Jesus Says to Rome

You have heard that it was said to those of old, “Pray to Mary, and petition the Saints.” But I say to you that there is only one mediator between God and men (1 Timothy 2:5). You need no other go-between than me. Do you not know that you already have an advocate with the Father (1 John 2:1)? Do you not know that I am the way, and the truth, and the life, and that no one comes to the Father except through me (John 14:6)? So, when you pray, ask in my name, that the Father may be glorified in the Son (John 14:13).

You have heard that it was said, “Kneel before the consecrated host, and worship the one sacrificed in the mass.” But I say to you that when I had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, I sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until my enemies should be made a footstool for my feet. For by a single offering I have perfected for all time those who are being sanctified (Hebrews 10:12–14). And have you not heard that where there is forgiveness of sins, there is no longer any offering for sin (Hebrews 10:18)? I meant it when I said on the cross, “It is finished” (John 19:30).

You have heard that it was said, “Honor the pope.” But I say to you that this is a sadly misguided understanding of the role my disciple Peter played and the reality of succession in the church. The Rock on which I have built my church (Matthew 16:18) for two millennia is not Peter alone, but the band of the apostles together (Ephesians 2:20). All my specially appointed apostles, not just Peter, are my expressly commissioned authoritative spokesmen for my church (John 14:26; 15:26–27; 16:13). Their authority is not their own, but mine. I am the one who has authority (Matthew 7:29), not your ecclesiastical scribes. And when I ascended, it was my apostles together, not Peter alone, who served as my authoritative on-the-ground spokesmen in the first generation of the church. At my word, it was the apostles’ spoken and written words that served as the early church’s final authority — and when the apostles had passed, it was their preserved writings that have carried my voice as the church’s final authority these two thousand years, not the accumulated traditions of the church.

Again you have heard that it was said to those of old, “Priests are prohibited to marry.” But I say to you, I appreciate that you’re listening to 1 Corinthians 7, but what about the other things I have to say through my inspired spokesmen? I say twice that a presbuteros must be the husband of one wife (1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:6) — without, in any way, excluding the celibate (like me, and Paul) from church office, but also emphatically not excluding the married. Why do you exclude them from your priesthood, except upon special exception? Celibacy is a special calling, not to be coerced with church law. Have I not been equally clear that it is better to marry than to burn with passion (1 Corinthians 7:9)?

You have heard that it was said, “Your acceptance with God is not based solely on another’s goodness, but also on your own.” But I say to you, do not rob me of my full glory in your full acceptance before God. Let me be honored as the one who alone forgives your sins (Mark 2:10), and the one who alone provides the perfect righteousness you need to be accepted by God (Philippians 3:9). It is true that you get involved in your ongoing holiness as my righteousness is imparted to you after you have been fully accepted (Romans 6:12–14). But don’t jump the gun by thinking you could ever muster holiness enough to earn your acceptance with the thrice-holy God. It is not the godly that my Father justifies, but the ungodly (Romans 4:6). Do you not know how profoundly sinful you are (Romans 3:23), that it is impossible for those in the flesh to please God (Romans 8:8), that no mere human effort can ever justify you in my Father’s sight (Romans 3:20)? You need Another’s work to count for you — the perfect life and death of the one God-man who came to earth to achieve for you the acceptance with God that you could not achieve for yourself.

You have heard that it was said, “The Scriptures are the product of the Church. The authorized tradition sits alongside the Scriptures as your final authority.” But I say to you, for the sake of your tradition, you have made void the word of God (Matthew 15:6). In my new-covenant marriage with my bride, the Groom speaks the authoritative final word, not the Bride. It is my voice the sheep hear and follow (John 10:3–4, 27), not the voice of the church.

It was the unique, irreplaceable apostles whom I specially trained for over three years and specially appointed as my authoritative spokesmen. The old-covenant prophets and new-covenant apostles have spoken for me and about me (John 5:39, 46; Luke 24:25–27, 44–45; Ephesians 3:5; 2 Peter 3:1–2). It is my voice in their recorded words that is your final authority for doctrine and practice. When I say your final authority is Scripture alone — sola Scriptura — I mean the writings of the apostles and prophets (Ephesians 2:20). And when I say the apostles and prophets, I mean that I myself am the Word (John 1:1), God’s final say (Hebrews 1:2). I am the Church’s final authority, and the way that I have appointed to mediate that authority to you is not through ongoing church tradition, but through the apostolic and prophetic word alone.

