Real Christianity: God is Light (1 John 1:5)

The Bible is a theocentric (God-centered) book, because God is the main Character in it. Christianity, therefore, is a theocentric religion and fellowship with God is theocentric, too, for the same reason – it is all about God. Whether men realize it or not the universe and all of life is theocentric. Therefore, our fellowship with God depends on who and what God is, not on what we are. In fact, as we shall see, what we are is a hindrance to fellowship with God.

John’s message that he declares to us simple folk who hold to the apostolic teaching of the New Testament is that “God is Light, and darkness is not in Him at all.” (1 John 1:5). John defines the basis of fellowship with God in terms of light and darkness. Under the figure of light John presents to us the absolute and undiluted holiness of God. God is holy, righteous and true. Therefore, God Himself is the standard by which we enjoy fellowship with Him. God expressed this to Abraham when He said, “Walk in My presence and be complete in your conformity to Me” (Gen.17:1). In order to walk acceptably in God’s presence one must conform to Him and to His will. This only makes sense. God is our Creator and Provider. He has every right to tell us how to live. He told Adam and Eve, and He tells everyone else. God has not surrendered His right to sovereign mastery of men.

If I am to walk in fellowship with God I must conform to His light and reflect it back to Him as well as to those around me. Obviously this will mean dramatic change in me, in my thoughts and in my actions. But cheer up. There is Light on my path to lead the way and to make the changes I need.

More to come, with God’s help…

The Bible: What it’s all about (4)

God graciously saves sinners through Jesus Christ.

Because the Scriptures are Christocentric in their focus, they are therefore redemptive in their focus. They are about God SAVING sinners. In fact, the Bible is the revelation of this saving work as God developed it and worked it out through history. Scripture unfolds what one man called the “Drama of Redemption.” This is the grand theme of all of Scripture. Given that man is fallen and not able to rescue himself from the wrath of God, it is up to God to save him, if he is to be saved. That is what the Bible is all about. Any other story is useless to fallen man. Any story about morality or human performance does nothing for someone who is spiritually dead and, therefore, totally dependent on the good will of God to make him right with God.

The believer is also totally dependent on the grace of God. If we are to live out the Christian life we need God to be continually “at work in (us) both for the willing and the doing of what pleases Him.” Only then can we “work out (our) own salvation” in the form of a fruitful and God-glorifying life (Phil.2:12-13). Therefore, when we read Scripture, we need to look for God’s saving work, either as explained in teaching portions, or as demonstrated in the stories of God’s dealings with individuals. Focusing on the individuals will keep us from seeing the grander work of God. Remember, the Bible is about God and His dealings with men, not about men and their dealings with God. The Gospels, for example, are not about the disciples, the Pharisees, or those who were spoken to by Christ. THE GOSPELS ARE ABOUT CHRIST! To speak of anyone else as the main character of a passage is to ignore the most important Person in the story. What kind of blessing can we expect from ignoring Christ? A man-centered “blessing,” that’s what kind. Any other story is useless to fallen man, believer or unbeliever. Brethren, we have such little time to read and think about God’s Word as it is.  Let’s not waste it.

More to come, God willing…

The Bible: What it’s all about (3)

God graciously saves sinners through Jesus Christ.

Graciously. God makes known to us early in Scripture (Gen.3) that the work of salvation is a work of sovereign grace. He does it because He wants to. He is not bound by anything in man, by any sense of obligation to man, or by any sense of need on His won part. He saves guilty, sinful, rebellious man of His own free will (and good will).

            Moreover, the word graciously signifies that God saves man without any help from man or any merit in man. The Bible is not the story of how men worked their way into God’s favor, or how they helped God out or earned His blessing by obeying Him. That is true both of unbeliever and believer. We are what we are by the grace of God (1 Cor.15:10). Even in those who “labor abundantly” for the Lord, what they do is thanks to the grace of God working abundantly in them. No one can boast of his accomplishments, only of God’s accomplishments in and through him.

            Grace means that God comes to a fallen, guilty, rebellious friend of Satan and reverses all the disastrous effects of sin in him. When Adam and Eve sinned, they rejected God’s counsel and submitted to Satan’s. They became buddies with that Arch Deceiver and Rebel against God. However, God said in Genesis 3 that He would reverse Adam and Eve’s friendship with Satan and put enmity in its place. In other words, their hearts would be changed to hate Satan and the sin they had chosen; and once again love God and His will. That is grace!

            This last truth is most important for our understanding of Scripture. When we read of someone doing God’s will or pleasing Him we must understand that it is God Himself who made the difference. God is the One who gave them heart-changing grace and enabled them to obey Him. Such people are not in Scripture because they earned a place in God’s story, but because God dug them out of the miry clay, gave them a new heart, and worked in them to obey Him. “It is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure” (Phil.2:13). Such people are not examples of what man can do, but examples of what God’s grace can do in us, too.

