Another Bible study

Kenya is infested with a terrible counterfeit Christianity which would better be called God-anity, or perhaps God-inanity. It uses lots of the words and concepts of Christianity - God, forgiveness, repentance, sin, blessing, etcetera. But it has the not particularly minor defect of having little to say about Christ, the only one through whom we can have or know these things. This disease has affected many true believers, and if you ask them a direct question about what they believe about Christ you'll get a good answer - but if you just ask them about their spiritual experience or understanding in general terms, you'll be quite unlikely to meet Him in their reply. Hence today's Bible study...

1 John 1v1-2v2 – Salvation in Christ

Who is John talking about in verse 1? How do we know that this is who he is talking about?

What are the different ways in which John describes Jesus in verses 1-4? (There are at least four!)

1.
2.
3.
4.

Why is the apostle John telling us these things? (Two main reasons)

1.
2.

What does John say about God in verse 5? What does this really mean? (Notice that John says that this is part of “the message” he had been commanded to pass on).

What does this tell us about how to spot a true Christian?

If God is pure light, then how can we walk with him, according to John? What are the steps that he tells us we must take?

How, according to 2:1-2, is it possible for Jesus to be able to take away our sins? There are two things to notice, one in each verse:

1.
2.

In 2:1 our translation says we have “one who speaks ... in our defence”. In fact in the original the phrase is just one word, and says “we have an advocate”. In other places the Bible uses the word “mediator” (e.g. 1 Timothy 2:5-6). We need to understand this idea. We need to understand how important Jesus is to true Christianity. Christianity is not just about “me and God”. We have no access to God or knowledge of or fellowship with God, apart from in and through Christ.

Rainbow Books

A friend runs this Christian book-store, with both general interest titles and material suitable for Christian educators and home-schoolers: Rainbow Books

Federal Vision Essay Re-Plugged

As a few people have dropped by who are interested in thinking about the Federal Vision, here's a plug for a short essay I wrote touching on the FV's take on the issue of apostacy:

http://david.dw-perspective.org.uk/writings/the-federal-vision-and-the-language-of-appearance.html

It's not an academic essay, but was the result of stitching together some blog posts, intended for general consumption! Whatever the lack of rigour, I have at least re-read it and corrected some of the more egregious typos.

It's essential for FV advocates to establish that New Covenant members, professing faith in Christ and united to him in that covenant, can later fall away and be lost - and not because there was some difference in their covenant membership compared with those who are at last saved. This is connected logically with other FV beliefs:

1. The New Covenant is entered by baptism.
2. Therefore all those who are baptised are Christians, united to Jesus Christ in covenantal union.
   
3. Thus, if we want assurance of our standing in Christ, we can look to our baptism (just as a married man can look at his wedding ring for assurance of his marital status).

Real life shows that many baptised people apostatise. But doesn't the Bible teach that those who are truly saints can never be lost? So what gives? Traditionally the Reformed have distinguished between saving faith and temporary faith, and taught that it is by saving faith (not baptism) that we enter the New Covenant. (Reformed paedobaptists would also add, or by being born as the child of a true believer). Baptism is the sign of the New Covenant, the sign of faith; it is not the entry marker itself. This, though, clashes with the FV's insistence that we can look to our baptism for assurance: i.e. that we look at the objective ordinance, not the qualities of our subjective faith. Hence FV advocates have had to look to a different answer. This answer has been to deny the premise that the Bible teaches that those who are truly saints cannot be lost. Yes, the elect can never be lost - but that's a different kettle of fish, it's argued. Election is hidden and secret; baptism is visible and objective, and it's only the latter that we can address in our present state. In the essay I look at some of these issues.

End of term essay

It seemed a good idea to set an essay for my Bible college students. When I then realised I had to read and mark the 40,000 words handed in, I wasn't so sure...

It's quite humbling to read a whole essay that didn't refer in any significant way to a single concept you taught in class throughout the term. Hmmm! On the other hand, it's encouraging to read an essay where the student clearly has internalised the points you were trying to get across.

Being cross-cultural and with some of the students having limited English, some things don't come across quite right. Or at least, I'm really not sure what they mean. The most interesting section was where one student explains that it is not only the missionary's job to preach the good news to lost people, but also he must take action to "eradicate evildoers". Unfortunately he didn't explain what he had in mind...

Retractions

A week or two ago I published a post about a new magazine, noting that its stated aim and its actual contents and other features of it were at variance. This generated a variety of responses, by comments (some of which were published, some not) and e-mail.

Having considered them, I think it's fair to say that the tone of my post was unnecessarily and unhelpfully aggressive. For that I apologise. It is in part my fault that it provoked at least one aggressive reaction I've seen in the blogosphere (which went beyond what I had actually said). It was not needed and I should not have done it. I could have written the post in a more objective manner that would have been more edifying.

