Archives for 2016

In a “Sermon on the Nativity,” Martin Luther said:

The inn was full. No one would release a room to this pregnant woman. She had to go to a cow stall and there bring forth the Maker of all creatures because nobody would give way. Shame on you, wretched Bethlehem! The inn ought to have been burned with brimstone, for even if Mary had been a beggar maid or unwed, anybody at such a time should have been glad to give her a hand.

There are many of you in this congregation who think to yourselves: “If only I had been there! How quick I would have been to help the baby! I would have washed his linen! How happy I would have been to go with the shepherds to see the Lord lying in the manger!” Yes you would! You say that because you know how great Christ is, but if you had been there at that time you would have done no better than the people of Bethlehem.

Childish and silly thoughts are these! Why don’t you do it now? You have Christ in your neighbour. You ought to serve him, for what you do to your neighbour in need you do to the Lord Christ himself.

Shane Lems writes:

Church attendance in the United States has always waxed and waned. It is not accurate to say that church attendance in America was excellent around the turn of the nineteenth century and has declined ever since. Instead, there have been various tendencies in attendance: sometimes attendance trended upwards, sometimes it trended downwards.

R. Kent Hughes, pastor, author and professor, wrote a helpful list of anti-church Evangelical trends back in 2003. These developments, he said, show that many who call themselves Christians have a very low view of the church and of church membership. Hughes’s discussion of this topic is very insightful; below I’ll summarise, explain, and expand on his insights since they are still relevant today.

1. The Hitchhiker Mentality

A hitchhiker is a person who wants a free ride for a limited amount of time. He doesn’t take ownership of the car, maintain it, or help with its repairs; he simply wants a ride and will bail if anything goes wrong or if he’s finished riding. This is how many people think of the church and church membership:

You go to the meetings and serve on the boards and committees, you grapple with the issues and do the work of the church and pay the bills—and I’ll come along for the ride. But if things do not suit me, I’ll criticise and complain and probably bail out. My thumb is always out for a better ride.[1] Many Christians today have the mindset of just coasting in a church for a time and then leaving when they feel like it. They don’t get involved in the life of the church; they don’t donate their time and energy; they never ask what they can do to help; and they don’t invest their lives in the church. They are irresponsible and immature in this aspect of their lives, and have little concept of duty or service.

2. Consumer Christians

These are ecclesiastical shoppers [that] attend one church for the preaching, send their children to a second church for its youth program, and go to a third church’s small group. Their motto is to ask, “What’s in it for me?”

The consumer mentality “encouraged those who have been influenced by it to think naturally in terms of receiving rather than contributing.”[2] These are the kind of people who want to take from the church but never give. Church for these types of people is a commodity that exists to offer them something they want or need.

This view—a consumer view of the church—is a characteristic of the entitlement mindset of our culture. Everyone—especially younger Americans—believes they are entitled to certain rights and benefits, as if they are royalty to be served. The customer is king! This view has crept into the church: “If the church doesn’t serve or suit me, I’m out. If my needs are not met, I’ll go somewhere else.” Church shopping, consumerism, and entitlement all go together to be part of this anti-church Evangelical trend. To be sure, there are churches that make this trend worse by using consumer-centred church growth methods.

3. Spectator Christians

Spectator Christianity feeds on the delusion that virtue can come through viewing, much like the football fan who imagines that he ingests strength and daring while watching his favourite pro team. Spectator sports and spectator Christianity produce the same things—fans who cheer the players on while they themselves are in desperate need of engagement and meaning.[3] These are the people who like sitting lazily in the bleachers, but do not want to get in the game. The bleacher seat is good enough for them, thinking (implicitly or explicitly) that the Christian faith can be “caught” by watching from the stands and not committing oneself to stepping on the field. In other words, these are the people who are content with watching others follow Christ, but never really doing it themselves. They watch others to feel good about life or themselves, but not to learn how to die to self and live for Christ.

4. Drive-Through Christians

The fast-food drive-through means you can get (unhealthy) food in no time and with no effort. Since we’re in a hurry, we just want to quickly eat something that tastes good and then get on with our urgent business. The result of this kind of lifestyle is not good: it leaves unhealthy and typically overweight people who are stressed out because they have such busy lives.

