You Must Be Born Again

 “Don’t marvel that I said to you that it’s necessary for you all to be born from above.” - John 3:7

1. The Greek word translated “above” here is also often translated as “again” in verse 3. Both are implied in the word and in the passage. People who were born once already had to be “born a second time”, with a heavenly birth, a birth that comes down from God - in fact, a birth that had come down from God in Jesus Himself. They weren’t discussing merely abstract spiritual ideas. There is implied in their conversation a historical-redemptive reality to that moment in time. It was grounded in real time and matter and space. Salvation had come down from heaven, from God, in Jesus.
2. “You all” - Jesus moves the conversation from talking about the rebirth of an individual (vs. 3), to talking to Nicodemus as a representative of Israel about their collective rebirth (vs. 7), to talking about the rebirth of the whole world, including both Jew and Gentile (vs. 14-18). The salvation Jesus was bringing was cosmic in scope, as testified by the Old Covenant prophets. He was bringing salvation to all mankind, a fact that Israel in general did not care to hear.
3. “It is necessary for you all to be born from above.” Jesus’ statement is a statement of fact, not a command. It is not something a man has to do himself, or even can do to himself. No man birthed himself the first time, and he cannot birth himself a second time. It must be of the Spirit of God.

Nationalist Nonsense and the Gospel

 Responding to the ongoing silliness from the anti-Semitic Nationalist crowd on another platform.

*****

As someone a bit older than most of the folks involved in this seemingly unending debate, this re-emergence of anti-Semitism (however it may disguise itself) is bizarre. Romans answers this all quite clearly - all are equally under sin. Israel’s punishment in 70 AD may have taken a unique form due to the covenant, but it was their following after the Gentiles in their wickedness, rather than worshipping and obeying Yahweh, that was the problem from the moment they left Egypt on until Yahweh divorced them. They followed the Gentiles. Their sin may have been worse in the Old Covenant due to their relationship to God. But we have greater light and blessing now, per Hebrews, making any Gentile sin today even worse. Treating Jews today as the same as those pre-70 AD is anachronistic.

Eros and Popular Christian Culture, part two

 Continuing yesterday’s line of thought, from a conversation elsewhere online.

Women can teach Scripture correctly and truthfully to a degree, and generally have right doctrine. They are allowed to teach women and children in a limited way, under the care and guidance of their husbands and their church leadership. But they aren’t allowed a formal position of teaching or preaching pastor as defined by the New Testament in the Church, and they aren’t allowed to teach men. Paul specifically says so in 1 Timothy 2:11-14, and this is reiterated in ch. 3. And history has proven how women tend to allow their own dispositions to misguide their understandings of Scripture. That’s exactly at the core of this conversation, and reinforced by Genesis 3, as Paul points out in 1 Timothy 2. You don’t see Priscilla acting independent of her husband, but with him. Adam and Eve specifically went wrong because Adam did not stop and correct Eve on her erroneous doctrine. That’s at the heart of what Paul said. One can’t get around the Scriptural point that women regularly tend to go off the rails doctrinally. It will offend some women, but it is what it is.

Eros and Popular Christian Culture

 Romantic language is used in Scripture to picture the collective relationship the Church has with Christ, not the relationship any individual believer has with Christ. The Church is Christ’s Bride. No individual believer is Christ’s Bride. But even then the Greek word “Eros” never appears in the passages that talk about the Church as Christ’s Bride. It doesn’t appear anywhere in the Greek New Testament. Eros is a component of the marital relationship. But try making any marriage subsist entirely on that, and that marriage will fail. And it will not honor God, because it isn’t operating the way God designed and intends marriage to operate. 

But affection toward God is not unimportant in the individual’s relationship with God. It is cultivated through prayer and worship and service. We are to be entirely consecrated to Christ in every part of our being. But when feelings fail, as they do in any relationship, agape love perseveres and knows feelings will be perfected eventually, as we move on into the eternal state where we will be resurrected physically and fully sanctified.

As Doug Wilson once said, men can’t feel what it’s like to be a bride normally. They aren’t designed to. But if they can, then that’s a whole different set of problems.

Leon Podles’ book “The Church Impotent” is a good survey of the growth of the effeminacy of the Church over time. These days you have female teachers and “worship leaders” and song writers, with effeminate men alongside of them, in the midst of a still effeminate culture. The consequence is a sappy, Romantic, sub-Biblical notion of salvation and all it entails. When you have women dictating the Church’s teaching, which they shouldn’t be, romantic overtones that warp one’s understanding of the Gospel are the result.

Lent

The Puritan abolishing of the traditional Church calendar left a vacuum that the secular Statist, and now pagan globalist, calendar has been more than happy to fill.

But hey, maybe we can just return to the Puritan communion season traditions that the Regulative Principle birthed.

Every branch of the Church in its sincere attempt to honor Christ produces traditions that find no explicit warrant in Holy Scripture. We live an embodied existence, no matter how we war against it. 

For me, Lent is as precious as Advent and Christmas. But appreciating it takes putting worship of and love toward God first, and letting everything else flow from that. The man who makes theology and politics and culture-warring first will not understand, without reorienting himself.

Bible Reading Plans

 Some contrarian counsel: if you have anxiety, or a tendency toward perfectionism or scrupulosity, pressuring yourself to follow a “Bible in a year” reading plan is probably not wise. Read what you can, reflect on it, and spend time in prayer. You aren’t going to improve your justification before God by your performance of good works. This is especially relevant for those who grew up in theologically hazy, fear-of-man oriented, and performance-based Fundamentalism.

The Point of Salvation

 The point I’ve been trying to make in some of the recent things I’ve posted is that questions on race aren’t somehow subsidiary to the matter of salvation. Rather, for Scripture, the tearing down of divisions and the unification of all peoples (and of all creation) in Christ is central to the Gospel. For Scripture, it is the point. Sin separates, and God in Christ undid that separation, in a project that will carry on until the resurrection of the dead. This is why Paul handles Romans 1-3 the way he does. Paul in Galatians is not merely concerned with either salvation or “table fellowship” (contra Wright), but both, because the two cannot be separated. This is not universalism. Some will be saved, and some will not. But the Kingdom of God will be made up of those from every tongue, tribe, and nation. God is saving the world - that is the Gospel.

“Natural Affections”

 Matt. 10:34-37. “Natural affections” are good, but they were intended by God for this life. He regularly upends natural affections throughout Scripture and in this life, and His doing so is a foretaste of the Kingdom. It is a breaking into this age of the age that is to come. All things and people are God’s, and we are meant to hold on to them loosely. Rejoice in your natural relations as His gifts, but understand that many of them will be temporary and will not carry on into eternity. 

The End Goal

 Eschatology and Soteriology are not separate in Scripture, in contrast with our Modernistic tendency to try to divide things into neat, distinct categories. Rather, eschatology is the consummation of God’s plan to save the world. 

If the Church up until now had more consistently taken seriously Paul’s references to “the Jew first, and also to the Greek”, then it wouldn’t have struggled over why it appeared he took a drastic turn in subject matter in Romans 9-11. We would have understood Romans rather as having a singular, flowing argument about God’s plan for the world.

Our ignorance of the Old Testament hasn’t helped matters any.