberal Bible scholars and theologians to determine "what Jesus really said from what the gospel writers reported." The fruit of the Seminar was a book, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus. Below is an excerpt from a review of the book by Richard B. Hays, a first-rate New Testament scholar and theologian teaching at Duke Divinity School. Read the entire review here.

Indeed, a new book called The Five Gospels-the fruit of the labors of the much-publicized "Jesus Seminar"-claims to provide definitive new answers to the question, "What did Jesus really say?" A panel of New Testament scholars, meeting over a period of several years, has given us a new red-letter edition of the four canonical gospels plus the Gospel of Thomas, with the words adjudged by a poll of these scholars actually to have been spoken by Jesus printed in red type. Other colors reflect their shadings of judgment about the historical reliability of the other sayings attributed to Jesus: pink for possibly authentic, gray for probably inauthentic, and black for certainly inauthentic. The introduction to the book suggests breezily that an "unofficial but helpful interpretation of the colors" would be as follows:

Red: That's Jesus! Pink: Sure sounds like Jesus. Gray: Well, maybe. Black: There's been some mistake.

The results are offered up in a fresh translation-dubbed the "Scholars Version"-that seeks to "produce in the American reader an experience comparable to that of the first readers" by approximating "the common street language of the original."

My upcoming weekend: Schleiermacher

My weekend will be spent becoming intimate with Friedrich Schleiermacher, a dead German theologian. I have a 3000-word essay on Schleiermacher due Sunday night (for a supervision Monday). Goodbye, then, for now.

Wow

Wow. Check out this news article and video about a 1922 anti-Mormon movie.

My First Day of School!

The first day of the academic term proper at Cambridge University was a good day. I attended one lecture, for my course The Letters of Paul. It was quite good, for the lecturer was Prof. G. N. Stanton, the head of the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity. Today's lecture, titled "Paul: Hero or Villain," was an introduction to Paul and some ways Paul has been viewed throughout church history.

After the lecture, which lasted from noon to 1:00, I met with a professor of the Faculty of Classics to discuss the Greek reading class I will be taking. The first class is tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. GMT.

In the evening was the annual formal matriculation dinner at Homerton in the Great Hall (which appears similar to the dining hall of Hogwarts in Harry Potter). It was good food and fun, and I met some swell new friends.

Pope to End Doctrine of Limbo

The Pope will end the Catholic doctrine of Limbo this week. Check out the article here.

Sunday at St. Andrews the Great

I attended an amazing church last Sunday: St. Andrews the Great, an Anglican church. But wow—it was very good. Every part of the service was Christ-centered. The worship music included only contemporary songs (and this was, I think, my only criticism of the church). We sang several worship songs, including a few that were new to me (which I appreciated). The sermon was on Philippians 1, the first in a series on Philippians. It was not spectacular (no understatement intended), but it was very good, a solid, Christ-centered exposition of the text, along with an introduction to the book of Philippians as a whole.

After the service, there was a lunch for students (free the first time, 2.50 each subsequent time). The room was set up so that there were dozens of small tables at each of which were seated c. 8 people. The main course was a tasy dish of chicken and noodles with some kind of sauce. After the main course, the speaker, a young man, gave a short talk—a sort of "sermonette"—on idolatry. After his main talk, each table discussed three Scripture passages on idolatry. Although it was not one of the preset passages, I read Ezekiel 16 to my table. After a short time, the discussion time ended, and the speaker took questions from the audience. In answering a question about how "God gave them up" in Rom 1:24, 26, 28 is compatible with human free will, the speaker responded by saying that humans do not have free will and that all things are predetermined by God. I'd never heard a statement like that in a church. And, unless he meant by it some sort of hyper-calvinism (which I didn't take him to mean), the statement was amazing. It made my week.

Another Retroactive Post (Written Sept. 27th)

12:37 p.m. GMT

I woke up at 8:00 this morning, and since then I've been reading Scripture and translating Greek (excerpts from Aristophanes' Clouds). Today (Wednesday), like yesterday, is a free day. And so, the group has planned to, at 1:30, take a tour of Cambridge guided by a young woman whom we met yesterday and who had been friends with the Jewell students who studied at Homerton last year.

Last night, we all went to a pub in Cambridge City Center, right on the river Cam. I had good cod and chips (but no alcohol). When we returned to the dorm, I went down to the student union room with some of the other Jewell students. However, while they played E.R.S., I ended up playing table tennis with two English students. Not having played for a long time and having a bad paddle, I lost all three games I played.

My Journey to Cambridge (A Retroactive Post)

(I typed this post on Sept. 24th/25th, during my travel to England. Now that I have internet access in my room, I'm finally able to post it. Hooray!)

2:23 a.m. CDT

As I write this, the time is 2:23 a.m. CDT, and I'm sitting on a large Air Canada airplane flying eastward over the Atlantic Ocean, bound for London, England. I'm in seat 17k, a window seat, sitting next to my friend and peer David Wiegert. We go to study at Homerton College, Cambridge University for the entire 2006–2007 academic year (minus, of course, Christmas break, which is Dec. 2 to Jan. 16). The flight is scheduled to arrive at London at 11:05 a.m.

I flew out of MCI (Kansas City International) at 6:00 p.m. (yesterday, technically) Sunday, September 24th. Small and uncomfortable, the plane arrived at Toronto, Canada, at about 10:00 p.m. (EST). After going through customs and inquiring three times whether we needed to reclaim our bags before boarding the connecting flight to London, it was about 10:30. Our connecting flight leaving at 10:50, we had to hurry/hasten to a bus that took us to our terminal. Running, we got off the bus and hurried hastened to our gate, where we finally arrived at 10:50, just in time to catch the plane.

While I was waiting in the customs line at the Toronto airport, a young woman named Megan Lilley introduced herself to me. Twenty-two years old and from Branson, MO, Megan was on her way to London to study at a Bible mission (or Bible school, or something) there. She wanted to introduce herself to me, she explained, because she had overheard David and I talking about the Bible. We talked for several more minutes, until we had made it through customs. An interesting, encouraging, and cool experience.

12:36 p.m. GMT

I'm presently on a bus (or coach) destined for Cambridge. Having landed at Heathrow International Airport, London, at c. 11:10 a.m. GMT (which is six hours ahead of CST), David and I, after passing through customs and collecting our luggage, proceeded to the Central Bus Station at about 11:45. We bought a one-way ticket for two to Cambridge, the bus leaving at 12:10 p.m and being scheduled to arrive at Cambridge c. 3:00.

7:34 p.m. GMT

I finally arrived at Homerton c. 4:00. David and I went to the porter's lodge to get our room keys and other check-in information. We went to our dorm, Queen's Wing, and, after some confusion, we found our rooms. All the WJC students—there are nine in all at Homerton—were all on the same hall. (An interesting group.) Each of us has a single room, and the men and women are not separated but mixed throughout the hall.

Other News

I went to the William Jewell College Perspectives on the Common Good pluralism in US democracy lecture. I asked the black lady there, "Isn't it more important to pursue the truth than to pursue the good?".

I went to the Bethel Baptist Association's annual meeting, so that I could fulfill the requirement for my ministry internship.

I went to Northland Reformed Church Sunday, the 24th. Pastor Syms' made a thoughtful and kind announcement acknowledging and thanking me for my internship and announcing my imminent journey abroad. We stayed for a bit and had interesting conversations with some of the churchfolk. I think my mom is beginning to warm up to the Reformed church and its style and members.

I Have Internet!

I have internet! In my room! Yay! Way to go Homerton College!