Something similar happens when a person views the church like a fast-food restaurant: People with this view get their “church fix” out of the way by attending a weeknight church service or the early service on Sunday morning so that the family can save the bulk of Sunday for the all-important soccer game or recreational trip. Of course there is an unhappy price extracted over time in the habits and the arteries of a flabby soul—a family that is unfit for the battles of life and has no conception of being Christian soldiers in the great spiritual battle.[4]

5. Relationless Christians

Despite the Bible’s emphasis on Christians regularly assembling to worship and fellowship, today some people say “the best church is the one that knows you least and demands the least.”[5] This goes hand in hand with the trends already mentioned. People want to hitchhike through church life—making small talk with the driver but never really getting to know him personally. To many people, the soccer game or vacation are more important than the people at church, so why bother to start relationships within the church?

This becomes evident when people baulk at the idea of membership. Few people appreciate church membership today because it goes against their selfish desire to be on their own, it means they are accountable to others, and it means they need to share their lives and help others when needed. For most people, it’s much more fulfilling to go to a movie Friday night than help the needy church family move into an apartment down town.

6. Churchless Worshippers

This trend is also common, since many people today think that they can worship God alone, on their own, when it is most convenient and beneficial to them. Why wake up early on Sunday and go to a place where there are strange people when I can just sleep in and worship God while I watch the football game alone? Although this line of thought is completely unbiblical, it is quite common today. Hughes put it this way:

The current myth is that a life of worship is possible, even better, apart from the church. As one person blithely expressed it, “For ‘church’ I go to the mall to my favourite coffee place and spend my morning with the Lord. That is how I worship.” This is an updated suburban and yuppie version of how to spend Sunday, changed from its rustic forebearer [namely, Emily Dickinson, who said 100 years ago], “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church—I keep it staying at Home.”[6]

Hughes is right-on with these trends; I’ve seen them myself since I became a pastor some years ago. The ethos of American culture (consumerism, individualism, narcissism, dislike of authority, lust for entertainment and fun, busyness, and so forth) directly contradicts the ethos of the biblical view of the church. They are quite at odds.

It’s helpful to think about the above trends for these reasons: 1) so we ourselves don’t get caught up in them, 2) so we can understand the mindset of those who are caught up in them, 3) so we can patiently dialogue, discuss, teach, rebuke, and preach to those struggling with these trends, 4) so we can help keep the church from catering to these trends, and 5) so we can better preach the gospel that frees people from all these “isms” (narcissism, consumerism, individualism, etc.). Since this is the cultural air we all breathe, every one of us needs to be constantly reminded of the biblical view of the church, and of the loving, patient Saviour who is her Head, Husband, and Redeemer.

Endnotes

[1] R. Kent Hughes, Set Apart: Calling a Worldly Church to a Godly Life (Wheaton: Crossway, 2003), 128.

[2] Ibid., 129.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 130.

Shane Lems serves as pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Hammond, Wisconsin. Ordained Servant Online, December 2016.

Matthew Roberts writes:

How should we keep the Sabbath? Let’s start with the Sabbath command in Exodus:

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God…” (Exodus 20:8-10)

God tells us to keep the Sabbath holy. “Holy” means “set apart especially for God’s use”. Note well—this does not mean “for us to use for God”; it means “for God to use us for his purposes”. But of course, since we’re his creatures, God’s using us for himself is also the very best thing that can happen to us.

So how do we keep the Sabbath day holy? How do we let God use it for his glory and our good?

 

Not a chore but a celebration

The main thing to grasp is that the Sabbath is a celebration. It’s not a chore but a delight. This is true of all God’s laws, of course. The fact that we often think of the Sabbath as a stifling restriction on our freedom says far more about our hearts than about the Sabbath command. That’s what sinful people think of all God’s good commandments! For example, the command not to commit adultery sounds incredibly restrictive to sinful human ears. But in fact it leads to blessings for everyone, whether married or not, which are infinitely better than the joys we imagine adultery might lead to; and which are the very opposite of the miseries adultery in fact leads to.