Remember, it is God who makes the difference.

More to come, with God’s help…

Real Christianity: By the Book (1 John 1:4)

Today people are enamored with personal experiences. The New Age movement is all about experiencing super-human spirit forces that can give meaning to life. The basic hedonist is all about experiencing pleasure and fulfillment from the joys offered by the creation. The bias of the “Me” generation (which is really every person still dead in transgressions and sins) is like a black hole that pulls everything in life into the vortex of self. But this self-centered perspective on life is not peculiar to unbelievers. It can infect Christians, too. We can be so involved with the “me-my-and-mine” in this world that our time, energies and resources are exhausted by “just living.” Yet, at the end of the day we have to confess that what we have been occupied with isn’t really “living” at all, but only maintaining our existence. For the Christian, life is not defined by personal experiences, but by fellowship with God. Personal experiences are just that, personal, and therefore different for everyone. Fellowship with God is the constant of Christianity – basically the same for every child of God.

If we are to avoid that selfish pre-occupation with the things of the present life, one thing we will have to do is make sure we have “God” time whether we have our own personal “me” time or not. In other words, the face of God comes before Facebook.

John says, “we are writing these things (about Christ and about fellowship with God) to you so that your joy may be completely filled up.” In verse 3 John says his purpose in declaring these things to us was our having fellowship with God. However, John has not only “declared” these things to us, he has written them down as well. In fact, the testimony of John and the other apostles was very carefully written down in the Gospels and Epistles. These books were written, Jesus said, “for those who will believe in Me through their word” (Jn.17:20), that is, in the New Testament. The apostolic testimony declares, explains and applies the Person and work of Christ in redeeming us. God gave us that revelation so that we might have fellowship with Him – that we might know Him through Christ, be accepted by Him, love Him, trust Him, follow Him and enjoy Him.

At the end of the day, fellowship with God is an experience, one that will last forever. But it is entered into and enjoyed only as we read, study, meditate on, believe and follow His revealed Word in the Bible. The measure of your joyful fellowship with God’s Book will be the measure of your joyful fellowship with God.

More to come, God willing…

Preaching: Text or Theology?

If the Bible is not a theology Book (see previous post), then what is it? The Bible is God preaching. It is not just information; it is proclamation. The aim is to address sinners about what God has done in Christ, and to call them to “repentance towards God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20:21). Whether Old Testament or New, we read about God’s salvation through Christ. Therefore the grand theme that is controlling all the revelation in the Bible is “God’s gracious salvation of sinners through Christ.” That could really be the subtitle on the title page of your Bible. It is the controlling factor for all that the Holy Spirit inspired the writers of Scripture to include in their texts.

All of the Bible is what can be called “occasional” literature. That does not mean that we can read it once in a while. It means that it was written for a specific occasion to address particular people about particular needs. So then, when it comes to a particular book of the Bible, we first ask what part the book plays in developing the grand theme of redemption. That is why it was written in the first place. It was not written to give 21^st Century man “lessons” or “principles” about life. It was written to address sinners who are in need of a Savior, and to call them to repentance and faith in Christ.

Furthermore, when it comes to a particular book, we ask what God’s message was to those people in the context of His redeeming work. The Old Testament is not simply a history of God’s dealings with Israel. It is the story (sermon) of God’s unfolding work of redemption as seen in His dealings with Israel. When we read a particular text in the OT we need to keep in mind what God was doing at that particular time so we can understand what contribution the particular book or even passage of the book made to the overall picture. That sounds like a lot of work! It is. It is a lot harder than just getting “lessons” out of an ancient text to apply to modern hearers. But it is also a lot truer to God’s original intention in the Book.

More to come, God willing…

The Bible: What it’s all about (2)

God graciously saves sinners through Jesus Christ.

Somewhere in the margin of my Bible I have noted a statement made by our pastor emeritus to the effect that the Bible is theocentric in scope and Christocentric in focus. This is right in line with the previous post on this topic: the Bible is all about God. Our pastor simply used bigger words, as he was wont to do, to say the same thing. The Bible is theocentric – God is the central character of the Bible. In fact, every other character simply plays a supporting role in the story. Every other person in Scripture has meaning only because of his place in the story of God’s redeeming work. They are not there for us to imitate them, but because they have some meaning or task in relation to God’s activity in salvation. The Bible is all about what God does, not about what we do. Of course, we experience what God does, but it is God who gives the experience to us. We do not somehow get it from God because of our actions. It is all of grace.

