A Helpful Introduction to the Old Testament

Posted on Thursday, January 8, 2009 | Comments Off

On Sunday evenings at Beaver Baptist Church  I am teaching a survey of the Bible.  I got the idea from The Story of a Kingdom, a survey of the Bible using principles of biblical theology.  The author, Jonathan Gibson,  credits a number of books on biblical theology, including Graeme Goldworthy’s According to Plan, William Dumbrell’s The Faith of Israel, and Tim Chester’s From Creation to New Creation, all of which are excellent.  You can particularly tell the influence of Goldsworthy.  The only shortcoming for my purposes is that his course is designed for students of English as a second language, thus the lesson outlines are somewhat simple.  So I decided that I would supplement the lessons with my own reading.

One resource that I have found to be quite helpful is book that I feel deserves a wider reputation: Yesterday, Today and Forever: The Continuing Relevance of the Old Testament , by Larry Helyer.  It is not a comprehensive survey, but it treats a number of key periods in the OT and key themes.  The Table of Contents will give you the idea:

  1. An Overview of the Old Testament
  2. The Old Testament Teaching on Creation
  3. The Fall and the Flood
  4. The Promise to the Patriarchs
  5. The Exodus from Egypt and the Sinai Covenant
  6. The Kingdom of God: Part One
  7. The Kingdom of God: Part Two
  8. The Word and the Spirit: Prophesy in Israel
  9. Eschatology of the Old Testament
  10. The Way of Wisdom and Worship
  11. Epilogue: The Relationship of the Old and New Testaments

This post hardly qualifies as book review, since I am currently reading chapter 5 on the Exodus.  But I can testify to the book’s helpfulness.  For example, in chapter 2 on the Creation, Helyer has a very even-handed discussion of the various approaches to the issue of Genesis chs. 1 & 2 and modern science.  (For the record, I am an “Old Earth Creationist”).  I like a number of his charts and tables, which I have utilized in my handouts, and each chapter has a useful bibliography for further study.  Helyer is familiar with the scholarly literature, and yet incorporates it with a very accessible style.  It’s a book I will recommend to anyone wanting to get a grasp of the Old Testament.

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Posted in Beaver Baptist Church, Biblical Theology, Books and Other Reading

What Are Spiritual Gifts?

Posted on Wednesday, January 7, 2009 | Comments Off

Yesterday, on the way home, I started yet another book: What Are Spiritual Gifts? Rethinking the Conventional View, by Kenneth Berding, professor of New Testament at Talbot Theological Seminary.  Berding challenges what he calls the conventional view:

Let’s begin by looking at the conventional approach to the so-called spiritual gifts. . . . This approach says that the spiritual gifts are abilities or enablements, given by the Holy Spirit to individual believers to help them serve others.  There are three main components in any conventional definition of a spiritual gift: (1) the entity itself is an ability or enablement; (2) it is given by the Holy Spirit; (3) it is to be used in building up the community of believers. . . .

In this approach, every believer who has a relationship with God through Jesus Christ has been given at least one special ability that he or she is to discover and use in building the community of faith. [pp. 25-27]

Berding claims that nearly all discussions about the spiritual gifts begin without defining from scripture what a spiritual gift is.  That is, all spiritual gifts are assumed to be abilities that are supernaturally given by the Holy Spirit.  Here Berding describes an alternative understanding:

In this alternative approach, the so-called spiritual gifts are not special abilities; they’re Spirit-given ministries.  According to the contextual evidence in the letters of Paul, the so-called spiritual gifts should be viewed as the ministries themselves.  Every believer has been assigned by the Holy Spirit to specific positions and activities of service, small and large, short-term and long-term.  These are ministry assignments that are given by the Holy Spirit to individual believers and, in turn, these individuals in their ministries have been given as gifts to the church. [p. 32]

Berding asserts that this is not a charismatic vs. non-charismatic issue in that both parties believe that spiritual gifts are abilities given by the Holy Spirit, it’s just that they disagree on whether the Holy Spirit still gives miraculous gifts, such as speaking tongue, prophecy, etc. [p. 29]  In arguing for the ministry-assignment view, Berding concedes that some ministries such as prophecy, but not all ministries, would have required a supernatural enablement.  [p. 34]

Berding argues that in Paul’s usage of the Greek word, charisma, every usage of the word can fit the concept of ministry, and that in a number of cases, that is the only viable meaning for the term.  The heart of the book, chapters 5 through 14, lay out Berding’s argument, but I have only read through chapter 7.

