Tag: Spirit of God
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Why Was Jesus Murdered?
Theories about how Jesus’ death dealt with our separation from God have come and gone throughout church history. The favored, traditional Christian doctrine is that Jesus was sacrificed on the cross to “forgive our sins”. This is believed to be crucial since those sins were holding us apart from God’s “justification” and, it is believed, our resultant ticket to God’s heaven when we die. More cynical observers say that this is simply the “Get out of Hell free” version of Jesus’s death. Just as there are sound, biblically founded reasons to accept this theory, there are equally valid reasons to…
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Always Learning, Never Knowing
Most people who embark on a journey expect to arrive at their destination. Airports contain huge boards showing the status, gate number, and destination of all of its departing airplanes. All of the people boarding a flight for a particular destination fully expect to arrive at that destination. But this situation isn’t true of every pursuit. Our premise here is that there are those embarked on the abstract journey of “knowing” that don’t always want to succeed. They don’t want to “arrive”.
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The Singular God and the Divine Christ: A Case for Modalism
Only some people believe that Jesus of Nazareth was divine, the same thing as God. Almost none of those believe that God is a singularity. They would say that He is “three in One”. Does the assertion of Jesus’s divinity by itself create a dichotomy between these two ideas, as many claim? The purpose of this piece is to demonstrate that a single Divinity does not represent a dichotomy but rather a transcendent truth that goes by the label “Modalism”. We will look at some of the voluminous textual evidence that supports this case and find that, far from being…
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Jesus in Light of Paul in Light of Jesus
There has been a long-running tradition in scholarship of complaining that Paul tried to establish his own religion apart from the teachings of Jesus. I claim this is a position of ignorance, and perhaps academic agenda, not because Jesus’ and Paul’s words aren’t different – they are. But, rather, because they simply haven’t understood how the two messages interoperate within the context of the larger plan of God. In this larger context, of God’s redemption of Israel and the world to Himself, their messages were a duality, with one integrally supporting the other.
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Refuting Paul’s Attackers
The Apostle Paul has gotten a bad rap for centuries, mostly based on his antagonists’ misunderstanding/ignorance. Our purpose here is to review the attacker’s charges in some detail and demonstrate why they’re mistaken. In so doing, we’ll look at his criticisms in antiquity from both Jewish-Christian and Gentile-only factions of the early church, as well as from contemporary critics who contend Paul’s messages are counter to Jesus’.
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Unpacking the New Covenant Gospel
Many Western Christians [i] and secular individuals have misunderstood the core message of the Bible’s Good News for centuries. This analysis aims to clarify the true Gospel, obscured since the Reformation, by examining relevant New Testament and Hebrew Bible passages to determine whether they support or challenge what I’m referring to as the “New Covenant Gospel”, first proposed by Dr. Jason A Staples. This interpretation diverges from the traditional Gospel message fundamentally.
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Thinking About Jesus and the Crucifixion
For nearly as long as there have been people, they have been sacrificing animals to their gods. It has been a doctrine of Christianity from its formative days that Jesus was crucified as a sacrifice on behalf of all people. Is this doctrine correct? Or does it simply represent an adaptation of Jesus’ story to fit this ancient and powerful socio-cultural model? And, can we know?
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Why Priests and Sacrifices?
I have written several pieces explaining the fact that God, as He is recorded in the Hebrew Bible, did not want His people to perform sacrifices to Him. Yet the vast majority of the Pentateuch is all about sacrifices and offerings. Why?
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Why Jesus?
God promised Israel a savior, a Messiah of the line of David. Having rejected God and suffered for centuries they expectantly looked forward to their ultimate vindication and redemption that he would bring.
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Searching For (and Finding) the “Needle in the Biblical Haystack”: Following the Bible’s “Blue Thread”
Our premise in what follows is that there is a unified message permeating throughout the entire Bible: both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. That message represents God’s “signal” concerning how we are to treat Him (love and reverence), and each other (love, as we love ourselves). But His signal must penetrate through lots of modern distractions and Biblical texts that have little, if anything, to do with living in accordance with God’s will and with one another in love. Thus, they are “noise” obscuring His signal.
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Ruminate on God’s Word
Recently Steve Gregg visited my area and presented a message to a Christian fellowship here. His subject was the change that we are expected to undergo having committed ourselves to Christ. But it was a metaphor he used in his message that I thought was stunning in its clarity, and worth sharing with those both familiar, and not yet familiar, with Steve’s teachings.
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What Is God Waiting For?
