Watch the video and enjoy!
[HT: Denny Burk]
Resurrection! That is our hope!
Well, since I wasn’t able to post on Easter Sunday, I figured I would at least post about the resurrection sometime this week. So here goes!
This article is from Christianity Today. I encourage you to read more than just the excerpt. 🙂 Enjoy!
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The bodily resurrection is the good news of the gospel—and thus our social and political mandate.
by N. T. Wright – posted 3/24/2008
There is no agreement in the church today about what happens to people when they die. Yet the New Testament is crystal clear on the matter: In a classic passage, Paul speaks of “the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 8:23). There is no room for doubt as to what he means: God’s people are promised a new type of bodily existence, the fulfillment and redemption of our present bodily life. The rest of the early Christian writings, where they address the subject, are completely in tune with this.
The traditional picture of people going to either heaven or hell as a one-stage, postmortem journey represents a serious distortion and diminution of the Christian hope. Bodily resurrection is not just one odd bit of that hope. It is the element that gives shape and meaning to the rest of the story of God’s ultimate purposes. If we squeeze it to the margins, as many have done by implication, or indeed, if we leave it out altogether, as some have done quite explicitly, we don’t just lose an extra feature, like buying a car that happens not to have electrically operated mirrors. We lose the central engine, which drives it and gives every other component its reason for working.
When we talk with biblical precision about the resurrection, we discover an excellent foundation for lively and creative Christian work in the present world—not, as some suppose, for an escapist or quietist piety.
Bodily Resurrection
While both Greco-Roman paganism and Second Temple Judaism held a wide variety of beliefs about life beyond death, the early Christians, beginning with Paul, were remarkably unanimous on the topic.
When Paul speaks in Philippians 3 of being “citizens of heaven,” he doesn’t mean that we shall retire there when we have finished our work here. He says in the next line that Jesus will come from heaven in order to transform the present humble body into a glorious body like his own. Jesus will do this by the power through which he makes all things subject to himself. This little statement contains in a nutshell more or less all Paul’s thought on the subject. The risen Jesus is both the model for the Christian’s future body and the means by which it comes.
Similarly, in Colossians 3:1–4, Paul says that when the Messiah (the one “who is your life”) appears, then you too will appear with him in glory. Paul does not say “one day you will go to be with him.” No, you already possess life in him. This new life, which the Christian possesses secretly, invisible to the world, will burst forth into full bodily reality and visibility.
The clearest and strongest passage is Romans 8:9–11. If the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Jesus the Messiah, dwells in you, says Paul, then the one who raised the Messiah from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies as well, through his Spirit who dwells in you. God will give life, not to a disembodied spirit, not to what many people have thought of as a spiritual body in the sense of a nonphysical one, but “to your mortal bodies also.”
Other New Testament writers support this view. The first letter of John declares that when Jesus appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. The resurrection body of Jesus, which at the moment is almost unimaginable to us in its glory and power, will be the model for our own. And of course within John’s gospel, despite the puzzlement of those who want to read the book in a very different way, we have some of the clearest statements of future bodily resurrection. Jesus reaffirms the widespread Jewish expectation of resurrection in the last day, and announces that the hour for this has already arrived. It is quite explicit: “The hour is coming,” he says, “indeed, it is already here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of Man, and those who hear will live; when all in the graves will come out, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment.”
(more… )
Holy Saturday: Anticipating the Resurrection
In honor of Holy Saturday, here is a good interview with N.T. Wright regarding the resurrection of Jesus.
Below is an excerpt…
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At the National Pastors Conference in San Diego, PreachingToday.com’s Brian Lowery got to interview N. T. Wright about his latest book—Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church—and how it relates to preaching. Since we are all in the midst of the Easter journey, his words are timely, challenging, and above all else, hopeful.
Preaching Today: In your book Surprised by Hope, you talk about a deeper understanding of hope “that provides a coherent and energizing basis for work in today’s world.” How has that deeper understanding influenced your preaching through the years?
Bishop N. T. Wright: [Studying] the Resurrection for an earlier book, Resurrection of the Son of God … ended up rubbing my nose in the New Testament theology of new creation, and the fact that the new creation has begun with Easter. I discovered that when we do new creation—when we encourage one another in the church to be active in projects of new creation, of healing, of hope for communities—we are standing on the ground that Jesus has won in his resurrection.