Being Reformed in perspective I believe that I am saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone, as revealed in Scripture alone. By the grace of God we are what we are (1 Cor. 15:10). God’s saving work is a gracious work. That work is done through Christ. Therefore, the Bible is not only all about God, but also all about His work of redeeming us through Christ – it is Christocentric in focus. If we read the Bible with any other controlling thought in view, we will miss the message. If we preach the Bible with any other controlling thought in view we will fail to communicate the message.

In all our reading and study of God’s Book we need to keep His central theme in mind: He is graciously saving sinners through Christ.

More to come, God willing…

The Bible: What it’s all about (1)

Here it is. What the Bible is all about:

God graciously saves sinners through Jesus Christ.

That’s it. That is the theme of the Bible. Many subordinate themes support this foundational idea, but they are only supporting it, not supplanting it. I will seek to develop each element in this sentence to give you the beginning of an idea of how this theme provides the interpretational framework for all the information of Scripture.

God. First of all, the Bible is about God. In English grammar we would say that “God” is the subject of the sentence above. That means that He is the “doer” of the action (verb – saves) in the sentence. “Sinners” is the object receiving the action, not the doer of the action. The Bible is all about what God does to save guilty, sinful men. [We abominate as heresy any attempt to make man his own savior, or even partial savior. The church has stood against those views since the early days (really since Genesis 3)].

Therefore, when we read the Bible we need to ask, “What is God doing in this passage?” Whatever man does in the text needs to be understood in the light (context) of what God is doing both in the specific passage and in the Bible overall. Man, in the text, is the object of the sentence – the recipient of God’s grace – not the subject of the sentence, the gracious source or the example to follow. As the Holy Spirit so pointedly puts it, “Who makes you better? And what do you have that you have not received?” (1 Cor.4:7). God makes the difference, not man (Gen. 3:15a). God makes the difference between unbeliever and believer, and between one believer and another. If there is anything in man to boast of, let him boast of God. Therefore, the Bible is not a book of examples to be imitated, but of God’s saving grace to be recognized, sought, and trusted.

More to come, God willing…

Real Christianity: Background to 1 John

Before we go much further into 1 John it might be helpful to look at the background of this epistle. Tradition (history) tells us that John wrote his epistles, his Gospel and the Book of the Revelation in the last decade of the first century (A.D. 90-99). This most likely made him the last surviving apostle. Thirty or forty years before this, the church saw the great Jewish controversies battled by the apostle Paul. The issues of justification by faith, of the status of Gentile believers, and of meat sacrificed to idols, etc. had all been resolved. By this time the Jewish connection with the church had largely disappeared for two reasons. Jerusalem and the Temple had been destroyed, and the gospel had been taken all over the Roman Empire and won numerous Gentile converts, thus taking root in the Hellenistic world. The growing number of Greek and Roman converts naturally resulted in an ever-increasing Hellenistic influence in the church. As the church had previously been infected by Jewish sentiments in its early years, it now felt the sway of Hellenistic thinking.

Scholars tell us that the more we learn about the first century, the more groups we find who were following mystical (mystery) religions. Just who had been troubling the believers in Ephesus and its environs is hard to say. However, their basic teachings are fairly clear both from historical studies in ancient religions and from John’s writings. The religions appealed basically to those who considered themselves intellectuals. Greeks were proud of their wisdom and considered the gospel “foolishness” (See 1 Cor. 1:22-23). The idea of a “crucified god” was preposterous to them. Therefore, in order to make the gospel more palatable to these erudite heathen, some felt they could “contextualize” the truth and modify certain distasteful notions. Furthermore, certain mystery religions held to the separation of the spiritual from the physical. The spiritual was good and the physical was viewed as evil. Therefore, the true God did not “become flesh,” He only appeared to do so. On top of that, they concluded that what one did in the physical realm really had not effect on the soul, and so they denied the possibility of committing sins with the body. The result was false gods and false lives. Those who adopted these ideas left the church and caused great trouble for those “simple” folk who clung to the teaching of the apostles.

Much of what John wrote was to counteract these pagan influences. Among other things he insists on both the humanity and propitiatory death of Christ, the necessity of obedience to God’s commands, the impossibility of the regenerate believer continuing in sin, and the fact that every believer has true knowledge of God. John refers to those who left the church and teach heresy as “they/them,” and identifies himself with the other apostles as “we/us.” John wants his readers to fellowship with “us,” the apostles, who teach the truth about God and Christ. Therefore he wrote this epistle to expose the falsity of the claims of the departed intellectuals and to strengthen the assurance of those who had Real Christianity. 

The Bible is God Preaching (1)

Theology or the Bible?