Now it’s the same with the Sabbath. It’s not a restriction to kill us but a blessing to give us life. It’s a celebration! It’s like a weekly Christmas day, or more accurately, a weekly Easter day—a day for celebrating the fact that God has made us and has saved us for himself through Christ.

 

So first, it’s a day for celebrating the goodness of God’s creation

When I was a child my parents would let us have golden syrup on our cereal on Sunday mornings. ‘Sunday Syrup’, as we called it, got the Sabbath right. The Lord’s Day is a day for the best food, the best wine, for eating together and celebrating God’s goodness in creation. We should see it as a feast day—a day of glorious rest from the normal run of life, a day of joyful celebration with our family—and especially with God’s family, the church. We keep the day holy by celebrating the incredible goodness that God has given us in making us and in providing all the good things of creation for us.

That’s why it’s a day to rest from work. Work is good, but it’s not everything. We’re supposed to enjoy and delight in the good gifts of God’s creation.

Resting from work is an act of faith. We show that we trust that God is God and we are not. The world will keep on running without us. The most common reason Christians give for working on Sunday is ‘I just have so much to do; I can’t get it done otherwise’. But that’s exactly why we should rest. You see, when we do that we show that we think that our lives are in our hands, when in fact they’re in God’s. God commands us to rest for this day and to trust that he has the results in his hand. The more we feel the pressure to work the more we need the discipline of trusting God, not ourselves, that resting on the Lord’s Day gives us.

Proper rest requires preparing in advance. You have to pack and plan properly for a holiday if it’s going to be a holiday. It’s the same with the Lord’s Day. Do the vacuuming, laundry, shopping, ironing, meal prep on Friday and Saturday. Do that and you’ll be able to rest properly on Sunday. It’s the same with paid work (or full-time study)—you’ll only rest if you’ve planned in advance that you’re not going to work on that day. Otherwise other people’s expectations, and your own pressure on yourself, will be too much to resist.

Of course, if our rest comes at the expense of having others work for us, then we haven’t yet grasped what the Sabbath is about. God is Lord of all creation. Christ died to bring in the new creation of all things. So Christians should not employ others to work for them on the Lord’s Day. That’s why God forbade having your servants or your ox or your donkey work for you on the Sabbath. The rule of thumb we follow in our family is that we don’t spend money on the Lord’s Day. We don’t buy or sell or do any kind of business, because that’s a form of making people work for us.

Now Jesus was clear that it’s right to do good on the Sabbath, and specifically caring and healing is an appropriate use of the day. The Westminster Confession calls this ‘duties of necessity and mercy’. So working in healthcare is certainly not a breach of the Sabbath. Also things which are a necessity for others’ wellbeing are appropriate—if you work for an electricity company, for example. For the same reason it’s acceptable to use electricity on the Sabbath! But we do well not to pay others to work for us in things other than true necessities. Buy your milk and bread the day before.

Rather than seeing this as a restriction on what we can do for ourselves, see it as an opportunity and invitation to do things for others. So instead of thinking ‘Bother, I can’t do the shopping’, think, ‘Who could I invite round for lunch/tea? Who in the church would be cheered up if I visited him/her this afternoon? Is there anyone on his own today who would love to be with people? Or someone I could take a meal to because she’s not well?

Real rest requires thankfulness to God. It’s not just a day to have fun, though it should be thoroughly enjoyable; real enjoyment comes from receiving things from God with thankful hearts. So learn particularly on the Lord’s Day to thank God for the things he has given us.

 

It’s a day for celebrating the goodness of our redemption

That last reason links to the very heart of the Sabbath day. It’s for the worship of God. Gathering with fellow Christians to worship God in our churches isn’t something we do on Sunday because it’s a convenient day to do it. It’s the very centre and purpose of what the Sabbath is about. Leviticus 23:3 describes it as a ‘holy convocation’. ‘Convocation’ means ‘calling together’. The risen Lord Jesus seems particularly to have met with the disciples on the first day of the week. John’s vision of the heavenly worship in God’s throne room in the book of Revelation happened on the Lord’s Day (Revelation 1:10). The purpose of the day is so that God can call us together to meet with him to worship him.

