Missions Blog

Taken from here by Vitamin Z.

Miroslav Volf is a Christian theologian from Croatia. He says that he used to hold to the fashionable view that dismissed the wrath of God, that the idea of an angry God was somehow incompatible with the love of God. But then war came to his country. Terrible atrocities were done. He found himself exceedingly and justifiably angry. Then he thought - if God is not angry at such injustice and cruelty, then he is not a God worth worshiping. Only if God is angry against such evil is he worth loving, or being loved by us.

I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the form Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry.

Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.

- Dr. Christopher Wright, The God I Don’t Understand, p. 131

The Top 50 Books That Have Shaped Evangelicals | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction

Christianity Today’s 50th anniversary issue arrived in my mailbox the other day featuring this list. You can check it out online at the link above. Thanks to Travis at Stepping in Faith for bringing to my attention that the list was also online.

I’ve read numbers 44, 43, 37, 36, 32, 21, and part of 9. If you didn’t believe me earlier that the ” The Gospel of the Kingdom” was a great and very important book, you can now take Christianity Today’s word for it. They listed as #44 on their list of influential books.

However, I am sad that Left Behind was appropriately added to the list. A book that should be considered entertainment has shaped much of our theology about the end times and placed an overemphasis on Israel over all other peoples.

What books have you read on the list? Which ones did you like and did you dislike any of them? There are many on the list that I hope to read in the future. If you are looking for encouraging testimonies of Christians I can highly recommend “God’s Smuggler” and “The Cross and the Switch Blade.” I read part of “Through the Gates of Splendor” which is #9 on the list (WHOOP!!!). I read all of “Shadow of the Almighty”, but I might need to go back and read all of Elisabeth Elliot’s other classic.

On a humorous note, notice that the Bible was left completely off the list .

Believing Jesus » Why Legalism is so Sinful

Ben Arbour did us all a great service transcribing these great words by Dr. Piper. Thank you Ben. This concept is extremely key. Ben is writing some great stuff over there, so please check him out. Here are Dr. Piper’s words. I am not blockquoting it to make it easier to read.

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If You Want to Love, You Must Die to the Law

If you want to be a loving person, the way to pursue it is to die to the Law and to pursue a vital, all-satisfying union with Christ. Romans 7:4 says, “You also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God.” Notice the exchange: die to the law and belong to the one who was raised from the dead, that is, Jesus. This leads, Paul says, to bearing fruit for God. And the preeminent fruit of the Christians life is love. Therefore the key to love is to die to the law and embrace Jesus Christ by faith as the Savior and Treasure of your life.

But this does not mean that the Law aimed at something other than love, Romans 13:10 says, “Love is the fulfillment of the law” (NASB). So it seems that death to the Law means something like: Stop using the Law unlawfully. That’s the way Paul talks in 1 Timothy 1. There are folks who want to be “teachers of the Law” but “they do not understand…what they are saying” (verse 7). What are they doing wrong?

Paul explains in 1 Timothy 1:5 that “the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and good conscience and a sincere faith.” So Paul’s gospel ministry aims at the fruit of love. People who love from “sincere faith” are in sync with the gospel.

Where does this love come from? He says it comes “from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.” In other words, the way to pursue love is by focusing on the transformation of the heart and the conscience and the awakening and strengthening of faith. Love is not pursued first or decisively by focusing on a list of behavioral commandments and striving to conform to them. That is what we must die to.

Then in 1 Timohty 1:6-7, Paul describes some men who don’t understand this and yet are trying to use the Law for moral transformation. They are making a mess of it. He says, “Some men, straying from these things [that is, from heart, the conscience, and faith], have turned aside to fruitless discussion, wanting to be teachers of the Law, even though they do not understand…what they are saying.” So their error is a misuse of the Law. They are trying to teach the Law, but they are turning aside from matter of the heart and conscience and faith. And so they are not arriving at love.

Is then the Law at fault? No. Paul absolves the Law, by saying in 1 Timothy 1:8, “But we know that the Law is good, if one uses it lawfully.” The “lawful” use of the Law is to use it as a pointer to the gospel of the risen Christ, which awakens love. Paul confirms this in verse 9 by saying, “Law is not made for a righteous person, but for those who are lawless, rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners.” What does he mean? He means that the Law does not need to do its job for those who are united to Christ by faith and are bearing the fruit of love. It needs to do its job by confronting sinners with the fact that their lives are contrary to the gospel and that they must pursue “the gospel of the glory of the blessed God” and belong to the one who was raised from the dead.

Paul says, with a sweeping statement in verses 10-11, that the Law is for pointing out, and convicting people of, “whatever is contrary to sound teaching, according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God.” This is very significant. Notice the connection between the Law and the gospel here. Who is the Law for? It is for “the lawless, rebellious, the ungodly and sinners,” that is, for those whose lives are not “according to the glorious gospel.” That is, for those who do not love. For love is the aim of Paul’s gospel (verse 5). The point is that the Law does not produce lives that accord with the gospel. Used lawfully, the law sends us to the gospel. That’s the point of Romans 7:4 – you must die to the Law [as a way of producing the fruit of love] and be united to Christ by faith “so that you might bear the fruit [of love] for God.”

In other words, according to 1 Timothy 1:5-11, the Law is meant to accuse and convict people of breaking the gospel! “The law is for…whatever is contrary to…the glorious gospel” (verses 10-11). The law of commandments is not the first and decisive means of fruit-bearing for the Christian. Rather the Law brings us to Christ so that, as Romans 7:4 says, “you might be joined to…Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit [of love] for God.” Oh let us embrace the risen Christ!