I unrepentantly stand by in full the substance of the post; it is still clear to me (from such things as the magazine's leadership, its contents, its choice of books to be reviewed, its choice of authors, from those who have promoted it on the web (even before the first issue's publication date!)) that this new magazine is going to be, intentionally, a medium for channeling in some of (inter-related) sub-cultures of American Presbyterianism (Federal Vision theology, James Jordan, "Reformed Catholicism") which are at present overwhelmingly not accepted by the actual British Reformed movement. These are trends I shall by God's grace remain an unrepentant and staunch critic of! But, also by God's grace I shall try to be more constructive in how I go about it. My thanks to AR for calling me to account, I appreciate it.

Godly repentance

Here's a great article in the Telegraph from Christopher Howse on the theme (though he doesn't use the word) of repentance; witty as well as insightful.

Howse, not a Christian to my knowledge (though I don't know much of him), nails the aspects of true repentance:

• You state clearly what the crime is (not just, "Err, well, I made mistakes, though can't actually name any of them in particular...")
  
• You state clearly, without hedging or excuse-making, your personal accountability for it, and your regret over that (not just, "well, it's a sorry situation, which I regret...")
  
• You ask for forgiveness from those you've wronged (recognising that you are now their debtor - not giving them the impression that you've condescended quite far enough from your lofty perch just by achieving the two points above!)
  
• Then, you face the consequences (resigning, repaying, whatever). Here's the proof in the pudding (see 2 Corinthians 7).
  

Why is this so hard? Because we're sinners. I catch myself at it all the time... apologies are loaded with "probably", "but", "though at the time, it was tricky because...", blah blah blah. It's a truly pathetic sight to witness someone who's lived for 30, 40 or 50 years unable to say such simple words as "I was wrong; I am sorry - please forgive me". But then, when it's my turn, out come the weasel words, if I manage to get that far at all.

But in fact, godly repentance is wonderfully refreshing. The offence of some wrongdoing is like a bad smell that lingers. It's there, people know it, it needs to be dealt with. Godly repentance is the thing that actually deals with it, instead of shoving its foul odour under the carpet, from where it will eventually seep through in an even worse way. With godly repentance, the past becomes the past and the future is a new start. Truly God's way is much higher and better than man's.

Now, there's nothing uniquely Christian as such in the above; whatever stripe you are, you can agree. The point, though, is that Christianity actually provides a real basis for giving and receiving genuine apologies - and the spiritual resources to do it. Our offences against God are huge, infinite - yet God forgave us freely and paid the price himself. Christ has washed away all his peoples' sins freely, and given them his Spirit. If we know the enormity of what God's forgiven us, then can we still rage and boil inside and say "No, I won't admit it until he/she does first"?

Christianity is ultimately God's original creation, restored (and glorified). There's nothing particularly superhuman about the words "sorry - this was my fault; I should never have done that regardless of whatever else was going on". Yet there is something very superhuman about them, because as Howse notes, they don't happen very often. Any old atheist can say, "why do I need to believe in Jesus to live this kind of life?" The answer's in the reality as it exists in 21st century Britain. It's one thing to theorise about how you don't need Jesus; it's another thing to actually face up to what's really the case on the ground.

For those of you who know me, feel free now to wonder amongst yourselves now how I can't see how what I've articulated obviously applies to what I did here, or there, etcetera...

...

In another news... 79:25. Missed it again, even with the help of a cooler morning. I can't have been fully recovered from a best-yet (in Kenya) 8 miler 2 days ago, as I only needed to equal the last 3 miles from last time (when I had a stitch) to get under the 79.... this may be gibberish except to the elite group of regular readers of this blog...

A short Bible study

Today I was quite excited. I simply opened the Bible with a recent convert (I think - we are having the study to clarify his status) and we simply asked and answered some simple questions. He was hungry, and the truths were meaty ones, and it was encouragnig to see him taking it in.

(English note on the last question: "What can we say about..." is a bit of a Kenyanism!)

Colossians 1:15-22
First look at what is said about the Lord Jesus in verses 15-19.
a. What is said about Jesus' relationship to God?
b. What is said about Jesus' relationship to creation? (What did he create? Why? Anything else?)
c. What is said about Jesus' relationship to the church?
d. Why was Jesus the first to be raised from the dead, according to verse 18?
If you think about all these things, then what can we say in summary about the Lord Jesus?
Now look at verse 20. How did Jesus make peace (that is, "reconcile"?)
Where did Jesus bring peace?
Think about all that we have looked at. What can we say about Jesus? How can we think about him rightly?