New creation is not just “whistling in the dark.” It’s not a kind of social Pelagianism, where we try to improve things by pulling ourselves up from our own bootstraps. Because Jesus is raised from the dead, God’s new world has begun. We are not only the beneficiaries of new creation; we are the agents of it. I just can’t stop preaching about that, because that is where we’re going with Easter.
For me, therefore, there’s no disjunction between preaching about the salvation which is ours in God’s new age—the new heavens and new earth—and preaching about what that means for the present. The two go very closely together. If you have an eschatology that is nonmaterial, why bother with this present world? But if God intends to renew the world, then what we do in the present matters. That’s 1 Corinthians 15:58! This understanding has made my preaching more challenging to me, and hopefully to my hearers, to actually get off our backsides and do something in the local community—things that are signs of new creation. (more…)
Good Friday: The Good Shepherd Is Slain-The Bridegroom Is Taken Away
Here is today’s Good Friday prayer and meditation from Touchstone Magazine.
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Prayer
Almighty and Everlasting God, who willed that our Savior should take upon Him our flesh and should suffer death upon the cross, so that all mankind should follow the example of His great humility, mercifully grant that we may both imitate the model of His patience and become partakers of His Resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (from Saint Andrew’s Missal)
This is the day commemorating annually the unique sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the true Pascal Lamb of our salvation, by whose blood we have been purchased unto God as His own consecrated people, a holy nation, a royal priesthood. Christians today gather at the foot of the cross with Mary the Lord’s Mother, the beloved disciple John, the repentant Mary Magdalene and her several companions, the confessing Centurion and all others who have, down through the ages, foresworn all righteousness of their own in order to be justified and made holy by the redeeming act of the God who so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.
March 21
The Suffering Servant: When did the early Christians go to the Old Testament, and specifically, to the Book of Isaiah, to interpret and understand the significance of Jesus’ sufferings and death?
Although St. Peter’s sermon on the first Pentecost affirmed that Jesus had been delivered to His enemies “by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23), he did not cite any specific Scriptures to demonstrate this purpose and foreknowledge. This fact seems particularly worthy of note, because Peter did on that occasion cite biblical prophecy with respect to our Lord’s resurrection (2:25-36).
Not until Philip do we find our earliest recorded example of recourse to the Old Testament to interpret the theology of Jesus’ sufferings and death (8:28-35). Surely this was not Philip’s own idea.
Jesus Himself had dropped more than one hint on the subject. He avowed, for example, that He suffered in fulfillment of Holy Scripture (Matthew 26:54), a declaration later prompting His disciples to search the Old Testament under that perspective.
Moreover, Jesus also spoke of the soteriological significance of His death by declaring that His blood was “shed for many for the remission of sins”(Matthew 26:28), thus introducing the Old Testament liturgical category of the “sin offering” to interpret what He accomplished on the cross.
Finally, Jesus described Himself as a servant, who came to give His “life as a ransom for many” (20:28). The Old Testament source for this assertion left no room for doubt. Jesus was clearly identifying Himself as the Servant of the Lord portrayed in the Book of Isaiah, that Servant who “poured out His soul unto death,” who “bore the sin of many,/ and made intercession for the transgressors.” In the suffering Jesus believers would recognize the One who “was led as a lamb to the slaughter,” who was “wounded for our transgressions, . . . bruised for our iniquities,” who “has borne our griefs/ and carried our sorrows.”
Continue reading Good Friday: The Good Shepherd Is Slain-The Bridegroom Is Taken Away
RC Sproul inteviews Ben Stein
Maundy Thursday: The Last Supper & The Agony in the Garden
Today I received an E-mail from Touchstone Magazine regarding today’s date in the Church year calendar. Today is Maundy Thursday. I would like to reproduce that E-mail below for your reading pleasure. Also, please refer to my wife’s post about Maundy Thursday for a brief explanation of the day.
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Prayer
Lord Jesus Christ, brightness of the Father’s glory and the express image of His person, who, having purged our sins, entered once into the holy place and sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high; mercifully bend our stiffened necks, we beseech You, and temper our rebellious hearts before the unspeakable mystery of Your compassion, for we ask this in Your holy name. Amen.
