26 essays
On the final day of our Lord’s life, his opponents rushed to judgment, claiming victory too soon. Since they could kill him, he could not in their minds be the Messiah because “Messiah abides forever.” (John 12:34). They took his death to mean the wrong thing, so they mocked him, called him a deceiver (Matthew 27:63), and made the fatal mistake of placing a guard at his tomb. As a result, those soldiers froze in fear when an angel came to open the sealed tomb.
Read Essay →“Because God loved the world so much, he gave his only Son
that whoever trusts in him may have eternal life.”
Each word in this most familiar verse hangs heavy with meaning.
“Because God . . . ”
who was before the rest of reality,
the reason for everything else,
the origin of all that is,
the agent behind what all happens, especially in regard to what this observance means.
Read Essay →Today is a day like no other. It commemorates the resurrection of a nationally known teacher publicly put to death by crucifixion three days earlier just outside the walls of the capital city. His empty tomb on Sunday morning marks the tremendous change from extreme grief to boundless jubilation, from devastating disappointment to confident hope, from feeling forsaken to being vindicated, from totally confused to fully aware of what has happened.
Read Essay →“The one-time offering of Christ’s “body” has made us holy. . . . . When he offered one sacrifice for sins for all time, he sat down on the right hand of God. . . . By one offering he has perfected forever the ones he sanctified. . . . Where there’s forgiveness for sins, there’s no more sacrificing for them” (Hebrews 10:10, 12, 14, 18).
Jesus lived out full righteousness in the human realm, resurrected after his death on a cross, and ascended to God’s right hand in the real temple: heaven itself. So he remains there (Hebrews 7:23) as the One we can stay committed to for continued righteousness and friendship with God. As 1 John 1:7 puts it, the blood he shed keeps us clean from sin by continued identity with him. We show our ongoing aspiration for goodness by ongoing commitment to his achieved goodness.
Read Essay →It is so good to be able to remember. We can deal with old issues that resurface by using what we learned from before even for coping with new matters that come up. But we can also forget, and that benefits us too. Less useful experiences fade and disappear so they do not clog up our conscious thinking now. Negative times lose their edge, and experiences like pain we cannot “remember” at all—only that they happened.
Read Essay →As Jesus and the eleven disciples walked from the upper room to Gethsemane, he gave them a picture to help them through the difficulties they would soon face. They were to think of themselves like branches attached to him as the grape vine. The Father as gardener had put that arrangement in place to accomplish his purposes in the world.
The picture had features that corresponded with what it represented. The branches were to produce fruit. To do that, they needed to stay attached to Jesus as their source of nutrients. They could not accomplish the Father’s purpose on their own. If they did not produce fruit, they would be cut out and thrown away. They were to produce fruit instead of leaves or other growths that would get pruned away; their efforts would come to nothing.
Read Essay →One age-old question asks why God created mankind. Probably the best answer is that he created us to bestow himself on as a person.
That answer resembles why people choose to have children. They do so despite knowing the risks, the resulting limitations, the added responsibilities, and the possible disappointments that come from having children who can act contrary to their parents’ guidance and even their own best interests. Parents use backup systems for retrieving such departures.
Read Essay →The first of each week means a new beginning, especially when it’s the first week of the new year. We can look on it as a clean slate, open to new possibilities, finished with past limitations, and given a fresh start.
We are remembering here Christ the person and his final work of establishing a basis for forgiveness, which means freedom from past failure and freedom for pursuing a new life.
Read Essay →The Son of man “has the keys to death and hell” (Revelation 1:18). This description reminds us of the eternal aspect of salvation through him. What God gives on the basis of the Son’s righteousness is more than forgiveness for a specific sin, for one kind of moral failure, for just past sins, or even for sins along the way after we accept him as Savior. His benefit carries on through death and eternity, particularly the deliverance from hell as permanent separation from God in the end.
Read Essay →“God has made us what we are. He created us in Christ Jesus for living the way he prepared ahead of time” (Ephesians 2:10).
