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March 14 - March 23, 2023
gift-giving, or grace, in the ancient world always required reciprocation.
in antiquity a gift implicated the person who received the gift to respond with some kind of gift given back to the original giver.
Of course, the receiver of a gift responds by beginning with gratitude, but ideally gratitude turns into a reciprocal gift.
Matthew Bates demonstrates in this book that grace in the New Testament fits this pattern: God’s superabundant, prior gift is granted without regard to our relative worth, but the reception of God’s gift demands a return gift from us, a resp...
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Allegiance, then, is at the heart of grace as it was perceived in the ancient world. Grace was not simply—or ever—pure gift in spite of what some say today. One must define terms by their usage not by our contemporary beliefs or usages. Grace can both be one hundred percent gift and at the same time summon the gifted person with an obligation, a heartfelt and intentional duty, to respo...
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King Jesus summons people into a kingdom where he alone is king, and kings expect one thing from their subjects: allegiance.
reliability, confidence, assurance, fidelity, faithfulness, commitment, and pledged loyalty.
With regard to eternal salvation, rather than speaking of belief, trust, or faith in Jesus, we should speak instead of fidelity to Jesus as cosmic Lord or allegiance to Jesus the king.
The true climax of the gospel—Jesus’s enthronement—has generally been deemphasized or omitted from the gospel. 2. Consequently, pistis has been misaimed and inappropriately nuanced with respect to the gospel. It is regarded as “trust” in Jesus’s righteousness alone or “faith” that Jesus’s death covers my sins rather than “allegiance” to Jesus as king. 3. Final salvation is not about attainment of heaven but about embodied participation in the new creation. When the true goal of salvation is recognized, terms such as “faith,” “works,” “righteousness,” and “the gospel” can be more accurately
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At the center of Christianity, properly understood, is not the human response of faith or belief but rather the old-fashioned term fidelity.
for many today faith is defined as the opposite of evidence-based truth. This is neither a biblical nor a Christian understanding of faith.
the “faith” God requires of us has nothing to do with ignoring relevant evidence that is easily available when adjudicating truth claims.
the true people of God are willing to act decisively in the visible world not for reasons that are immediately apparent but because an unseen yet even more genuine underlying substance (hypostasis), God’s reality, compels the action.
neither Noah nor Abraham launched out into the void, but rather each responded to God’s command. They acted in response to the call of a promise-fulfilling God with whom they had experience.
One might even dare to say that in so acting Noah and Abraham above all showed allegiance to God as the sovereign and powerful Lord who speaks all human affairs into existence,
The key point is that true pistis is not an irrational launching into the void but a reasonable, action-oriented response grounded in the conviction that God’s invisible underlying realities are more certain than any apparent realities.
it is only good when it is an obedient response to God’s exercised sovereignty. We are not to leap out in the dark at a whim, or simply to prove to ourselves, God, or others that we “have faith.” But the promise-keeping God might indeed call us to act on invisible realities of his heavenly kingdom.
If the call is genuine, we may indeed be bruised by the leap. Yet if it is genuine, in gathering the bruises from the hard landing, we can be certain that we will come to look more like the wounded Son, which is the final goal of redeemed humanity.
True pistis is not an irrational leap in the dark but a carefully discerned response to God’s reign through Jesus over his kingdom and that kingdom’s frequently hidden growth.
for instance, we were to discover that Paul is concerned not primarily with “good works” in general but rather with “works of law”—that is, works demanded by the law of Moses—then what difference might that make?
Furthermore, if we were to determine that in
appropriate salvation-oriented contexts in the New Testament pistis most likely means faithfulness, or fidelity, or allegiance, then might not pistis by its very definition include c...
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genuine biblical faith is not a conjured optimism, a pull-a-rabbit-out-of-the-hat, magical feel-goodism, nor is it aimlessly directed at some vague cosmic hope that affirms good karma will somehow prevail in the end.
true faith cannot be spontaneously generated on the basis of wishful thinking, for it is rooted in a concrete object toward which it is directed.
if we want to grow in faith, we should study and contemplate God’s extraordinary reliability.
Advocates of free-grace salvation have correctly recognized the primacy of God’s grace and the necessity of holding certain doctrines as “true” or “real,” but by effectively reducing faith to intellectual assent, they have introduced a dangerous error.
Other than feeling a vague regret over ongoing sins, any long-term behavior changes, inasmuch as these are “deeds,” are not essential to the heavenly cake, but rather more like frosting. It might be rewardingly delicious to add some
good deeds to the cake, but the cake is really terrific regardless—and so maybe it won’t be worth the effort. Yet the full Christian gospel both demands and gives much more.