“Maundy,” the unusual adjective descriptive of this day, comes from the Latin mandatum, meaning “commandment,” because this is the day on which the Lord gave the “new commandment” that we are to love one another. On this day He exemplified this love by washing the disciples’ feet and also instituted the Lord’s Supper, in which all of us who share the one bread are made one body in Christ.
In many Christian bodies, following a tradition that apparently goes back to apostolic times, believers are disposed and inspired to spend at least an hour of this night, and in some cases the whole night, in prayer, remembering that Jesus Himself did so and likewise encouraged His disciples to “watch” with Him. In some monastic communities, this is a public liturgical service, and in some Roman Catholic and Anglican parishes the night is hourly divided among members to make sure that prayer is being offered in church all night long. Many other Christians keep such watch in their own homes.
March 20
Matthew 26:17-56: We come now to Holy Thursday and the evening of the Last Supper. The traditions behind the four gospels attach several stories to the narrative of the Last Supper. These include the story of Jesus washing the feet of the disciples, a saying of Jesus relative to His coming betrayal, a prophecy of Peter’s threefold denial, various exhortations and admonitions by Jesus, and a description of the institution of the Holy Eucharist.
There are considerable differences among the four evangelists with respect to their inclusion of these components. Thus, only John describes the foot-washing, though Luke 22:24-30 includes a dominical admonition which would readily fit such a context. With respect to the actual teachings and exhortations of Jesus during the supper, John’s account is by far the longest, stretching over several chapters.
Only two of the stories are told in all four gospels. First, there is some reference by Jesus to His betrayal. In Matthew and Mark this comes before the institution of the Holy Eucharist; in Luke it comes afterwards, in John it immediately follows the foot-washing. Only in Matthew and John is Judas actually identified by Jesus. Luke and John ascribe the betrayal to the influence of Satan.
Second, all four gospels include a prophecy of Peter’s threefold denial. All of them, likewise, narrate the fulfillment of that prophecy.
The Church chiefly remembers the Last Supper, however, as the occasion of the instituting of the Holy Eucharist, and it seems a point of irony that this story does not appear in John. Perhaps he felt that this important subject had been adequately treated in the Bread of Life discourse in chapter 6.
To the three Synoptic accounts of the Holy Eucharist we must add that in 1 Corinthians 11, which is at least a decade older than the earliest of the four gospels. Indeed, this narrative recorded by St. Paul links the institution of the Eucharist explicitly to the betrayal by Judas: “I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you: that the Lord Jesus on the night in which He was betrayed took bread . . .” This text provides clear evidence that the traditional narrative contained in the Eucharistic prayer, as it was already known to Paul when he founded the Corinthian church about A.D. 50, made mention of Judas’s betrayal. That same formula or its equivalent–“on the night He was betrayed”–is found in both the liturgies of St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom.
The Church’s testimony on this point is remarkable. It is as though some deep impulse discourages Christians from celebrating the Holy Communion without some reference to the betrayal by Judas. This reference serves to remind Christians of the terrible judgment that surrounds the Mystery of the Altar: “Therefore whoever eats this bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For he who eats and drinks in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body” (1 Corinthians 11:27-29).
Continue reading Maundy Thursday: The Last Supper & The Agony in the Garden
2008 Christianity Today Book Awards
I have created a new category in the bookstore. Please browse those selections that the editors of Christianity Today have selected for the best books in the 2008. They also selected 11 others book in the same categories for the award of merit. Here is a link to Christianity Today’s post if you want to read some articles on their site regarding the individual books.
The Decline and Fall of Europe
Justin Taylor has pointed out an excellent series of articles addressing the very reasons why Europe is going in the direction it is going in, regarding the eventual overpopulation of Europe with Muslims. Here is an excerpt from those articles:
With just a single exception, the non-Muslim population of every country in Europe now has a birth rate at below replacement levels. (The exception is Malta, and God bless it.) Why, I ask Bruce Thornton today on Uncommon Knowledge, do Europeans so steadfastly refuse to reproduce?
Because, replies the author of Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow-Motion Suicide, “children are expensive. They require you to sacrifice your time and your interests and your own comfort. If your highest good is pleasure, if your highest good is a sophisticated life, then children get in the way. Why would you spend so much money and so much energy on children if your highest good is simply material well-being? That’s sort of the spiritual dimension of the problem.”
“The spiritual dimension of the problem.†There are so few children in Europe, in other words, because there are so few believers.