By setting your accumulated traditions alongside the Scriptures, you have emptied my word of its power (Matthew 15:6). You have been taken captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ (Colossians 2:8). Putting the traditions of men on par with the words of God means losing the words of God. No matter how hard you try to hold divine revelation equal to human tradition as your final authority, the words of man will inevitably distort and diminish the words of God.

Jesus Understands Loneliness

“He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” (Isaiah 53:3)

Sometimes we feel alone in the world. Jesus understands this feeling. In a very human sense, he was alone.  

Imagine what living in this world was like for Jesus. He was without sin (Hebrews 4:15). That might sound like a pleasant problem to deal with. I don’t think so. I think it was tormenting. Peter described sinful Lot’s experience in Sodom as being tormented day after day by the “lawless deeds that he saw and heard” (2 Peter 2:8). How much worse was it for sinless Jesus living in a world of sin?

Imagine what his childhood was like. He would have been odd, sticking out morally like a sore thumb, never quite fitting in with any group, even his own family.

Even his loving parents wouldn’t have fully understood him. Nor would they have been able to protect him from others’ stinging remarks and maybe cruel mocking over his unsullied strangeness.

I wonder how much came from his siblings? His brothers and sisters (Matthew 13:55–56) would have grown increasingly self-conscious around him, aware of their own sinful, self-obsessed motives and behavior, while noting that Jesus didn’t seem to exhibit any himself. What resentments accrued? All was not harmonious because Jesus’s own brothers didn’t believe in him (John 7:5), possibly until after his resurrection (Acts 1:14).

Jesus was a sinless person living with sinful parents, sinful siblings, sinful extended relatives and sinful neighbors. No one on earth could identify with him. No human being could put an arm around him as he sat in tears and say, “I know exactly what you’re going through.” His sorrow and grief (Isaiah 53:3) began way before Gethsemane.

But Jesus’s loneliness reached its apex the moment he became sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21) on the cross and was “forsaken” by his Father (Matthew 27:46). First he was estranged by sinlessness and then from being sin. Jesus knew supreme rejection and loneliness.

Which makes him perfectly suited to understand yours. He is a high priest who can sympathize with this weakness (Hebrews 4:15).

But Jesus doesn’t just understand your loneliness; he’s destroying it. Because he died on your behalf, you are no longer truly a stranger or alien, but you are a fellow citizen with the saints and a member of God’s family (Ephesians 2:19). Because Jesus was alienated from God and man, you will enjoy the full family fellowship of God and all of his redeemed saints forever.

Child of God, your loneliness is passing away. The day is nearing when you will know as you have been fully known (1 Corinthians 13:12). And the fading loneliness you still feel Jesus understands.

So “with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that [you] may receive mercy and find grace to help” with every lonely need (Hebrews 4:16).  

New Publications Relating to C. S. Lewis

Joel Heck, Professor of Theology at Concordia University, Texas, has served us again by publishing rare materials relating to C. S. Lewis. In 2008 he published The Personal Heresy: A Controversy. And now he has published the Socratic Digest (Concordia University Press, 2012), a digest of the biannual publication of the meetings of the Socratic Club at Oxford from 1943 to 1952. Lewis was a regular part of this club and seven of his essays are included, plus other Lewis-related interactions.

Here is an excerpt from the preface to help you know what you will find.

With the reprinting of the Socratic Digest, one more major document in Lewisiana becomes available to the general public. . . .

For those, especially, who want to read the actual essay that Elizabeth Anscombe presented in response to Chapter 3 of C. S. Lewis’ 1947 book Miracles or who want to understand better the context in which Lewis wrote seven of his essays, some of which appear in different format than as they were later published, the Socratic Digest will provide that. For those who want to read the response of Unitarian Nicol Cross to Lewis’ chapter in Mere Christianity, “The Shocking Alternative,” this Digest provides that response. For those who want to know the issues of the day in Oxford during the 1940s, particularly for the Christian faith, the Socratic Digest is the answer. For those who want to read the notes taken on Charles Williams’ argument in the first issue that free love is neither free nor love, the Socratic Digest provides it. For those who want to enjoy the give-and-take between H. H. Price and C. S. Lewis on the topic of a minimal religion or the importance of theism, this is where one will find that argument, and in the reading one will see the same Lewis who later proposed similar arguments in Miracles. Those who want to anticipate Lewis’ inaugural lecture at Cambridge will enjoy his statement, “Almost I’d sooner be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn” (164), or this one, “When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, ‘Would that she were’” (229).