“Create” means making something new. It implies doing something valuable, something purposeful, something people take initiative on, something they want to do
So it is appropriate for Paul to call it “creating” what God accomplished for us through the Messiah. The sacrifices that were offered before were shadows and pictures of the new reality Christ established. God valued us enough to have his own Son do his work while we were still sinners (Romans 5:8b). Jesus did not die in defeat. In Gethsemane the attackers “fell back” (John 18:6) at first when he identified himself, so their subsequently arresting him happened because he let them. Jesus did it on purpose. God took the initiative because he cared (Romans 5:8a).
Read Essay →Just a few days before the death of Jesus, two brothers among his disciples—James and John—asked to sit on his right and left in his kingdom. His profound answer was, “You don’t know what you’re asking” (John 10:38). That comment covers two areas of ignorance we all have: not knowing the future and not knowing ourselves.
The brothers did not realize what they and the other disciples would have to deal with in establishing Christ’s kingdom. That’s why Jesus asked them whether they could drink “the cup” and “be baptized with the baptism” of suffering that he would drink and undergo.
Read Essay →Jesus once said, “I always do what pleases my Father” (John 8:29). We do well then to understand that his crucifixion was more than a free-standing act that ended his life and thereby established the atonement. Rather, it culminated his righteousness and epitomized his constant goodness throughout his years of incarnation. He did not simply come among us and do the one deed that saves us. He needed to do the Father’s will at each point along the way to qualify himself for the Father to appoint him as the righteous One who saves us from unrighteousness.
Read Essay →Only once did Jesus ever say to tell what someone did during his ministry. It happened just a couple days before the Romans crucified him in Jerusalem. Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus, took some expensive ointment and poured it on Jesus’ head and feet. The spikenard in that alabaster cruise was worth nearly a year’s wages for a common laborer in Palestine: 300 denarii (John 12:2-8; Matthew 26:6-13; Mark 14:3-9).
Read Essay →For us the jubilation on Palm Sunday connects with the resurrection next Sunday, the resurrection of the son of David, who comes to us in the name of the LORD—to be crucified Friday.
The Triumphal Entry does not announce conquest of one kingdom by another but progress from one kind of kingdom to another. The triumph does not take place between two nations but between two kinds of things—from a political system to a personal fellowship.
Read Essay →Archaeology studies the past by examining the relics and ruins that remain. Archaeologists dig up items they use to piece together the history of peoples, places, and events all over the world. Numerous journals report their findings, and professional societies underwrite the work of the countless laborers, technicians, and scholars.
The impact of such endeavors overwhelms us. We marvel at the effort, cost, skill, and value in the discoveries. But we sense also the futility of material living as a final form of existence. Grand buildings lie in rubble under dirt and overgrowth. Countless skeletons show how temporary the best of physical things is.
Read Essay →Love is more than an idea in the mind, a word on a piece of paper, a red card from the store. Love is an act, something one person does to another. It was the best thing the Lord did in his earthly life, the thing we note during the time around this table that displays emblems of his self-giving.
Acts have consequences so love, we say, is self-giving for consequences in others, for the good of the lives around us. We can also say that love is a self-giving that fosters in others love in return as well as something they pass forward.
Read Essay →5Take the attitude Christ Jesus took.
6Although he was in the form of deity,
he didn’t consider being on a par with God
something to hang onto.
7He emptied himself,
and took the place of a servant.
In the form of a man,
8he humbled himself to the point of dying—
dying on a cross.
9So God lifted him up above all others
10so every knee in heaven, on earth, and under the earth
Read Essay →Sometimes we are stuck with our mistakes. That’s the way it can be with physical harm. My friend Wayne lost his arm in a hay bailer. He lived, but there was no way to undo the loss.
That’s the way it is with legal issues too. If I run over someone while speeding through a work zone, I am stuck with the sentence for my carelessness. The courts will not commute the jail term for my punishment. I am stuck “till I’ve paid the last penny” (Matthew 5:26).
