The covenantal patterns injected into our lives by the structure of promise and fulfillment pervading Scripture resound with cosmic harmonics that set our hearts resonating with expectations beyond hopes and expectancy beyond expectations! There are hidden levels of anticipation that transcend the abrupt endings of our minor tragedies, that beckon us beyond and beyond… [1/12/01]
Jesus is the image of God to perfection. Yet that image is barely perceptible in a still shot. God’s essential features are not visible in a still life, but only in live action. It is the moving picture of Jesus doing high-powered acts of divine restoration, as we read in the Gospels, that most truly depicts God’s image on earth. No deaf, dumb, and blind icon is worthy of the least consideration. Christian iconography is an oxymoron. That’s like saying, “Sure I’m a Christian; don’t you see my idol collection?” God forbids it because they one and all, fat or flat, misrepresent Him to an appalling degree. The image of God must convey action, like a movie or video does. [2/08/01]
We have no mandate from Heaven to herald some “simple Gospel.” As likely as not, such an abbreviated version is “a different proclamation, which is not another“! Paul was mandated by God to be “perfecting” his career “and the service which I got from the Master Jesus to certify the Proclamation of the favor of God” (Acts 20:24), which amounted to “heralding the Kingdom” (20:25). He felt the full weight of this burden: “Wherefore I am attesting to you in this very day that I am clear from the blood of all, for under no circumstances do I shrink from informing you of the entire plan of God“ (20:26-7). Only such a full “Explanation of His favor” is “able to build and give the legacy of an allotment among all who have gotten wholesome” (20:32). Anything less may well be simpleminded instead of simple. [2/08/01]
The Old Testament, though full of “shadows” and hints of the truth as it is in Jesus, contains, nonetheless, authoritative shadows–the ones God Himself chose for the purpose of anticipating the fulness to come. [2/14/01]
GOD PAID US JESUS!
When God, the Father, gave us His uniquely-begotted Son, He paid us agelong life in exchange for death. He ‘cut a deal (/covenant!)‘ with sinners to pay them agelong life if they would trust Him and become His possession—His inheritance on earth. What a sweet deal! By eating the Lord’s Supper we are accepting God’s payment into our dying bodies. We are chewing on uncreated celestial nutriment and quaffing divine liquid nourishment. That is, God’s own Wholesome Spirit—His divine nature, the contents of Deity—is entering our human natures to resuscitate, rejuvenate, regenerate, and renew our existences. God is pleased to accept our sacrifices of love to one another—our mercy, generosity, pardoning, kindnesses, covering each other’s sins, etc., etc.—-by reviving us again and again to overcome the death gnawing at our flesh.
God had to sacrifice His Son for us in order to solve the sin problem, because our sin is the natural result of lacking life (being early on cut off from the Tree of Life for distrusting God’s Declaration). By sacrificing the absolutely just and innocent Jesus to the vicious, unjust, public execution at the hands of Satan and his pawns, God was fully justified in raising him from among the dead, exalting him to the throne of the created universe, and overcompensating him with a measureless surplus of Wholesome Spirit, in turn, to give away for free to all who believe this proclamation and trust Jesus as Master and Messiah. This staggering downpour of God’s nature upon human nature effected the requisite cleansing of our sins by nullifying its very root cause—our deficiency of God’s glory due to diminishing life. Our vitality being sapped steadily, we reached out in lust/craving/covetousness to grasp and clutch some vestige of glory from this dying and doomed order of things. We thereby violated the integrity of created structures, invaded what was not ours, trammeled what remained of God’s glory, and corrupted the whole world with disgusting defilements. So wretched degradation and death became our legacy.
Yet God in brilliant wisdom reverses the downward plunge by entering this miasma in the person of His only-begotten Son. In this way God loves the population of the corrupted civilization we built, that He pays Jesus to us so that whoever trusts him need not get destroyed but be able to possess the undying life that comes with him! Then that life, welling up inside of us, engenders a willingness, in turn, to sacrifice for the sake of other dying fellow creatures, trusting and expecting repayment from God rather than from wretchedly deficient creatures. Thus God’s Life re-enters the realm of death, disease, slavery, abuse, and sorrow to proliferate through regenerated humanity. This is God’s Kingdom of uprightness, peace, and joy in the Wholesome Spirit. [3/05/01]
The Holy Spirit is the ‘business end’ of God! That’s where His firepower is. [3/31/01]
The power of the New Covenant is greater than the Old because now it is not defiling to touch lepers—there can be healing! Things have changed. The rules have changed. The power has been augmented! [4/4/01]
By the blood of Jesus, the Master, the Messiah, the uniquely born Son of the one and only, living and true God, Creator of all; by the blood poured out in an unjust, violent, prolonged, and public execution from a perfectly innocent Victim; by the blood avenged three days later through God’s resurrecting the just Victim from among the dead and forty days thereafter exalting him to the throne of the created universe; by such blood, accepted into our own bodies by faith, in the mundane form of grape juice during the Lord’s Supper, we have:
“Atonement“/Protective Covering/Indemnification
Salvation
Justification and Uprightness
Sanctification
Liberation
Liberty
Peace
Forgiveness/Pardon
Cleansing from sin
Erasure of sins
Conciliation with God
Nearness to God
Rescue
Agelong life
[4/04/01]
The Premial Atonement 