There’s more. (Look for Chapter 4 of 5).
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Here are the links to the videos:
The Global South Anglican: its origins and development
Here is a very helpful article for those of you interested in the conservative and orthodox churches of the Global South that exist withing the World Wide Anglican Communion. Peter Toon has a good summary that is well worth your reading. Please pray for the Anglican denomination, as it is going through a crisis that seems to be leading towards its ultimate demise and death for those we desire to maintain the unity of the Church in the bond of sexual immorality and abominable practices.
Here is a portion from Toon’s blog entry:
Though the expression, “Global South,†has been in use for a decade or more in the spheres of international relations, global economics, third-world development, and the like, its use in Anglican ecclesiological discourse is very recent. To refer to “The Global South†as one of the various constituencies of the Global Anglican Communion of Churches is now common; but; it has only been so for four or five years. (see the essay by Dr Poon listed at end of this article.)
Further, the economic and political use of the expression refers solely to the poorer countries of the world, the so-called developing nations, situated south of Europe and the U.S.A. (see for details of all this the work of “The Center for Global South†at American University in Washington D.C. founded in 1992); but, the Anglican use strangely includes both the provinces that are in developing countries and one or two that are in developed countries (e.g., S E Asia).
Today, 2008, the constituency called the Anglican Global South is generally associated with both a conservative theology and also opposition to the liberal-progressive agenda in sexuality of provinces in the West, especially North America. This has not always been so, for the original stance of this grouping was a continuation of the former South-South Encounters of representatives of Anglican Provinces not in the West or the North. As such it had admirable aims and sought primarily to do justice to the vocation and experience of being Anglican outside of the West and North and after colonialism. This explains why the relatively affluent province of S E Asia is in The Global South.
Totally separate from the work at, and between, the South to South Encounters, and beginning before the Lambeth Conference of 1998, continuing during that Lambeth Conference, and then more intensely afterwards, has been the persistent work of various American “ambassadors.†They have both made visits to Africa and Asia, and also invited to the U.S.A. bishops from these continents. The aim was to enlist these overseas bishops as orthodox allies in the battle being fought in and around The Episcopal Church over the innovations in sexual practice and ethics.
3 in 4 U.S. mosques preach anti-West extremism
Well, I can only hope that news like this will lead to more American’s realizing that “moderate” Islam really isn’t that “moderate” or peaceful. Reports like these will keep coming out and Islam will continue to pursue its goal of taking over the world the world for the god that they idolize and worship.
Here is the report. Below is an excerpt:
An undercover survey of more than 100 mosques and Islamic schools in America has exposed widespread radicalism, including the alarming finding that 3 in 4 Islamic centers are hotbeds of anti-Western extremism, WND has learned. The Mapping Sharia in America Project, sponsored by the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, has trained former counterintelligence and counterterrorism agents from the FBI, CIA and U.S. military, who are skilled in Arabic and Urdu, to conduct undercover reconnaissance at some 2,300 mosques and Islamic centers and schools across the country. ‘So far of 100 mapped, 75 should be on a watchlist,’ an official familiar with the project said. Many of the Islamic centers are operating under the auspices of the Saudi Arabian government and U.S. front groups for the radical Muslim Brotherhood based in Egypt. Frank Gaffney, a former Pentagon official who runs the Center for Security Policy, says the results of the survey have not yet been published. But he confirmed that ‘the vast majority’ are inciting insurrection and jihad through sermons by Saudi-trained imams and anti-Western literature, videos and textbooks. The project, headed by David Yerushalmi, a lawyer and expert on sharia law, has finished collecting data from the first cohort of 102 mosques and schools. Preliminary findings indicate that almost 80 percent of the group exhibit a high level of sharia-compliance and jihadi threat …
Experts say there are at least 40 episodes of extremists and terrorists being connected to mosques in the past decade alone. Some of the 9/11 hijackers, in fact, received aid and counsel from one of the largest mosques in the Washington, D.C., area. Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center is one of the mosques indentified by undercover investigators as a hive of terrorist activity and other extremism. It was founded and is currently run by leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. Imams there preach what is called ‘jihad qital,’ which means physical jihad, and incite violence and hatred against the U.S. Dar al-Hijrah’s ultimate goal, investigators say, is to turn the U.S. into an Islamic state governed by sharia law.