Even the word ‘church’ speaks of this: the Greek word means ‘assembly’ or ‘gathering’, which deliberately echoes the ‘gathering’ of God’s people at Mount Sinai when God first set them free from slavery in Egypt. And as the book of Exodus makes clear, the reason he freed them was so that they could gather and worship him at Mount Sinai. So since the Sabbath celebrates our freedom from slavery to sin (Deuteronomy 5:15)—which is what the exodus was all about—then the heart of that freedom is that we get to assemble to worship together the God who made us and who has saved us.

So make meeting with the church the main thing in the day! Come to church expecting to meet with God, and be ready to listen to him. God takes us through the gospel again in every service to remind us again how to relate to him rightly. The things that happen in a service are designed by God as tools he uses to work in us and change us. He speaks to us in his Word to make us more into his images. He calls us to pray so that he can answer and we can grow in our trust in him. He shares the meal of the Lord’s Supper with us, to assure us of his grace and call us actively to put our trust in Christ crucified again for our lives. Our morning service is the main place we do this. The evening service provides an opportunity to end the day doing the same thing.

Make the whole day about the church. That doesn’t mean being at church the whole day—but seeing it as a day to spend with your church family. That’s why it’s great to spend the day with other Christians from church, including your lunch and afternoon. If you have your own family, make it a day very special for them; pray together in the morning, eat together at lunchtime. And it’s all the better if you’re able to show or receive hospitality to join your family with others from the wider church family.

And why not invite non-Christians to join us? The Sabbath is a foretaste of the coming new creation. That means that it’s a shop-window for all the blessings of the gospel. Our neighbours should look over our garden walls or into our living room windows on Sunday afternoon, and see something that they too would love to be part of. Why not invite them to join in? Or even better, invite them to come to church and see for themselves what it means for human beings like them to meet with the living God who made them? I suspect that the majority of those who become Christians from a non-Christian background do so because they were invited to church by a Christian. The glory of the gospel of Christ is on display as his people worship him on the Lord’s Day in a way that happens at no other time.

And if you do have time on your own, don’t slip back into doing chores. Sit down with a cup of tea and read a good Christian book, or catch up on reading the Bible.

To sum up, God gives the Sabbath to us to be a delight (Isaiah 58:13–15). Naturally, we struggle to believe that. But if we do, then we find that God uses it to be an incredible blessing to us—the focal point of what it means to know God as our Father through the Son by the work of the Holy Spirit.

 

slightly edited from http://www.trinitychurchyork.org.uk/resources/blog/post/how-should-we-think-about-the-sabbath-part-2

TO DELVE DEEPER:

• A Sign of Hope
  by Richard B. Gaffin, Jr.
• Why on Sunday?
  by O. Palmer Robertson
• Proper Sabbath Observance: The Sojourner’s Sabbath
  by Herman C. Hoeksema

Matthew Roberts writes:

Is Sunday the Sabbath day? And if it is, then how do we keep it without being legalistic? Here is a summary of how Reformed churches have generally understood the Bible’s teaching on the Sabbath.

1. God established the Sabbath at creation: he made the world in six days, and then rested on the seventh. So he blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy (see Gen. 2:1–3). Note well: ‘holy’ means specially set aside to, or devoted to, God. It’s a day for creation to remember its Creator, for creation to especially remember and celebrate its relationship with its Creator.

2. At the same time the Sabbath day is looking forwards. The purpose of creation is rest: the whole of creation is looking forward to its coming rest when all things are complete. We can see this because the New Testament shows that the dominion of man over all creation, described on day 6 in Genesis 1, is only truly fulfilled in the resurrection of Jesus; he is the man who is given all authority in heaven and on earth, who has all things put under his feet. So the true seventh, Sabbath day, the day of rest, comes after Jesus has been raised from the dead and entered into his kingdom. i.e. it still lies in the future.

Even in the Old Testament this can be seen, because the idea of ‘rest’ – clearly connected to the Sabbath – is always about a future hope. Israel in the Wilderness looks forward to ‘rest’ in the promised land. And once they are there, it quickly becomes clear that the true day of ‘rest’ still lies in the future. Psalm 95 makes this point, as Hebrews 3:7-4:13 explains.