            This idea was solidified for me while reading a book by Sidney Greidanus entitled Sola Scriptura: Problems and Principles in Preaching Historical Texts. I believe this was Greidanus’ doctoral dissertation and the first of a number of stimulating books on preaching the content of Scripture. I say “the content” to distinguish it from preaching the doctrines of Scripture. Greidanus’ thesis is that to truly preach the Word of God according to the Reformed doctrine of sola scriptura (which means that Scripture alone is our authority in things pertaining to God) one must preach the message of the biblical text and not just a compilation of ideas that come from various texts on a certain theme. A discourse explaining a particular topic of theology is not preaching the Word of God. The discourse may be orthodox and helpful, but the topic, or even an outline of the topic is not the message that is contained in the text one has selected for preaching. The text is a message from God to us.

This is not to say that theology has no role in preaching. It has a very important role: that of the guardrail that keeps us from going off the road. However, theology is not the road itself, to continue the metaphor. The road itself is the text of Scripture. The message of Scripture is the message of the inspired biblical text, not the message of theological treatises. This is because theology, however good, is still the work of man. The categories are selected by man, however well they may fit the data of Scripture, and the definitions are man-made syntheses of various texts from Scripture. Again, this is not to say the theology has no place in the life of the Christian. It is a helpful fence to keep us from going too far afield. But it is not the Word of God. Only the Bible is God’s message to us. Theology analyzes that Book and gives us helpful information about the truths found in that Book, but it is not the Book itself. The Book itself is God’s message to us.

Perhaps an illustration would be helpful here. When we are eating fish, we have to be very careful to remove all the bones so that we do not choke. When we are eating filet mignon, we simply cut and eat. Reading theology, as is true for any book written by man, is like eating fish: eat the meat and throw away the bones. The Bible, however, has no bones. But you cannot eat it without chewing (thinking, studying, meditating, etc.). You must work at understanding Scripture, not just read it for a blessing.

God’s Message

            The biblical text is God’s message to us. The character of the Bible is more than just information; it is proclamation. The text addresses us and charges us to believe and obey not only the gospel, but also the whole revelation of God for our lives as Christians. This is true not only of those portions that are easier to apply, such as the epistles, but equally true of all of Scripture. Through the length and breadth of the Bible God is preaching to us. We can understand this very easily from 2 Timothy 3:16. Paul tells us that the aim of the Scriptures is to “equip” the “man of God” for his work of “teaching, reproof, correction and training in righteousness.” These God-breathed Scriptures aim not only to inform us, but to reprove us, correct us, and transform us into people who have learned to walk with God according to His Word. God is preaching to us. That is something not theology book can do. 

More to come, God willing...

Real Christianity: Fellowship with God Through Jesus Christ (1 John 1:1-2)

John begins his epistle with a long and convoluted sentence. Grammatically the subject and main verb of the sentence do not appear until verse 3. “We [subject] declare [verb] to you [indirect object] what we have seen and heard [direct object].” Sorry for the grammar lesson, but grammar can help sometimes (!). Verse 1 is an expanded explanation of the direct object and verse 2 is an aside to identify “the Word of Life.” Clear as mud? {This is what an advanced degree can do for you.} If so, read it again looking at your Bible. If you still have trouble leave a comment below.

Verse 1, then, tells us the content of John’s declaration to us. The content is what the apostles witnessed as they followed Jesus through His ministry “from the beginning” to end. They are bearing witness to us what God revealed to them (verse 2). And they are identifying this “Word of life” that they witnessed. Of course we know that John is talking about the incarnate Second Person of the Trinity. The apostles heard, saw, beheld (looked upon, viewed attentively, contemplated) and handled (remember the loaves and fish?) what Jesus did. His point here is that they were physically involved with a physical Jesus who is also the “Eternal Life” who “was with the Father.” [More on that later.]

Everything that the apostles witnessed of Jesus revealed the Father. What Jesus did included securing our salvation. Everything Jesus did in revealing the Father and securing our salvation was so that we might have fellowship with God. This tells us what God thinks of our having fellowship with Him. This is our purpose in life. We exist, are saved, and live out our days here to have fellowship with Him, not just to miss Hell and land in Heaven. Of course, Heaven will be more and better fellowship.

More to come, God willing…

(Here is a diagram of verses 1-3a:

We are declaring to you what we have seen and heard.

                what was from the beginning

                what we have heard

                what we have seen with our eyes àconcerning the Word of Life

                what we beheld                                (This prepositional phrase

                and our hands handled                       can modify each clause.)

[And

             The Life was manifested (this is why we could witness Him), and

             We have seen and

    bear witness and

    declare to you the Eternal Life

                                                            Who was with the Father,

                                                            And was manifested to us.])