Jeff Ling

David Platt On The Gospel & God’s Election from Bowen Blog on Vimeo.

“After having described the contest which the godly have perpetually with their own flesh, he returns to the consolation, which was very needful for them, and which he had before mentioned; and it was this, – That though they were still beset by sin, they were yet exempt from the power of death, and from every curse, provided they lived not in the flesh but in the Spirit: for he joins together these three things, – the imperfection under which the faithful always labor, – the mercy of God in pardoning and forgiving it, – and the regeneration of the Spirit.; and this indeed in the last place, that no one should flatter himself with a vain notion, as though he were free from the curse, while securely indulging in the meantime his own flesh.

As then the carnal man flatters himself in vain, when in no way solicitous to reform his life, he promises to himself impunity under the pretense of having this grace; so the trembling consciences of the godly have an invincible fortress, for they know that while they abide in Christ they are beyond every danger of condemnation.” – John Calvin

The Offensive Cross of Christ

“The cross, says Martin Hengel in his classic little book Crucifixion, ‘was not just any kind of death. It was an utterly offensive affair, ‘obscene’ in the original sense of the word.’ So obscene was it in fact, that the sophisticated, cultured people in Greek and Roman societies would not even utter the word cross in polite company. It was a reviled word, and it conjured disgusting and nauseating images.

Crucifixion was never a private event. It was always raw, and searingly public, because its purpose was to terrify the masses into submission to the authorities. Crosses often lined the main roads into cities, holding the broken writhing bodies of the condemned, or displaying the rotting corpses of the dead. The Romans even scheduled public crucifixions to coincide with religious festivals, insuring the maximum number of people present to witness the horror.

I think we underestimate just how serious Paul was when he said that the cross was an ‘offense’ to the people around him. We chalk it up to good rhetoric when he says that the message of the cross was a ‘stumbling block’ to some people and ‘madness’ to the rest. But that wasn’t just cheap overstatement. It was Paul’s matter-of-fact acknowledgment, born of twenty years of first-hand experience, that the message he was preaching—that salvation was to be had through a crucified God—was considered by everyone to be either deeply obscene or totally, completely, tin-foil-hat ridiculous.

Surely Paul could have made the gospel more palatable—and less dangerous—by saying it was about something else. Something cleaner and less ridiculous than the cross. Something more glorious. Less disgusting

He didn’t do that, though. ‘I decided,’ Paul said, ‘to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified’ (1 Cor. 2:2). In the face of the worst cultural prejudice imaginable, he fixed the entire gospel squarely and immovably on the fact that Jesus was tacked to a stauros (Greek – Cross) and left to die. If he had been trying to find a surefire way to turn first-century people off from his ‘good news,’ he couldn’t have done better than that! So why did he do it? It’s simple. He did it because he knew that leaving the cross out, or running past it with a glance, or making it peripheral to the gospel, or allowing anything else to displace it at the center of the gospel would make it, finally, no gospel at all.”

- Greg Gilbert in Don’t Call It a Comeback

Spurgeon in the Piulpit

“The man who never strives against the sin which dwells in him, who, indeed, is not conscious of any sin to strive against—that is the man who may begin to question whether he knows anything at all about the spiritual life. He who has no inward pain may well suspect that he is abiding in death—abiding, therefore, under constant condemnation. But that man who feels a daily striving after deliverance from evil, who is panting, pining, longing and agonizing to become holy even as God is holy, he is the justified man! The man to whom every sin is a misery, to whom even the thought of iniquity is intolerable, he is the man who may with confidence declare, “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.” Souls that sigh for holiness are not condemned to eternal death, for their sighing proves that they are in Christ Jesus! “ – Spurgeon, Sermon #1917  Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit 1 Volume 32: In Christ, No Condemnation

Reading two books at the same time that should prove to be really instructive or send me hurtling into a deep theological vortex from which I may never recover.

John Piper’s  The Future of Justification is on my Kindle. (Amazon seems to like Piper, as almost anything  he does goes right to Kindle) Piper says that while N.T. is not preaching “another gospel” (Gal. 1:8-9) he is portraying the doctrine of justification in such a way that is “sodisfigured that it becomes difficult to recognize as Biblically faithful.” Piper will proceed to clarify what he views as the correct doctrine of justification. As for Wright, his Justification, recently released and so far only available in harback, is a response he wrote to Piper’s work to clarify his stand on justification. From what I’ve read in the introduction, Wright’s view is not that Piper’s stand on how justification occurs is not wrong, but rather insufficent to communicate the vast implications of the saving work of Christ. I hope that reading them together will be a blessing and not a burden.