Kindle Notes & Highlights
T. F. Torrance,
T. F. Torrance’s Homoousion - safeguarding the trinity against other pagan doctrines, like Athanasius's "against the Arianism".
Will need to review this further, however found good resources at tftorrance.org
The disciples of Jesus learned by bitter experience that human beings have a way of imposing their own ideas upon God. And they learned that in doing so, we not only create a god of our own imaginations, we also miss the real God and thus the joy of His presence and activity and blessing.
Man if that isnt true i dont know what is.
For failure to repent, failure to revise our mental baggage inherently means that we are imposing our own alien ideas upon the world and the people around us, thereby dooming ourselves to live in a world generated by our own imagination.
We must become aware of our habits of thought and examine our inherited ideas, which have shaped our perception of God.
such a Jesus leaves us with ourselves to manufacture the kingdom, which leaves us with a kingdom that is no more than we can create. We must be willing to bear the pain of grinding out a better prescription for our glasses. To refuse to do so, to call a halt to the process and leave our habits of mind unexamined, is to run the risk of missing Jesus Christ altogether and dooming ourselves to a life, a kingdom, a salvation of our own making.
Clarity is not a luxury: It is a matter of life or death.
Jesus died because God the Father refused to give up His dreams for us, and because the only way for those dreams to be fulfilled, in the context of sin, was by recreating the human race through death and resurrection.
There are at least two facts about the Christian God that are unparalleled: The first is the doctrine of the Trinity. The second is the humility of God.
The Fall of Adam means that the incarnation will be an agonizing event, and one that involves untold risk. If the Son of God enters into Adam’s world and takes on Adam’s fallen mind, there is a very real chance that he will believe in the god who appears there and begin to live out of that appearance, thereby violating his eternal relationship with the Father in the Spirit. What is at stake in the incarnation is the very being of God and thus the existence of the universe, on the one hand, and the salvation of the human race on the other. In astounding grace, the Triune God hazards its very
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WOW!
The death of Jesus Christ was not punishment from the hands of an angry God; it was the Son’s ultimate identification with fallen Adam, and the supreme expression of faithfulness to his own identity as the One who lives in fellowship with the Father in the Spirit.
The final word was not, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” The final word was, “Father, into Your hands I commend my Spirit.”
Why did Jesus Christ die? He died because the Triune God loves us with an everlasting and passionate love, because the Triune God absolutely refuses to allow us to be destroyed. He died because the only way to get from the Fall of Adam to the right hand of God the Father almighty was through the recreation of Adamic existence that required the incarnation of the Triune life of God, 33 years of struggle and suffering, and the crucifixion and resurrection of Adamic flesh.
It was not just Adamic existence that was crucified in Jesus Christ; it was Adam and you and me and the whole human race.
The death of Jesus Christ was part of a seamless movement in which the Triune God laid hold of the human race and decisively and sovereignly altered its very existence, cleansing it of all alienation, quickening it with new life and lifting it up into union with the Father, Son and Spirit. It is finished.
If we take these three Psalms together, we are face to face not only with the sufferings of Jesus on the cross, but also with his resurrection and ascension. We are confronted with the fact that the relationship between the Father and Son in the Spirit, far from being ripped apart, held fast through the deepest of human despair. There is no forsaking by the Father.
Psalms 22,23, and 24