Thanks are to Joel Heck for the kind of scholarly work that continues to fill the widening reservoir of “Lewisana.”

Remember to Breathe

One of the worst aspects of suffering is the way it tends to isolate. When great storms of suffering overtake us, our sense of loneliness can become overwhelming. As the clouds close in, we may lose sight of everything but our suffering, making it loom larger and larger. With profound suffering, we may think that no one else has ever suffered as much.

I have been partially paraplegic since I was 17, with very limited use of my legs. I’m now 62. A few years ago when my walking worsened, my doctor suggested that I see a physical therapist for the first time in almost forty years. Often, when she has just asked me to do something difficult and I’m straining really hard to do it, she’ll say, “Breathe!”

Of course, I’m not the only one who needs to hear that (women in labor and athletes must be urged to breathe). But sufferers often need the same reminder.

Losing perspective in suffering is stifling; it is like forgetting to breathe. More particularly, we Christians can forget that we are never alone, no matter what we are undergoing, because God is with us, just as he was with those saints who have been in similar straits before. Sometimes we are especially prone to forget when we are dealing with some chronic disability of our own or of one of our loved ones that seems to just be going on and on, with no end in sight. We need then, especially, to be reminded to breathe in the word that God has breathed out for us (2 Timothy 3:16–17).

The Scriptures record a lot of suffering because God’s people have never been free of it, not even from the kinds and degrees that can overwhelm God’s most stalwart saints. Indeed, when Job’s suffering seemed to him to be neverending, he actually accused God of keeping him from catching his breath (see Job 9:18, NLT). Yet his story finally conveys that, as awful as his situation was, much of what he needed to hear was something like this: “Breathe! Don’t panic! Slow yourself down! Don’t take everything to be as it seems. And don’t irrationally conclude that things will never get better.”

In other words, even one of the Old Testament’s greatest believers needed some breathing lessons.

The Crux of History

Human history swings on the hinge of a Palestinian Jew. They can call it “Common Era” if they wish, but every event known to man is recorded as occurring (approximately) before or after the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.

And no single event in recorded history is more influential than his execution. Because of Jesus’s death nearly 2,000 years ago, over 2 billion people now call themselves Christians. Most statisticians agree that over 100,000 are killed every year because they take that name.

Why? Why is Jesus’s death so influential? And why are a million people killed in a decade because Jesus was killed?

Why is precisely the right question to ask. Everything hangs on why Jesus died.

The world thinks he died because he threatened the political establishment. But that is not what Jesus believed. When Pilate flexed his governing muscles, Jesus was unimpressed, saying, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above” (John 19:11). Here’s what Jesus believed:

I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. (John 10:17–18)

But why did he believe he had to lay his life down? His answer: "I lay down my life for the sheep" (John 10:15). What does that mean? That’s the most important question to ask about the most influential event in human history.

And the most clear, concise, concentrated Biblical answers to that question (that I’m aware of) are collected in John Piper’s 122 page book, Fifty Reasons Jesus Came to Die. This is one of those rare books that can be read as a devotional by Christians of all maturity levels, and given to non-Christians as a clear explanation of the gospel. Each chapter is only two pages long, but meditation on each could go on for days. The book could be a small group study for a year, or a lunch hour office study for a month. Numerous churches give it to visitors on Sunday mornings and many folks have given them as gifts to family and friends at Christmas.

Because the content of this book is so important, we want to help you read it and give it away. You can purchase it or read it free here, or if you want to give a bunch away, go here to purchase cases (48 copies) inexpensively ($1.65 per copy).

Humans are reconciled to God by Jesus’s death (Romans 5:10) or not at all. That’s why his death is so influential and why it is so violently opposed.

The cross is the crux of history because it’s the crux of the gospel.

The Deeper You Walk, the Hungrier You Get

When you take your stand on the finished work of God in Christ, and begin to drink at the River of Life and eat the Bread of Heaven, and know that you have found the end of all your longings, you only get hungrier for God. The more satisfaction you experience from God, while still in this world, the greater your desire for the next. For, as C. S. Lewis said, "Our best havings are wantings."