About 2000 years ago, Christ rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, prophesied by Zechariah (9:9) of Israel’s long-awaited Messiah, and hailed by His followers with “Hosanna[i]”. In keeping with God’s plan for His Creation, Jesus was murdered, buried, and then arose from death only to reappear to the Disciples and many who knew Him. During His ministry, He repeatedly taught about the immanence of God’s Kingdom on Earth (i.e. “at hand”, “in your midst”, etc.) The Bible says that for His act of sacrificial obedience, Christ was given all authority in Heaven and on Earth. Yet, here we sit, 2000…
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Groaning With the Spirit
Rom 8:26 “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.” A recent post on social media mentioned an interview with NT Wright (A Deep-Dive into the Book of Romans: Dr. N.T. Wright – Theology in the Raw) in which he makes a point regarding the above (and other Romans’) passages of Paul that for me was both startling and eye-opening. Let’s look at Wright’s narrative of the Romans story, and unpack his startling point.
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Developing Spiritual Fitness
Most of us think about our spiritual lives (when we think of them at all) as cerebral, passive things: things that just are, likely supported by some “quiet time”, perhaps some Bible reading, and prayer. However, our spiritual strength is only truly developed when, like a muscle in our body, it is stressed, and stressed repeatedly.
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Interpreting the New Covenant
There is substantial controversy surrounding the proper interpretation of the announcement of a New Covenant between God and Israel and Judah (Je 31:31-34, Ezk 36:24-28). Both the Jewish and Christian interpreters spin its interpretation to suit their theological views, leaving no consensus. Let’s see if by working through the texts we can discover the truth.
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Freedom, in Paul
Countless words have been spilled analyzing and debating Paul’s intended meaning of the phrase “works of the Law”, and his theological treatment of the Law itself. In contrast, far fewer words have been spilled analyzing and exploring Paul’s concept of the “freedom” he ascribes to those “in Christ”. Our intention here is to show the relationship between these two concepts and, in so doing, dispel some pervasive misunderstandings, at least among evangelicals.
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The Bible Explained
Do you know how the stories of the Bible fit neatly together into an integrated whole — the story of God’s interactions with His created humanity? If not, this may help.
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What is the Christian’s Calling?
There are three polar opposite popular opinions these days as to what it is the Christian is called to do. The first is that the Christian calling is to do essentially nothing. This is the view held, in whole or in part, by the vast majority of those who identify with the Reformed Church tradition, convicted as they are by the doctrine of God’s Grace. These folks’ understanding is that God is in complete control of the outcome of society, and so they are at best incidental to His Sovereign decision. Some who hold this opinion share it only up…
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Christ’s Cultural Revolution
Most people including self-professed Christians have no inkling of the enormity of the transformation of their everyday existence Christ prescribed. His prescriptions so thoroughly upended the culture of first-century Jews that they concluded He had to be eliminated.
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The “X-Files” of the Tanakh
There is some very strange stuff going on, semantically, in the Tanakh – the Old Testament. Our English translations hide much of it, allowing us to blithely assume that unclear verses are either just poorly translated or, perhaps, intended to be purposefully obscure. But, what if their obscurity/ambiguity reveals some much deeper meaning than simply the literal texts in which they appear? And, if there is a deeper meaning, what could it be, and what is it likely to be?
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Paul’s Apocalypse of Christ
In his letter to the Ephesian church, the Apostle Paul reveals that for millennia God had knowledge kept secret that suddenly, through Christ, had been revealed, first to Christ’s Apostles, and then to those to whom they preached. The revelation of this secret, this μυστήριον mustḗrion, was for Paul the life- and reality-shattering apocalypse of Christ.
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Seek First the Kingdom of God
Not all Christians experience the same quality of spiritual life. For some, their lives are joyful, full of confidence, full of assurance of their acceptance and eventual reward, and full to overflowing with the Spirit of God, to the point that they feel compelled to give it away to those around them. For others, life is more measured, perhaps a bit more stressful, containing more concern, at least to a degree, for some of the things in their lives, resulting in worry. They are somewhat discouraged by the lack of spiritual “fruit” in their lives. They want to love, and…
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Belief, and the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit
There appears to be in the Christian church today a profound misunderstanding of the working of Salvation in the Christian’s life. On the one hand, we have the tried and true fundamental statement of salvation found in Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians (2:8): For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. When one hears and receives this glorious proclamation, he breathes a groaning sigh of relief. “I no longer have to strive to please God…
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“in Christ”?
What does it mean to be “in Christ”? How do I know if I am? The Apostle John tells us this: 1 John 5:20 (ESV) [20] And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. To John, the condition of placing our faith in God and His Son, the Christ, was synonymous with being “in him”.