So to summarise: the Sabbath is about creation (remembering God made us) and redemption (remembering God has saved us, for a glorious future rest). When we rest from our work on the Sabbath day God is reminding us that he made us and that he has rescued us. The two accounts of the ten commandments (Exodus 20:11 & Deuteronomy 5:15) bring out these two aspects of the Sabbath. Both these things mean the Sabbath is to be kept holy – a day especially for God, and especially for us to meet with and serve and worship God.

3. Thanks to their fulfilment in Jesus, lots of Old Testament commands change in the way they apply in the New Testament. Some lapse completely (e.g. don’t eat shellfish) while others are essentially unchanged (e.g. don’t murder). The difference is in whether the commands are grounded in the unchanging realities of who God is and who we are (traditionally called ‘moral’ laws) or are grounded simply in God’s decision to command them. The latter God can clearly decide to withdraw, and he has done exactly that with many commands which were given for a specific purpose to God’s people during the time between Mount Sinai and Jesus. But God can never withdraw moral laws because they are grounded in his nature, in who he is and what he is like. So Jesus declared all foods clean (see Mk. 7:19); but he did not, indeed he could not, say it’s now OK to worship other Gods!

Lots of modern Christians assume that the Sabbath command no longer applies, just like the command not to eat pork. But there are two serious problems with this.

First, until very recently almost no Christians thought this. That should always be a red flag for us! We’re not very likely to be the first Christians to get this right. And if we are, the fact that the scales have fallen from our eyes at the very moment in western history when the culture has turned secular and is putting huge social pressure on us not to keep the Sabbath seems to be a bit too much of a coincidence.

Second, and more importantly, it’s very hard to make the case for this from Scripture. It’s true that there are changes in how the Sabbath works in the New Testament (not least the change of day from the seventh to the first), but it can’t be put in the same class as the laws that apply just to Old Testament Israel. This is because:

a) it is so explicitly grounded in creation. It’s not something which God introduced for Israel. Given Genesis 2:1-3 and Exodus 20:11, it clearly applies to all of creation.

b) It is in the ten commandments. All the other nine commandments, although they were spoken to Israel at Mount Sinai, already applied to the whole world. When Moses murdered the Egyptian in Exodus 2, it was already wrong, even though it was 40 years earlier. And when Pharoah commanded the murder of baby boys, that was also wrong. So why would the Sabbath be listed in this specific place if the same were not true? More than that, it is made quite explicit that the same is true: the Sabbath applies to all of God’s creation, ever since creation, because it is about creation. Just like the goodness of truth and the wrongness of lying, and like the sanctity of human life and the wrongness of murder, it is hard-wired into creation itself. And therefore it cannot simply have evaporated in the New Testament.

c) What’s more, it clearly hasn’t evaporated in the New Testament. Jesus addressed the Sabbath repeatedly, and not once did he declare it to be abolished. Rather he refocused people’s attention on what it was really for and on himself as the Lord of the Sabbath (which of course can only be true of God himself).

4. Why then has the day changed from the seventh day to the first day of the week? The clue is that it is called ‘the Lord’s Day’ in Revelation 1:10. This is the day that the Lord Jesus was raised from the dead.

The Sabbath was about creation. It was the seventh day because it was pointing forward to the great coming day when all creation would have reached its fulfilment, entered the rest God planned for it. That day arrived on the first Easter Sunday. That is the day when the new creation began. When God’s design for his creation: that it should all be ruled over by the man he has appointed, was first fulfilled. From that day onwards he has been building his kingdom. Of course, it is not yet complete, which is why we are still looking forwards to the true Sabbath rest arriving when Christ returns, and the new creation is completed. But we look forward to it knowing that it is done. Jesus in his death and resurrection from the dead has completed God’s works. It is finished. Now is simply the time of gathering people into his kingdom.

You see, the Sabbath is still about our creation and our redemption. But now, since Jesus’ death and resurrection, it is about not just our first creation, in the image of Adam, but also our new creation in the image of Christ. It is about his finished and certain work to make us perfect and bring us into perfect, eternal worship of God in his new creation. So now the week starts with Sabbath. We don’t rest at the end of our week’s work, as a pointer to a rest not yet here. We rest at the beginning, before we begin our week’s work, as a pointer to what Christ has completely accomplished, in which we will certainly share. We work in joyful celebration of what God has already done.