Read Essay →Telling the truth means more than not lying; it means telling it instead of not saying anything. Before God created the world, he planned what the Son would do in it (Revelation 13:8). And he did not leave us to grope around for that (Acts 17:27); we did not need to ascend on high to discover his intentions (Romans 10:6-8).
The Mosaic sacrifices foreshadowed cleansing from sins by the real thing they pictured. The prophets prophesied his coming to save his people from their sins. Jesus himself predicted his death on some five recorded occasions starting halfway through his ministry. So his inner circle of disciples was aware of how his work would climax.
Read Essay →Processes follow a pattern: preparation plus follow-through, both done and done well. A farmer does not just harvest wheat; he has to till, plant, water, and weed. And he does not just till, plant, water, and weed; he has to bring in the crop or there is nothing to sell or feed his animals. Athletes do not just run a race; they train strenuously beforehand. Training for years brings no glory if they do not finish the race. Students do not just pass required courses along the way; they have to finish the last semester to receive a diploma.
Read Essay →Getting something started is the hard part. Several things contribute to how true that is: what all it affects, how much it takes and how long, what resources can contribute to its progress, and how important its goals are in general.
Getting Christianity started was certainly no exception. The Lord’s Great Commission touches on several of those factors:
“Go make disciples in every country [its scope]. Baptize them into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit [people’s very identity]; and teach [means] them to observe everything I’ve commanded you [personal behavior]. I’ll always be with you [resource] till the end of the age [length of endeavor]” (Matthew 28:18-22).
Read Essay →From the time he first predicted his death, Jesus made clear that being his disciples called for self-denial (Matthew 16:24). He made that point in a graphic way: “pick up your cross and follow me.” When would anybody pick up a cross except on the way to their own crucifixion?
A crucial factor here is that in so doing we are following him. We are not choosing self-destruction. We are not opting for self-negation but choosing him, his values, and purposes over ours. We are heading for something rather than nothing, prioritizing one thing over another, in this case his interests over ours. In so doing, we emulate the One who entered this event saying, “Not my will but yours be done” (Matthew 26:39).
Read Essay →After Jesus fed the 4,000, some Pharisees came asking him for “a sign from heaven” (Matthew 16:1 = Mark 8:11-12; cp. Matthew 12:18; Luke 11:16; John 2:18). Jewish patriots did the same thing previously the day after he had fed the 5,000 (John 6:30). They illustrated their standard of evidence by citing the manna God gave “from heaven” when the Israelites needed food in the desert (Exodus 16:4, 13-22; Numbers 11:6-9).
Read Essay →“For the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2). It was the power of joy that Jesus could profit from. More exactly it was the power of the hope for joy, a joy not yet experienced, that carried him through what he was experiencing: being crucified.
Even more, his crucifixion came, not as a tragedy that overtook him unbidden, but one he saw coming early on (Matthew 16:21). He bore the shadow of a cross every day we walked. On the last day he willingly submitted to a cross that was heavier than he could even carry (John 18:6).
Read Essay →One of the most familiar verses in all of scripture says, “God loved the world to much that he gave hi only Son” (John 3:16). The important implication of that positive statement comes in the very next verse: “He didn’t send his Son into the world to condemn it but to save it” (3:17).
God has no inclination to see how many people he can send to hell, so we need not live in fear of him; all his intentions toward us are benevolent and loving.
Read Essay →Scripture uses shorthand statements like “Christ died for our sins” (1 Corinthians 15:3). To an outsider’s ear that may not make a lot of sense. What does crucifying “Christ” have to do with “our” “sins”? The previous verse indicates that it had to do with saving us from them. So the question tightens up: How can the death of one person connect with saving other people from their ‘sins”?
“Died for our sins” could mean that (a) he would not have had to die if we had not sinned, and that (b) he died to get rid of our sins. How does such a thing work? Sin takes place between an offender against an offended, so what can a third party do that removes an offender’s sins?
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