Tag: Sanctification

Power vs. Politics

After Jesus was resurrected and had gathered His disciples together, the disciples asked, “Lord is it at this time You are restoring the kingdom to Israel?”

Jesus said in response, “It is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority; but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.” Acts 1:6-8.

Jesus’ disciples were young. They were excited about Jesus’ resurrection, which for them confirmed he was indeed the King of kings. They were ready for Jesus to take over. They wanted to talk politics, but Jesus wanted to talk power.

The conversation is instructive. I am old enough to have lived through two evangelical experiments with American politics. The first was one of disengagement. This was the default in the late 1960s and through the 1970s.

That all changed with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Francis Schaeffer, Jerry Falwell, and other evangelical leaders encouraged evangelicals to get involved in politics. The catalyst policy was a pro life agenda, but it grew from that and evangelicals eventually found a home with the conservative Right. That started the second experiment that has continued until this day.

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The Good News of Christmas

I was reading the Christmas story in Luke last night in the New American Standard Bible translation, and came across verse 14, one of the most quoted verses at Christmas. But when I read, “And on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased,” it seemed wrong theologically.

I was reading it as saying God was pleased with men on earth, which was obviously incorrect. If God was pleased with man on earth, there would be no need for the Christmas story at all. Jesus’ birth was a foreshadowing of His death, which was necessary because man was enslaved to sin and in active rebellion against God.

So, I immediately went to the commentaries and different translations, and I discovered that while the New American Standard Bible was the more literal translation, what the angels were actually saying is there will be peace amongst those on whom His favor rests. Now, this does not sound as good on Christmas cards, but Truth isn’t determined by its marketability.

Think about it though, angels appear to shepherds to announce the birth of Jesus, and the angels are excited because they know the plan, they can see down the road where all this headed, and in their excited utterance of praise, they say two things. First, they praise God for what He is doing through the incarnation, and rightly so. And second, when they turn to man, they don’t mention salvation, and they don’t mention eternal life; they mention peace. They were excited because there could now be peace on earth among those who were favored by God to be redeemed through Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Part of the role of an angel is to comfort and protect those on earth. See Luke 22:43; Psalm 91:11; Daniel 6:22. So many people suffer from anxiety, fear, depression, and despair. Also, so much of the harm that comes to people on earth is the result of interpersonal conflict. I can only imagine what the work of angels was like in a world where none were redeemed or even partially sanctified.

But with the incarnation, once people were born-again, they would enjoy an inner peace and comfort of the Holy Spirit and set out on the path of sanctification, taking on God’s character. The more they became like Jesus, the more peace they would enjoy internally and in their relationships, which meant the less angels would have to do to comforting and protecting man.

What God did at Christmas then, not only benefited man, it benefited the angels as well, and it was reason not only for us, but for them to say as well, “Glory to God in the highest!”

Merry Christmas. GS

On Stumbling Blocks

“it is inevitable that stumbling blocks come, but woe to him through whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than that he would cause one of these little ones to stumble.” Luke 17:1-2

There are certain things Jesus said that frighten me. Saying that it would be better for me to have a millstone tied around my neck and drowned rather than be a hypocrite is one of them. Some others? That if I don’t forgive others, God won’t forgive me (Matt. 6:15); and that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven (Luke 12:10). I take these scriptures very seriously. I just figure it’s silly for me to believe what Jesus said about my salvation but assume he was mistaken about these other things. I take them seriously, and I fear God.

I’m not going to qualify what I mean by “fear God,” if for no other reason than I am tempted to, and I am sure I am tempted to because of the snowflake theologies of our generation that have created an ambient pressure to only define God in terms of His love for us. Such theologies enable misguided pastors like Rob Bell and destroy misinformed ones like Carl Lentz, and they can lead the rest of us astray as well. We should choose to serve the God of the Bible, not the God of The Shack.

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What You Missed By Not Reading A Christmas Carol

The Wife and I have been watching a different Christmas movie each evening in the run-up to Christmas.

In the midst of a party-less pandemic, it is the next best thing.

We started the first night with A Christmas Carol (the George C. Scott version), followed by How the Grinch Stole Christmas, then the next night, my favorite, The Bishop’s Wife.

Then last night we watched a movie neither of us had ever seen, The Man Who Invented Christmas, a loose biopic on Charles Dickens’s writing of A Christmas Carol. The movie is as much fiction as fact, but it led me to a realization: I had never actually read the story Dickens wrote. I had seen several versions of the movie, and my wife and I go every year to the local theatre to see the play, but I had never read the actual words Dickens wrote.

After the movie, I went to my study to do some writing, and while there I noticed one of the temperamental track lights on the mezzanine in our library had flickered off again, so I scurried up the spiral staircase to tinker with it. My tinkering brought light, and when I looked down on the bookshelf where the light shone I noticed on top of a row of vertically stacked books a thin leather-bound book, with gold embossed pages, and gilded lettering on the cover:

A Christmas Carol 

Charles Dickens

I then remembered the book was a gift from my wife, but I had not yet read it.

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