Justin Taylor's Blog, page 134

A Conversation with Sinclair B. Ferguson

Ligonier’s Google Hangout (September 27, 2013):

A Model of How to Speak to Mormons about Common Concerns of Religious Liberty and Yet Eternal Differences

Al Mohler, addressing Brigham Young University today:

I am not here because I believe we are going to heaven together. I do not believe that. I believe that salvation comes only to those who believe and trust only in Christ and in his substitutionary atonement for salvation. I believe in justification by faith alone, in Christ alone. I love and respect you as friends, and as friends we would speak only what we believe to be true, especially on matters of eternal significance. We inhabit separate and irreconcilable theological worlds, made clear with respect to the doctrine of the Trinity. And yet here I am, and gladly so. We will speak to one another of what we most sincerely believe to be true, precisely because we love and respect one another.

I do not believe that we are going to heaven together, but I do believe we may go to jail together. I do not mean to exaggerate, but we are living in the shadow of a great moral revolution that we commonly believe will have grave and devastating human consequences. Your faith has held high the importance of marriage and family. Your theology requires such an affirmation, and it is lovingly lived out by millions of Mormon families. That is why I and my evangelical brothers and sisters are so glad to have Mormon neighbors. We stand together for the natural family, for natural marriage, for the integrity of sexuality within marriage alone, and for the hope of human flourishing

You can read the whole thing here.

HT: Denny Burk

A New Verse Rendering of Beowulf

“I’ve long been waiting for a rendering of Beowulf by someone sensitive to its muscular verse, its palette of irony that ranges from grim understatement to barely suppressed hilarity, its profound humanity and Christian faith.

I’m waiting no longer—Douglas Wilson’s is the one, far more faithful to the original than Heaney’s or Raffel’s, and conceding absolutely nothing to theirs in sheer dramatic force.

I will be ordering it for my students forthwith.”

—Anthony Esolen, translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy, author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, and professor of English at Providence College

Seeing the Prodigal Sons in a New Way

Yesterday my pastor, David Sunday, gave a unique sermon: the parable of the prodigal son told from the perspective of the older brother. I commend it to you for your edification.

For another way to access the meaning of the story, you can check out the Modern Parables from Compass Cinema. If you use the code PSJT, you can download for free the film, app video, and study guide (through Tuesday, October 21).

To see the full product, go here. You can watch the film below.

The Joy of the Incarnation and Our Union with Christ

Elyse Fitzpatrick’s new book is Found in Him: The Joy of the Incarnation and Our Union with Christ (Crossway, 2013).

“Busy Christians in an iPhone age can look at Christ as though he were the battery charger and we are the smartphone. We ‘plug into’ Jesus during a quiet time, then go out and live on that energy until our spiritual batteries run dry—then it’s back to the next quiet time, conference, or retreat. But this is not a metaphor the Bible invites us to use when it speaks of our union in Christ. He is the vine; we are the branches. In her newest and perhaps most important work, my friend Elyse Fitzpatrick describes this beautiful union we have with our Savior and the joys of drawing from the Vine. I highly recommend this exceptional book!”

—Joni Eareckson Tada, Founder and CEO, Joni and Friends International Disability Center



“It’s hard for me to capture how thankful I am for this book. As Elyse is so skilled at doing, she has taken the doctrine of our union with Christ, which sits and collects dust on the shelves of most Christians’ theology and has little impact on their living, and displayed for us the beauty of its transformative power. When you don’t understand the essential provisions that have been made for you in your union with Christ, you sadly spend your life shopping for what is already yours in him. I will recommend and give away this book again and again and will celebrate with new enthusiasm that I have been found in him!”

—Paul David Tripp, President, Paul Tripp Ministries; author, What Did You Expect? Redeeming the Realities of Marriage



“Resist the temptation to think that a book on the incarnation of Christ and our union with him couldn’t help but be dull, dry, and doctrinally abstract. Elyse Fitzpatrick couldn’t be dull if she tried! This is a rich, incisive, thoroughly scriptural, and heart-warming journey into the gospel of who Jesus is and what he has done to unite us to himself. Elyse’s portrait of Jesus and our life in him will do more than challenge and inform; it will awaken awe at the depths of God’s grace and stir adoration for the one who loved you and gave himself for you. Read and rejoice! I did.”

—Sam Storms, Senior Pastor, Bridgeway Church, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

For more information on the book, go here.

A New Documentary on the Presidency of R. Albert Mohler Jr. at Southern Seminary

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has released a new documentary, Recovering a Vision: The Presidency of R. Albert Mohler Jr. (2013).