The more deeply you walk with Christ, the hungrier you get for Christ . . . the more homesick you get for heaven . . . the more you want "all the fullness of God" . . . the more you want to be done with sin . . . the more you want the Bridegroom to come again . . . the more you want the Church revived and purified with the beauty of Jesus . . . the more you want a great awakening to God's reality in the cities . . . the more you want to see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ penetrate the darkness of all the unreached peoples of the world . . . the more you want to see false worldviews yield to the force of Truth . . . the more you want to see pain relieved and tears wiped away and death destroyed . . . the more you long for every wrong to be made right and the justice and grace of God to fill the earth like the waters cover the sea.

If you don't feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great. God did not create you for this. There is an appetite for God. And it can be awakened. . . . (A Hunger for God, 23)

The Great Story and the Single Verse

In my neck of the Christian woods, words like narrative, meta-narrative, story, storyline, biblical theology, and big picture abound. I would like to sound a note that may encourage some who, like me, may wonder how this language works to build faith in the human heart.

First, I affirm the common-sense hermeneutical principle that in any message, or essay or poem or novel or scene from a movie or conversation or psalm or gospel or epistle or chapter or verse, it is the parts that give existence to the whole, and the whole that gives meaning to the parts. 

The word “boy,” does not have much meaning. “The boy in the corner,” has more meaning. “Feed the boy in the corner,” has even more. “Feed the boy in the corner with the word of God,” makes the meaning clearer. Without this “whole” (sentence) the meaning of the “part” (feed) would not be clear. And yet it is parts that create the whole. Both parts and whole are crucial for meaning to be transferred from one mind to another.

So I rejoice at every effort to see the big picture of the Bible. The whole story. The narrative from creation to consummation. The clearer the whole, the clearer the parts. And the more clearly we see the parts, the more accurately we will construe the whole.

But here’s the note I want to sound. Not only should the particulars of the Bible be seen in relation to the larger storyline of the Bible, but we should also realize that the story exists to reveal the particulars of God and his ways. And those particular glories of God are seen and enjoyed not mainly by gazing over the whole dazzling landscape of redemptive history, but by focusing on some particular thing God did or said inside the story.

For example, Isaiah 41:10 is a particular promise that has sustained me hundreds of times. (“Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”) I would argue that the whole of Isaiah exists so that I might have that kind of faith-sustaining personal encounter with its particular parts.

Yes, Isaiah is a magnificent whole, and, yes, it fits magnificently into redemptive history for the sake of Christ and his kingdom. But if its particulars do not stun us and gladden us and strengthen our faith and increase our hope and intensify our worship, the big picture will have been in vain. I think, in God’s design, the prophecy of Isaiah exists as a whole, and in its relation to the history of redemption so that its particular promises might be known and loved and trusted by me a Gentile, because of the mystery of Christ.

In profound ways, the whole Bible — the whole of redemptive history — exists to create a place and time and meaning where particular, individual, finite humans can encounter its stunning parts. The parts make up the whole, and so serve the whole. They would have no meaning and no beauty without the whole. But it is just as important to say that the whole exists to give place and time and meaning to the parts so that the parts can be known and experienced and enjoyed.

Most of us simply cannot hold the “whole” — the whole Bible, the whole book, or even the whole chapter — in our minds fully enough or steadily enough to feel our joy rising from its fullness. We read it. We gaze on the grand landscape. But it is this particular promise, this particular act of God, this particular warning, this particular turn of providence, that penetrates most deeply and awakens faith and joy and hope.

A beatitude, a line from Romans 12, a promise in Psalm 23, a warning in Hebrews 3, a miracle in Mark 1 — these are the places where our hearts are broken with contrition or leap with joy.

I recognize that people differ in which aspects of God’s glory move them. Some can hold in their minds a large, sweeping terrain of wonder. I don’t have that gift. Jesus manifests himself to me in the particulars. Granted, these particulars would have no wonder or glory if they were not part of something vastly greater. But it is this particular promise at this particular point in history, this particular time in this particular place that does its Christ-exalting work.

One implication of this for pastors would be that we love both. The big picture and the small brushstrokes. And as we open the whole counsel of God, and the whole story of redemption, let us glory in the brightness of the whole, and make the parts glow like a white-hot filament in a light bulb.