There are a number of practical implications if this view is correct.  For one, there would no longer be any need for believers to seek to discover just what gift or gifts they have been given by the Holy Spirit.  The believer merely need to seek where God would have him minister.  This could come in the form of some sort of inner confirmation by the Spirit, but it would also be informed by the believer’s identification of needs in the church, and wise counsel from others.  In addition, one would not be limited by the lists of so-called spiritual gifts found in Ephesians 4:11, Romans 12:6-8; 1 Corinthians 12:8-10; and 12:28-30.  They would be taken as a representative, and not exhaustive, list of ministries. [p. 49]

I know that in my own preaching and teaching I have emphasized that every on has a spiritual gift that they need to put to use in the kingdom work of the local church.  But I have not been helpful in showing how our church members are to identify those gifts.  I’m beginning to think that I should modify that to say that every believer has been called to at least one ministry in the local church.  I think it would be easier to give guidance to those who respond to such exhortations and who want to know what to do next.

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Posted in Biblical Theology, Books and Other Reading, Discipleship, Pastoral

What I’m Reading

Posted on Tuesday, January 6, 2009 | Comments Off

As mentioned yesterday, I’m reading Calvin’s Institutes, and finished his Preface to the Reader last night.

I’ve begun reading through the Bible (English Standard Version), using a one-year plan called The Daily Reader.  (HT: Peter Mead of Biblical Preaching).  What stands out about this plan is how they have arranged the Old Testament and New Testament Readings:

The Order of the Books

What order are we planning to read through and why?  Here’s the explanation:

Old Testament

You will notice that the Old Testament in this plan does not follow the same order as our English Bibles. We will cover the same 39 books during the year, but the order is different! We are using the Hebrew order (the order Jesus would have used). The Hebrew order organises the books in three sections. First we will begin with the five books of Moses. Second we will move through the “Former” and “Latter Prophets” – this will feel like history books, followed by the prophets. Third we will enjoy the “Writings.” There are a couple of reasons we have set it out in this different way. For those who have read through the Bible before, this will have a fresh feel to it. For all of us it will mean we enjoy benefits like not having to read the two books of Chronicles right after the books of Samuel and Kings (this can feel a bit repetitive in the English order!)  Watch for further comments about the Hebrew order as we go.

New Testament

You will also soon notice that the New Testament is not in English Bible order. The arrangement we will follow allows us to separate the gospels from each other. After each gospel we will read epistles that have some connection to it. Again, hopefully this approach will be fresh, motivating and helpful. So we’ll begin with Matthew (the more Jewish gospel) and follow it with Hebrews and James (two epistles with a very “Jewish Christian” feel!) Then Mark will be followed by the letters of Peter (who was probably behind Mark’s gospel) and Jude (which is often connected with 2 Peter). Luke will come next, along with his second work, Acts. Then, naturally, Paul’s epistles will follow Acts which tells so much of his story. Finally John’s gospel will be followed by his three other epistles and his last book of all, Revelation!

You can download a pdf file of The Daily Reading Plan, if you’re interested.

Last month at the Desiring God blog, I read John Piper’s recommendation of Leif Enger’s novel, Peace Like a River.  I ordered a copy, which arrived last Friday.  I’ve been reading it at bedtime, and I’m about halfway through it.  It’s well written and it’s a compelling story.

Finally, a man in our congregation is reading John Owen on Overcoming Sin and Temptation, in the edition edited by Kelly Kapic and Justin Taylor (Kapic wrote his doctoral dissertation on Owen at the University of London).  The book is an updating of three of Owen’s works: Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers; On Temptation: the Nature and Power of It; and Indwelling Sin.  He invited me to read it and discuss it with him, so I ordered it and it arrived yesterday.  This morning I read Kapic’s introduction while commuting on the bus to work.   It provided a nice sketch of Owen’s theology of sin and sanctification, and also whetted my appetite to immerse myself in Owen’s writings.  Here’s an sample in which Kapic discusses Owen’s insight that we must consider each individual’s personality in detecting how it is subject to sin and temptation:

A persistant danger among Christians is that we confuse certain personalites with sanctification, creating an inaccurate hierarchy within the kingdom of God.  In fact, Owen believes that because of our various backgrounds and temperaments, it is very hard to discern the most faithful Christians, since looks can be deceiving:

Remember that of many of the best Christians, the worst is known and seen.  Many who keep up precious communion with God do yet oftentimes, by their natural tempers of freedom or passion, not carry so glorious appearances as others who perhaps come short of them in grace and the power of godliness.

