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.
Thursday, December 12, 2024
“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.