Debating the Continuation of New Testament Prophecy

Below is an hour-long debate/discussion between Ian Hamilton (Cambridge Presbyterian Church; Cambridge, England) and Wayne Grudem (Phoenix Seminary, Arizona) on the role and continuation of prophecy in the church today. Adrian Reynolds moderated the discussion, which took place at Proclamation Trust‘s 2010 Evangelical Ministry Assembly (EMA).

Joseph and the Gospel of Many Colors: Reading an Old Story in a New Way

Voddie Baucham Jr.’s new book is Joseph and the Gospel of Many Colors: Reading an Old Story in a New Way (Crossway, 2013).

Here are a couple of commendations from biblical theologians:

“Here is a popular-level reading of the life of Joseph as it is found in Genesis—an approach that reads the narrative both within the framework of Genesis and within the framework of the entire Bible. It avoids mere moralism, but does not overlook the morals implicit in the story; it avoids finding Jesus hiding behind every verse in some earnest but skewed and uncontrolled appeal to typology, yet it shows how the narrative prepares the way for Jesus. In many ways these chapters foster quiet, patient, faithful Bible reading, while driving readers toward the gospel.”

—D. A. Carson, Research Professor of New Testament, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School



“Voddie Baucham has thrown a spanner in the works of those writers and preachers who see little more in the biblical narratives than unrelated moral and spiritual lessons that are ingeniously applied directly to us. By identifying vital theological dimensions that unite the whole Joseph story within Genesis, he steers us towards the christological significance of this much loved, and much misapplied, account of the sons of Jacob.”

—Graeme Goldsworthy, Former Lecturer in Old Testament, Biblical Theology, and Hermeneutics, Moore Theological College

For more information, including an excerpt go here.

Doing the Lord’s Work in the Lord’s Way Will Mean More Accomplishments and More Scars

Chapter 4 of Francis Schaeffer’s No Little People is entitled “The Lord’s Work in the Lord’s Way.” The thesis is that “The Lord’s work in the Lord’s way is the Lord’s work in the power of the Holy Spirit and not in the power of the flesh.”

Schaeffer argues that “the central problem of our age” is that “the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, individually or corporately, tending to do do the Lord’s work in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them” (p. 66).

In one section, he combats the false ideas that doing the Lord’s work in this way is a passive endeavor, meaning that we’ll do less or that things will go better for us from an earthly perspective.

Let us not think that waiting on the Lord will mean getting less done.

The truth is that by doing the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way we will accomplish more, not less.

You need not fear that if you wait for God’s Spirit you will not get as much done as if you charge ahead in the flesh.

After all, who can do the most, you or the God of Heaven and earth?

Nor should we think that our role will be passive. The moving of the Holy Spirit should not be contrasted with either proper self-fulfillment or tiredness.

To the contrary, both the Scriptures and the history of the church teach that if the Holy Spirit is working, the whole man will be involved and there will be much cost to the Christian.

The more the Holy Spirit works, the more Christians will be used in battle, and the more they are used, the more there will be personal cost and tiredness.

It is quite the opposite of what we might first think.

People often cry out for the work of the Holy Spirit and yet forget that when the Holy Spirit works, there is always tremendous cost to the people of God-weariness and tears and battles. (p. 73).

 

Jonathan Edwards on Spiritual Pride

Jonathan Edwards found human language almost inadequate to express the insidious nature of spiritual pride. It would take several metaphors even to begin describing this strategy of Satan. “This is,” he wrote, “the main door by which the Devil comes into the hearts of those who are zealous for the advancement of religion. ‘Tis the chief inlet of smoke from the bottomless pit, to darken the mind, and mislead the judgment; this is the main handle by which the Devil takes hold of religious persons, and the chief source of all the mischief that he introduces, to clog and hinder a work of God. This cause of error is the mainspring, or at least the main support of all the rest. Till this disease is cured, medicines are in vain applied to heal all other diseases.”

Later, he writes:

There is no sin so much like the Devil as this, for secrecy and subtlety, and appearing in great many shapes that are undetected and unsuspected, and even appearing as an angel of light: it takes occasion to arise from everything; it perverts and abuses everything, and even the exercises of real grace and real humility, as an occasion to exert itself.

It is a sin that has, as it were, many lives; if you kill it, it will live still; if you mortify and suppress it in one shape, it rises in another; if you think it is all gone, yet it is there still.

There are a great many kinds of it, that lie in different forms and shapes, one under another, and encompass the heart like the coats of an onion; if you pull off one, there is another underneath.

We had need therefore to have the greatest watch imaginable, over our hearts, with respect to this matter, and to cry most earnestly to the great Searcher of hearts, for his help. “He that trusts his own heart is a fool” [Prov. 28:26]

—Jonathan Edwards, “Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England,” in The Great Awakening, ed. C. C. Goen, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 4 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 414, 416-417.

“Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Rom. 7:24-25)