Not only can appearances be misleading, but people in positions of leadership in the church can often suffer greater falls than the average congregation member.  When considering countless examples of the saints in Scripture (e.g., Noah, David, Hezekiah), Owen concludes that great “eruptions of actual sin” often occur not in “the lowest form or ordinary sort of believers,” but in people who have in the past “had a peculiar eminency in them on account of their walking with God in their generation.”  Past faithfulness is not a protection against present dangers. [pg. 31]

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Posted in Books and Other Reading

Reading Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion

Posted on Monday, January 5, 2009 | Comments Off

2009 being the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin, there is a wealth of resources pertaining to Calvin and his writings appearing in print and on the internet.  This website has inspired me to finally read the entirety of the Institutes of the Christian Religion (1,734 pages, including indices): Blogging the Institutes.  You can get a reading schedule from them that will take you through the Institutes in one year, with readings running Monday to Friday.  They also have a fine ensemble of bloggers, so I don’t plan to blog about my readings, although you never know.  Today is the first day, and it starts out with Calvin’s opening remarks to the reader, which are only 3 pages.

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Posted in Books and Other Reading

The local church as a “house of prayer”

Posted on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 | Comments Off

John Botkin is the pastor of Bangor Baptist Church in Michigan, and a friend from seminary days.  He’s posted an article titled Becoming a House of Prayer and talks about a chapter on prayer he has written for an upcoming book on pastoral ministry.  You can download a copy of the draft of his chapter here.  I’ve downloaded and read the chapter, and I think it’s very well done.  I was challenged to be faithful in my own work of prayer as a pastor, and to lead our church to be a house of prayer.  John’s article also contains some helpful suggestions for doing both of these things.  Recommended, and not just for pastors.

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Posted in Church Life, Pastoral, Pastoral Care

Speaking the unspeakable

Posted on Friday, September 19, 2008 | Comments Off

I’m not always in agreement with Internet Monk, but often he says things that are not only true, but need to be said.  In a post titled Evangelism Won’t Cure It, Michael Spencer identifies a perennial source of self-deception among Southern Baptists, namely, that the problem of decline in the SBC would be reversed if only we would become more evangelistic, and therefore, what the SBC needs is an evangelistic campaign that everyone needs to get on board with.

Read the whole thing, but here is how Spencer wraps it up:

I love what the SBC does right.  I really do. My denomination can be awesome at some things, especially in the area of cooperative missions.

I’m not dogging evangelists.  I spend a significant amount of my time in evangelistic ministry. It’s one reason I will remain an evangelical.

Our denomination has some wonderful churches and some great people.

But let’s just say it:  We’re Johnny One Notes on evangelism because we don’t want to admit how flawed, hurting, confused and increasingly dysfunctional we are.

We need evangelism in its place, and that won’t happen till we stop and look at the whole, not just the parts we want to blame.

And 100,000 more baptisms won’t solve those problems.

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Posted in Church Life, Discipleship, Evangelism, Pastoral, SBC Matters

Are we preaching a “prosperity gospel”?

Posted on Wednesday, September 17, 2008 | 3 Comments

Michael Spencer at Internet Monk, gave me food for thought with his post The “Real” Prosperity Gospel.  It is one thing to denounce the “name it and claim it” theology that promises that we can have health and wealth if only we have enough faith to believe God for it.  But Spencer responds to a commenter on his blog who suggests that those of us who reject the prosperity gospel often hold to a subtler form of it:

The real prosperity gospel isn’t the overt appeal to wealth. It is the more subtle appeal to God guaranteeing that we are going to be happy, and the accompanying pressure to be happy in ways that are acceptable and recognizable to the community of Christians we belong to.

The real prosperity gospel is the belief that God will- must?- keep things at a level where it’s still possible for us to follow Jesus without overt appeal to rewards in this life. The real prosperity gospel is revealed not in the promises of a yacht or a large home, but in the unspoken approval of a level of prosperity that allows us to live the Christian life on our own terms. It is the ratification of our private, sometimes entirely secret, arrangements with God of what his “goodness” means.

It’s the notion that, even if we are going through tough times, we can still be happy if we have Jesus Christ.  That if we ever lose our joy, we are somehow poor Christians.  We have to be careful not to teach, or give the impression, that if we are ever discouraged, sad or struggling, something is wrong with us or our faith.  God calls us to cast our cares and anxieties upon Him, He doesn’t promise that cares and anxieties with be absent from the lives of faithful believers.