So the Sabbath is not less important for New Testament Christians than for Old Testament Israelites, but actually more! It is the Lord’s Day, a day for joyful celebration and particularly for joyful worship of the God who has made us and re-made us in Christ.

Here is the Westminster Confession’s paragraph on understanding the Sabbath:

“As God’s creatures, all people know that they ought to set apart a fitting proportion of time to worship God. Similarly, God in his Word explicitly appoints one day in seven as a Sabbath to be kept holy to him. This is a positive, moral, and ongoing commandment that binds all people in all ages.

“From the beginning of the world to the resurrection of Christ, God’s appointed Sabbath was the last day of the week. With the resurrection of Christ, God changed the Sabbath to the first day of the week. Scripture calls this the Lord’s Day. We are to continue keeping the Lord’s Day as the Christian Sabbath until the end of the age” (21.7).   _{(paraphrased into modern English by LEW)}

slightly edited from http://www.trinitychurchyork.org.uk/resources/blog/post/how-should-we-think-about-the-sabbath

TO DELVE DEEPER:

• A Sign of Hope
  by Richard B. Gaffin, Jr.
• Why on Sunday?
  by O. Palmer Robertson
• Proper Sabbath Observance: The Sojourner’s Sabbath
  by Herman C. Hoeksema

This post is adapted from Reading the Word of God in the Presence of God: A Handbook for Biblical Interpretation by Vern Poythress.

1. THE BIBLE IS GOD’S OWN WORD.

That means that what the Bible says, God says.

2. GOD GOVERNS THE WHOLE WORLD THROUGH HIS DIVINE SPEECH, WHICH SPECIFIES AND CONTROLS WHAT HAPPENS (Heb. 1:3).

The Bible indicates that God speaks to govern the world, but we do not hear this speech; we only see its effects (for example, Ps. 33:6, 9; 147:15–18). The Bible, by contrast, is the Word of God, designed by God to speak specifically to us as human beings. All divine speech, whether directed toward governing the world in general or directed toward us as human beings, has divine character. In particular, it displays God’s lordship in authority, control, and presence.

3. GOD SPEAKS HIS WORDS TO US IN COVENANTS (Gen. 9:9; 15:18; 17:7; Ex. 19:5; etc.).

A “covenant” is a solemn, legally binding agreement between two parties. In this case, the two parties are God and human beings. In the Old Testament, God’s covenants with human beings show some affinities with ancient Near Eastern suzerainty treaties. These treaties show five elements, which also appear either explicitly or by implication in God’s covenants in the Old Testament: identification of the suzerain (Ex. 20:2); historical prologue (Ex. 20:2); stipulations (Ex. 20:3–17); sanctions (i.e., blessings and curses) (Ex. 20:7; see also v. 12); recording and passing on (Ex. 31:18; Deut. 31).

The identification of God proclaims his transcendent authority, and the stipulations as norms imply his authority over the people. The historical prologue shows how he has exercised his control in past history. The blessings and curses indicate how he will exercise his control in the future. His identification also proclaims his presence, and the recording and passing on of the covenantal words imply his continuing presence with the people.

4. ALL THE BIBLE IS THE COVENANTAL WORD OF GOD.

That is, the idea of covenant offers us one perspective on the Bible. The New Testament proclaims the gospel concerning the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. The apostle Paul characterises his entire ministry as a ministry of the “new covenant” (2 Cor. 3:6). So all of Paul’s writings are covenantal words in a broad sense. At the Last Supper, Jesus inaugurated “the new covenant” (Luke 22:20; 1 Cor. 11:25). The other apostles and New Testament writers function to convey the words of the new covenant to us.

When the Bible uses the word new to describe the new covenant, it clearly presupposes an older one. The new covenant fulfils the Abrahamic covenant (Gal. 3:7–14) and the Davidic covenant (Acts 2:30–36), but the Mosaic covenant is principally in mind when the New Testament implies a covenant that is “old” (Heb. 8:8–13). The Mosaic covenant also contains, in Deuteronomy 31, explicit instructions for preserving canonical covenantal documents and explicit instructions about future prophets (Deut. 18:18–22). The entirety of the Old Testament consists in divinely authorised additions to the initial Mosaic deposit, so it fits into the covenantal structure inaugurated with Moses. The entire Old Testament is covenantal in character.

