A Gospel Presentation - Part 2 (Creation/Curse)

Previous Posts in this Series:
A Gospel Presentation: Part 1 (Two-Age Worldview)

"Remember what happened long ago, for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me. I declare the end from the beginning, and ancient times from what is still to come. I say, "My purpose will stand, and all My good pleasure I will accomplish." (Isaiah 46: 9-10)

I used to read a verse like this, or hear someone preach about some similar statement and wonder, "does this mean God foresaw sin? What does it mean that He knows the End from the Beginning?" We all know the story - God creates the Heavens and the Earth (Genesis 1:1) and every living creature, he spends six days creating everything, including Mankind, and they are placed in the perfect Garden of Eden, given dominion over the Earth and given two commandments: 1) "Fill the Earth and subdue it" (Genesis 1:28) and 2) "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for on the day that you eat from it, dying you will die" (most translations read: "for on the day that you eat from it you will certainly die") - Genesis 2:17. He creates Eve after that, as a suitable helper for Adam, Eve is deceived by the Serpent and Adam eats of the tree as well. This is a story believers know well - one we have likely heard since childhood.

What follows this is what is interesting to me. In Genesis 3:8 we read, "Now they [Adam and Eve] heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden." The thing that sticks out to me here is that God is not outside of His creation. I think too many of us have a view of God as being removed, or somehow outside of what He has made. Scripture does not support this! Very clearly in this passage, God is not only involved with what He has created, but He is in it. A verse we have all heard 100 times, "In the beginning God created the Heavens AND the Earth." (Genesis 1:1) He created not only a place for Man, but also for himself and it stands to reason that at Creation, the two were connected in some way because God saw fit to walk around on the Earth. The way I read it - God wanted a family - he had a Son and that relationship was meaningful to Him and so creating Mankind was a way of expanding that family. Why would a God, who desires to have a big family, create that and then remove Himself from it?

A Gospel Presentation - Part 1 (Two-Age Worldview)

This is the start of a six-part series I will be doing covering The Gospel. The core question I will be addressing is "what is the Gospel?" How I have arrived at this point is a longer story, but the impetus for tackling this question comes from two passages in the Messianic Writings (New Testament), Luke 3:15-18 and Mark 1:14-15, which I will share shortly. The overall arc of this series will be on five main points: Creation, Covenant, Confirmation (Christ), Charisma (Holy Spirit) and Culmination/Cure (Day of Judgement, Eternity). I learned these as "The Five C's" and so I'm preserving that structure because it makes it easier to remember. This first post will be introductory, but mainly covering the Worldview of a 1st Century Jew as a backdrop for the rest of the series.

"Now because the people were waiting in suspense and were all wondering in their hearts whether John himself might possibly be the Messiah, John, in response, told them all, "Though I have been baptizing you with water, the one who is more powerful that I is coming, and I am not fit to untie the strap of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear out his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn. The chaff, however, he will burn in the unquenchable fire." It was with many, many other exhortations of this kind, then, that John was proclaiming the gospel to the people." (Luke 3:15-18, Blessed Hope Translation)

"Now after John was arrested, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God. "The appointed time has been completed," he declared, "and the Kingdom of God is drawing near! Repent and keep putting your faith in the promises!"" (Mark 1:14-15, BHT)

After coming across these two passages some time ago, the question arose in my mind - if John was preaching/proclaiming the Gospel before Jesus was ever on the scene, and if Jesus was preaching/proclaiming the Gospel at the very beginning of his public ministry, before having done and said all he did, before his death on the cross and before the resurrection, then what was the Gospel that they were preaching? In the Evangelical world, we are taught a lot of things about the Gospel, but usually it is something along the lines of, "Jesus died for our sins so that we could be with him in Heaven". If this is the full Gospel, then what was John saying? For that matter, what was the gospel that Jesus was preaching? To begin to answer this question, I want to start with an overview of the Jewish worldview, particularly of the 1st century Jew, by whom and to whom the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) and all of the Apostolic Letters, were written.

Why the Resurrection?

A friend of mine and I are challenging each other to develop a concise, 20-30 minute presentation of the Gospel. As part of that exercise, I was reminded of something very important. There are TWO issues that humans have with regard to their relationship with God. The first thing, that none of us has a problem remembering, is sin. We are sinful and God is Holy. Sin is the thing that causes the fracture in the relationship. With that being said - there is a second thing that is just as critical. The second problem is the CURSE. Adam & Eve sinned (problem 1) which precipitated a curse (problem 2) from God.

God says in Genesis 3, "Because you [the serpent] have done this (deceived, circumvented), cursed are you more than all cattle, and more than every beast of the field; on your belly you will go, and dust you will eat all the days of your life" (Gen 3:14) and then later on to Adam and Eve, "To the woman he said, "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth, in pain you will bring forth children; yet your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you." Then to Adam He said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten (sinned) from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, 'You shall not eat from it'; cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; and you will eat the plants of the field; by the sweat of your face you will eat bread, till you return to the ground, because from it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return." (Gen 3:16-19).

One thing that occurred to me this past Holy week: we often say that Jesus 'died for our sins' which, Hallelujah and Amen, is true. But do we think about why He had to come back to life? We have no problem understanding his death as sacrificial, but it seems like we just lump the resurrection into that equation as well, without realizing that the resurrection is, in itself, a unique element. Stay with me - Jesus could have lived a sinless and perfect life, have died for our sins and atoned for them perfectly, but stayed 'dead', just as the saints who had gone before him had. Would that have made the actual sacrifice any less effectual? I would argue 'no' - that the resurrection was not necessary in the sin/forgiveness equation.