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Posted in Church Life, Discipleship, Pastoral Care

Ben Witherington on Reimagining Church

Posted on Saturday, September 6, 2008 | Comments Off

Ben Witherington, Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Asbury Theological Seminary, has posted part one of a review of Reimagining Church by Frank Viola.  In part one, Witherington deals with Viola’s assertion that the relationship of the members of the triune Godhead is essentially egalitarian, and therefore relationships within the church are to reflect the Trinity.  Witherington concludes:

So here is where I stress that ontological equality, and functional subordination have always been and always will be compatible, and the blueprint Godhead provides us with a reason to expect that in the church there will be a hierarchial pattern of ordering things. I would hasten to add that it does NOT lead us to expect that this pattern will involve a gender hierarchy. No, it will involve a leader and follower, shepherd and sheep, pastor and congregation, apostle and co-workers hierarchy— something Frank wants to avoid at all costs, seeing it as either inorganic or simply fallen human structures.

Alas, however, it is the divine design, mirroring the functional subordination that indeed has and does exist in the Trinity. When the Bible says ‘honor thy father (and mother)”, it never conceives of a day when somehow the son ever ceases to be a son, ceases to owe respect to the father, ceases to be ordered under the father in these ways. There will always be an ordering in that relation and so a hierarchy. Likewise, there never comes a day when the only begotten Son becomes the Father, or somehow the Father changes roles and becomes the only begotten Son. Equality and indeed mutual love and respect do not in any way necessarily rule out an ordering of relationships, or even functional subordination in such relationships either in the Godhead, or in Christian community. I am afraid that what has affected and infected this discussion is secular notions of equality that assume that equal must mean ‘the same’ in all respects, or ‘the same’ in all functions. But this is not what the Bible either says or suggests.

But, by all means, read the entire review the review for yourself.

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Posted in Book Reviews, Church Life, Pastoral, Theology

Lord, make my life a miracle!

Posted on Friday, September 5, 2008 | Comments Off

Ray Ortlund Jr. shares a powerful quote from one his father’s books:

“Your danger and mine is not that we become criminals, but rather that we become respectable, decent, commonplace, mediocre Christians. No rewards at the end, no glory. The twenty-first-century temptations that really sap our spiritual power are the television, banana cream pie, the easy chair and the credit card. Christian, you will win or lose in those seemingly innocent little moments of decision. Lord, make my life a miracle!”

Ray Ortlund Sr., Lord, Make My Life A Miracle, pages 130-131.

Amen!

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Posted in Discipleship

Evidence for the influence of the synagogue on the early church

Posted on Thursday, August 28, 2008 | 6 Comments

Alan Knox at his blog The Assembling of the Church, discusses Stephen Catto’s Reconstructing the First-Century Synagogue: A Critical Analysis of Current Research.  In his post, Sacred Meals in the Synagogue,  Knox summarizes Catto’s findings:

Catto describes four “worship practices” that he says were common to first century synagogues. He says that those synagogues practiced 1) sanctity (cleansing or purity), 2) Scripture reading and teaching, 3) Prayer (including hymns), and 4) Sacred meals.

Yes, you read that correctly. Catto suggests that first century synagogue meetings included meals as a form of “worship”. In fact, he points out that many synagogue buildings included dining rooms for the meal.

Books like Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola and George Barna have argued that the early church represented a radical break from the worship practices of 1st century Judaism.  They assert that the early church did not imitate the synagogues’ use of purpose-built buildings, and had a form of worship that was more a spontaneous, free-flowing time of fellowship, in which table fellowship was prominent.  Catto’s book suggests that the fellowship was not distinctive to the NT church.

Knox concludes:

If Catto is correct, and I have much more studying to do before I form an opinion, then eating and drinking together were considered a form of worship to some Jews around the time of the New Testament. Thus, the concept “breaking bread” together would not be a foreign concept to the new church. Certainly, there would be difference between the communal meals of the synagogue and the communal meals of the church. Primarily, for the church, Jesus Christ is both the host and the benefactor of the meal, and the meal provides an outward demonstration of the fellowship that the church possesses because of the indwelling Holy Spirit.

I welcome examining contemporary church pratices in light of the New Testament. But I believe that much of the arguments presented by such writers as Viola and Barna rely on shoddy historical work, and, more importantly, portray a distorted view of the NT church.  Catto’s book, then, is potentially an important corrective.

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Posted in Church Life, Theology