Life is too brief to waste it romancing the Law of commandments. That marriage will not bear the offspring of love. Make haste to Christ. Let the Law be, not the wife, but the humble matchmaker between you and Jesus. Don’t fall in love with, and don’t hate, the humble go-between. Die to the Law. Belong to the living Christ.

Open the eyes of our hearts, Father, to see the precious and limited role of Your Law in bearing the fruit of love in our lives. Lead us into deep and personal union with Jesus. Let this relationship with the living Christ transform our minds and wills so that we want what He wants and hate what He hates. Make us, by this union, radically loving people. In Jesus’ name, we pray, Amen.

Chuck Smiths | TheResurgence

Mark Driscoll’s recent post discussed the growing gap between the founder of the Calvary Chapel movement and his son. Although I was interested in the post, I appreciated his comments on the Kingdom of God and the Rapture the most. These are things that I would love to write about more, but I will a let a man more educated than I speak to these things right now.

Rapture. The rapture, like the age of the earth, is an issue that Christians should discuss and debate, but not divide over. Years ago when I first read Smith Sr.’s book Calvary Chapel Distinctives, I was surprised to see that in addition to the Holy Spirit, Bible, grace, Jesus, and love, which all make sense, the premillenial pretribulational rapture of the church was an essential doctrine. Curiously, the rapture is a doctrine that has existed for less than two hundred years in the church’s history. The word itself started at a peculiar and possibly cultic charismatic prayer meeting where a women prophesied that the church would be raptured. From that simple beginning, the doctrine has now become the leading eschatological position in American evangelicalism. For more on this issue, the book The Incredible Cover Up: Exploring the Origins of Rapture Theories by Dave MacPherson is a fascinating historical read. Since the doctrine was not even heard of by men such as Athanasius, Augustine, Calvin, Luther, Zwingli, and Wesley, we should not make this doctrine the litmus test of biblical faithfulness, otherwise we are saying there was no faithful eschatology for the first 1,800 years of the church.

and…

Kingdom. The problem with the older generation of strong dispensationally minded evangelicals was that they had an under-realized eschatology. By this, I mean that they saw the kingdom of God as an almost entirely future event. The younger generation of evangelicals are more prone to embrace an over-realized eschatology whereby the kingdom of God is essentially here already, so talking about heaven, hell, and the eternal state is not important. On this point, Smith Jr. echoes a drum regularly beat by McLaren and others affiliated with the Emergent group. The problem is that the kingdom of God is not yet here, but it does break in through the church, the preaching of the gospel, and the power of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, a balanced eschatology that holds the “already/not yet” tension of Paul is the only hope for a biblical position on this issue.

I am more and more concerned with a lack of understanding about the Kingdom of God in modern Christianity and in my own life. For one, I just love the teaching and, for me, how it brings the word alive again. I love the masculinity of a God who is crushing the kingdom of darkness and ushering in His Kingdom. For a good read on the subject, check out The Gospel of the Kingdom by George Eldon Ladd. You can read the first 5 chapters here for free.

This week while working out at the gym I was discouraged by another report about Evangelical Christians getting excited about the war in the Middle East. A popular morning show was doing a report on this sad reality. I was also discouraged by a report on the Daily Show called “This Week in God” highlighting the new Left Behind video game, mocking it for being extremely violent and for giving players 2 points every time they save a soul, but taking a point away for killing someone.

It is a shame that the Left Behind series and dispensational theology have led Christians to rejoice in this war and to hope it continues, rather than praying for it to end like we should. It is even sadder to see the secular press grab ahold of these things and to mock Christianity.
I am however encouraged by Wade Burleson’s post today:
Grace and Truth to You: Dispensational Theology and the Destruction of Iran

I am not a dispensationalist, but I marvel at how many Christians believe it to be the orthodox understanding of the end times. There are many very real problems with dispensationalism, not the least of which is the teaching of the Bible that the Old Covenant with Israel has been abolished. But rather than go into great detail on eshcatology, I am simply pointing out a couple of concerns I have of regarding the end product of dispensationalism.

He goes to detail several shortcomings of the theology. At the end of his post he quotes a letter his grandfather received from A.W. Pink after requesting a copy of his book”The Redeemer’s Return” which was then out of print. This is a portion of that letter

I fully agree with the spiritually minded C.H. Spurgeon, who said:’I scarcely consider myself qualified to explain any part of the Book of Revelation, and none of the expositions I have ever seen entice me to attempt this task, for they are mostly occupied with a refutation of all the interpretations that have gone before, and each one seems to be very successful indeed in proving that all the rest knows nothing at all about the matter.’

If you ask then, ‘why then did God give us the Revelation?’ I answer, ‘to stain the pride of man, to expose our ignorance until such time as the whole of it is fulfilled.

My advise is, leave Prophecy alone, and concentrate on the practical portions of the Word!

Amen!, Mr. Pink. We need to be excited about the Lord’s return, but not at the recent events in Israel. As I previously stated, Jesus gave a clear word that the end would not come until the gospel had reached every people group (Matt 24:14) of the world. We are about 10,000 groups short, so it seems that we have a good bit of work to do. Let us hasten the coming of the Lord by getting out there and obeying the great commission.

Almost forgot, the Rapture Index is getting really high, but their index doesn’t take into account the evangelization of the world. Lets pray for a this war to end between two people who desperately need Jesus.

Grace and Truth to You: The (Entire) Household of Faith

In a heart warming “isn’t that just the cutest thing you have ever seen?!?” moment, Wade Burleson pushes my envelope about who all we should preach the Gospel to. What do you think?