The plot in the abbreviated gospel is self-centered: I have a problem (sin) and I am currently on the road to perdition, but Jesus died for my sins, so now I have the opportunity to change roads—to go to heaven. All that is required is my personal faith that Jesus’s death completely saves me from my sins.
But what if this gospel presentation were to begin not with me and my sin but with a story about Jesus?
this truncated gospel assumes that the ultimate goal for humanity is spiritual bliss in heaven rather than, as we shall discuss further in chapter 6, embodied participation in the new heavens and the new earth.
The most straightforward explanations of what the word “gospel” meant for the earliest Christians are found in three passages in Paul’s Letters, Romans 1:1–5, 1:16–17, and 1 Corinthians 15:1–5 (cf. 2 Tim. 2:8).
Another passage that does not use the word euangelion but aligns closely with the above mentioned is Philippians 2:6–11, which can help fill out our understanding.
the gospel is the power-releasing story of Jesus’s life, death for sins, resurrection, and installation as king, but that story only makes sense in the wider framework of the stories of Israel and creation. The gospel is not in the first instance a story about heaven, hell, making a decision, raising your hand after praying a certain prayer, justification by faith alone, trusting that Jesus’s righteousness is sufficient, or any putative human tendencies toward self-salvation through good works.4 It is, in the final analysis, most succinctly good news about the enthronement of Jesus the atoning
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This creator God, the only true God, the God whom not even the highest heavens can contain, has deliberately obligated himself to bring about the gospel through an advance promise.
In reading Paul’s summary of the gospel, we quickly recognize that the gospel is not at its most basic level a tale about me and my quest for salvation (or even about “us” and “our” quest), but rather it is a grand, cosmic story about God’s Son and what he has done.
As the story opens, the Son preexists with God the Father, but the good news, the gospel proper, begins when Jesus is sent by the Father to assume human flesh.
Jesus as the paradigm for humanity, the truly human one, corresponds to and parallels Adam.
Yet the story of the “fall” of Adam and Eve in the garden and the resultant human plight is not part of the gospel proper; rather it is a necessary framing story without which the gospel cannot be fully understood.
Jesus entered fleshly human existence not haphazardly, but his family line was carefully selected by God precisely to fulfill the promise God had made.
the gospel cannot be holistically comprehended without seeing the manner in which the incarnation fulfills God’s promise to David,
This promissory language, however, echoes even earlier biblical narratives, that through Abraham and his seed “all nations on earth will be blessed” (Gen. 12:3; 22:18; cf. Gal. 3:16). And even earlier, that the serpent’s head would be crushed through the seed of the woman (Gen. 3:15).
On the basis of this resurrection, Jesus was then installed in a new position of authority: he “was appointed Son-of-God-in-Power,” which is best construed as the informal description of the office into which the Son has been installed—a
The true thrust of Paul’s line of thought is that the resurrection served to trigger the exaltation of Jesus from his lowly status among the dead, so that he came to be installed in a position of sovereign authority.
V-shaped story about Jesus.12 Initially Jesus preexisted as Son of God, which seems to presuppose an exalted state, yet he moved downward, taking on human flesh and then reaching the very bottom—the abode of the dead. But once he reached bottom, the ascent began—he was raised from the dead and then installed in the heavenly sphere as Son-of-God-in-Power.
this new super-exalted status as cosmic Lord is not peripheral to the good news about Jesus. It is at the very heart and center—the climax of the gospel. Jesus has been enthroned as the king. To him allegiance is owed.
more than intellectual assent or a one-time decision is required by this gospel; a certain amount of tenacity in adhering to the proclaimed message is also needed.
That Jesus died for our sins and, as a portion of that “our,” that he also died for my sins is truly part of the gospel—emphatically so!—but it is imperative to realize that it is only a small but vital portion of the gospel as properly understood, not the whole gospel. It is also critical to recognize that “faith” is not primarily aimed at trusting in the forgiveness-of-sins process. For Paul does not primarily call us to “faith” (“belief” or “trust”) in some sort of atonement system in order to be saved (although mental affirmation that Jesus died for our sins is necessary), but rather to
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since this scriptural correlation is part and parcel of the gospel itself, the meaning of the gospel is both informed and constrained by the larger biblical story.
The gospel is not just a story about Jesus; it is a transformative story because the gospel unleashes God’s saving power for humanity.