If Everything Is Racial, Nothing is Racial

I recently started reading Doug Wilson's blog, cleverly named "Blog & Mablog". He had a post on recent current events, two shootings which occurred within days of each other, one in Atlanta and one in Boulder, CO. Two things that were immediately brought to the fore-front of the national discussion were the predictably tired overtures about gun-control, but this time around we also had a significant racial commentary. Both were knee-jerkingly blamed on 'white supremacy' when it appears that neither really had anything to do with white supremacy (the Boulder shooter, for example, wasn't even 'white'). Anyway, to Doug Wilson's comment that made me think:

"We have a problem, and the problem is one of hyperinflation. If accusations of racism came in a currency like papiermark, and they do, what it amounts to is that we have so much of it sitting around in piles now that it is worth nothing anymore. The printing presses are hot, and you can't even buy a paper clip with paper currency anymore. Being a racist today is like becoming a millionaire in the Weimar Republic." (Strunk & White Supremacy)

In other words, if everything that happens is labeled by race, or framed in terms of racism, then nothing is about race or is racist. The terms, by sheer volume of usage, lose their meaning and importance altogether. This is happening with all sorts of things in our culture and only gets worse and worse the more we allow the elites and mass media divide up the people into 'us vs. them'. The peddlers of 'everything is about race and racism' used to be confined to a small group of race-baiters, with their primary spokesmen being Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Now you have entire media outlets dedicated to fueling this rhetorical dumpster fire, eager for the clicks and views of a nation divided on false premises. The great majority have tuned it out, though some have chosen to wrap their identities around it, eager to play the victim and urged on by media and academia.

I'm not sure where it ends up, but I am sure that if everything continues to be framed in these terms, the terms themselves will become ever more meaningless.

Some More Thoughts on Salvation

This is one of those posts where I just need to go through the exercise of writing something out. Lately, my thoughts have been focused on two main things, "what is salvation" and "what does Jesus mean when he says, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father except through me"?

What is Salvation?

This question, it seems to me, is the critical one that has to be answered before the second question about what Jesus means in John 14:6. Being saved necessarily means that there was something to be saved from. We could say that we are saved 'from our sins', but that's not quite it. I think the most accurate thing is to say that we are saved from the penalty of our sinfulness. Throughout the New Testament, you get much discussion about sacrifice and atonement, and in Hebrews, about Jesus being the 'better sacrifice'. This is all legal language. Paul says that "all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God" (Rom. 3:23). What this means is that we all bear a legal charge against us. In order to clear that charge, a penalty must be paid. We see this drama play out in ancient Israel's sacrificial system. If someone sinned, in tandem with repentance they would bring the appropriate sacrifice to the temple, the priest would then transfer the guilt of that sin to the animal, and then the animal was either killed, or released in the wild. The important thing, however, was that God accredited forgiveness to the sinner in that exchange. There was nothing special about the animal or about the sacrifice - it was God's willingness to consider that sacrifice as sufficient.

In the eternal courtroom, on the Day that Jesus comes back, either you bear that sin yourself and pay the penalty through eternal death and suffering, or Jesus' sacrifice is considered as sufficient atonement, paying the penalty in your stead (by grace through faith, of course).

Does God 'Draw' People to Faith?

Here is a snippet of an email response I received from my pastor within the past two weeks - one that made me wrestle anew with whether God is the one who draws people to Himself. In my mind, the question boils down to, 'do we as individuals, play any role in coming to faith in the God of the Universe?' Anyway:

"Why is it that some do not believe today, even in the face of tremendous evidence that Christ has been raised? Jesus said that no one can come to him unless the Father draws them (John 6:44). You see while the door is narrow and thrown wide open to all who would believe, believing continues to be a matter of God's sovereign work in the world. [...] We must be drawn by the Father to the narrow door of Jesus. The children of God are not born of human decision, but born of God (John 1:13). This is truly good news, because it means that God is saving us, and we are in no way saving ourselves (John 5:21, NASB)."

I'm not quoting my pastor as a means of taking him down; by no means, I have the utmost respect and admiration for my pastor. I do disagree on some level, but I want to make sure I faithfully represent the opposing viewpoint and he articulates it well. Here are the verses he referenced:

John 6:44 reads, "No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day."

Fiction and Theater

At this point in America, national politics is complete fiction and theater. Just yesterday, we had two perfect examples of this. The first was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) breathlessly claiming on social media that she had a near-death experience during the Capitol Hill riot on January 6th. She then brings up, for the first time ever, that she was sexually assaulted earlier in life and that this event on Jan. 6th compounded trauma on trauma. It is sad that this even needs to be said, but of course I am not doubting her story of prior sexual assault or in any way normalizing that experience. My point in bringing it up is that she is clearly using it, in this particular moment, as a means of silencing anyone who might question her narrative on those Jan. 6th events. She knows the culture and the cultural hot-buttons of the moment. She could have brought this up and literally any other moment over the past several years - in fact, it's surprising that she didn't given the fervor of the recent 'Me Too' movement. Why she wouldn't have wanted to add her voice to that movement is actually somewhat baffling, given the profile of her position. I digress. The reality is, she wasn't in the Capitol building that day. She was in another building that was uninvolved with the protestors and rioters. A police officer came to her door and her building was briefly evacuated, but that's it. There were never any rioters in her building. In her telling of the events, they were in the building and she was hiding in her office...none of that actually happened. The only person who entered her office was a capitol police officer, there to escort her to another building. In her telling of the events, all she does is trash the cop.