Thus both the New Testament and the Old Testament can be viewed as covenantal in a broad sense. Indeed, the traditional names, in which they are called “Testaments,” signify their covenantal character (“testament” is a near synonym for “covenant” in later theological usage, which builds on Heb. 9:15–16).

5. THE BIBLE IS A SINGLE BOOK, WITH GOD AS ITS AUTHOR.

It does of course have multiple human authors. But its unity according to the divine author implies that we should see it as a single unified message, and should use each passage and each book to help us in understanding others. Because God is faithful to his own character, he is consistent with himself. We should therefore interpret each passage of the Bible in harmony with the rest of the Bible.

6. THE BIBLE IS GOD-CENTRED.

It not only has God as its author, but in a fundamental way it speaks about God as its principal subject. It does so even in historical passages that do not directly mention God, because the history it recounts is history governed by God.

7. THE BIBLE IS CHRIST-CENTRED.

Covenants mediate God’s presence to us, and at the heart of the covenants is Christ, who is the one mediator between God and men (1 Tim. 2:5). Christ, as the coming servant of the Lord, is virtually identified with the covenant in Isaiah 42:6 and 49:8. In Luke 24, Jesus teaches the apostles that all of the Old Testament Scriptures are about him and his work (Luke 24:25–27, 44–49).

Understanding how the Old Testament speaks about Christ is challenging, but in view of Jesus’s teaching it cannot be evaded. Fortunately, we have the New Testament to aid us. It contains not only teachings that help us to understand the Old Testament as a whole, but many quotations from the Old Testament that illustrate Jesus’s claims in Luke 24.

8. THE BIBLE IS ORIENTED TO THE HISTORY OF REDEMPTION.

God caused the Bible’s individual books to be written over a period of centuries. God’s later speech builds on earlier speech, and further unfolds the significance of his plan for history. God’s redemption takes place in history. Christianity is not merely a religious philosophy, a set of general truths about God and the world. At its heart is the gospel, the good news that Christ has come and has lived and died and has risen from the dead, and now lives to intercede for us. God has worked out our salvation by coming in the person of Christ and acting in time and space. The message of what he has done now goes out to the nations (Matt. 28:18–20; Acts 1:8).

9. CHRIST’S FIRST AND SECOND COMING ARE CENTRAL TO HISTORY.

God’s work of redemption came to a climax in the work of Christ on earth, especially in his crucifixion, death, resurrection, and ascension. Christ now reigns at the right hand of the Father (Eph. 1:20–21). We look forward to the future consummation of redemption when Christ returns.

10. GOD’S WORK OF REDEMPTION INTERWEAVES WORD AND DEED.

We see this interweaving even during his work of creation:

Word: God said, “Let there be light.”
Deed: And there was light.
Word: And God saw that the light was good [similar to verbal evaluation]. (Gen. 1:3–4)

Word: “Let us make man in our image . . .”
Deed: So God created man in his own image, . . .
Word: And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply . . .” (Gen. 1:26–28)

Likewise, Jesus’s words interpret his deeds and vice versa:

If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father. (John 10:37–38)

In the book of Acts, the miracles and the growth of the church help unbelievers to grasp the implications of apostolic preaching, and vice versa:

Philip went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed to them the Christ. And the crowds with one accord paid attention to what was being said by Philip when they heard him and saw the signs that he did. For unclean spirits, crying out with a loud voice, came out of many who had them, and many who were paralysed or lame were healed. (Acts 8:5–7)

 

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Vern S. Poythress is professor of New Testament interpretation at Westminster Theological Seminary, where he has taught for nearly four decades. In addition to earning six academic degrees, including a Ph.D. from Harvard University and a Th.D. from the University of Stellenbosch, he is the author of numerous books and articles on a variety of topics, including biblical interpretation, language, and science. His most recent book is Reading the Word of God in the Presence of God: A Handbook for Biblical Interpretation.