One In Jesus

Some things are in the Bible to teach us and as examples we are to follow. Other things are just what happened–not as examples.

Jesus changed water into wine at a wedding. Does this mean we are to serve wine at our weddings?

Five times the New Testament writers command their readers to greet one another with the Holy Kiss? Do we have to?

Women are commanded to be silent in the assembly? Does that apply today? Continue reading →

The “Patristics” are letters and such written by uninspired Christians in the centuries shortly after the founding of the church. Sometimes the authors are called the “Church Fathers.”

We are blessed by having a considerable volume of these writings. We learn from them a lot about how the early church thought and acted. Some of these writings date back to the late First Century!

However, if you take the time to read these materials, they are clearly inferior to the books of the Bible. There’s a noticeable drop off in quality from the canonical books to the Patristics. Continue reading →

I’m not real happy with this title, but I couldn’t think of a better way to say it without a paragraph-long caption.

“Positive law” is a law that’s a law just because someone in power (God in this context) says so. It’s often contrasted with “natural law” or “moral law,” which are laws that are inherently right and wrong.

The law that we must drive on the right is a positive law. The answer could just as easily have been the left–as in England. Either choice is as moral as the other. Just so, the rule that tax returns are due April 15 is just an arbitrary date. April 1 would have been just as moral (and maybe appropriately ironic!) Continue reading →

Let me suggest that we take more seriously a couple of passages that we don’t talk about very much–

(1 Cor. 2:14-16)  The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. 15 The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man’s judgment: 16 “For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

(Rom. 12:2)  Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is–his good, pleasing and perfect will. Continue reading →

A certain expert in the Law of Moses asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” He was asking Jesus for an interpretation of the Law of Moses, which commanded the Israelites to love their neighbors.

In response, Jesus told the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Ultimately he concludes,

(Luke 10:36-37)  “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

37 The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

Do as the Samaritan did, Jesus says. That is, serve people who are not Jews–anyone who needs help, even though they are of a different religion or ethnicity. Continue reading →

I was not expecting to find this as an important principle, but as I read Paul’s arguments in particular, I am struck at how many times he refers to baptism or the Lord’s Supper as instructive for our behavior in other contexts. Paul argues from these while we argue about these. Surely this fact alone tells us how far removed we are from the apostolic mindset.

An obvious example of Paul’s use of baptism and the Lord’s Supper as instructive in other contexts relates to the division among the Christians in Corinth– Continue reading →

The application should be obvious by now. Love and faith are the “interstitial doctrines,” that is, they fill in all the gaps. There are no gaps. No silences. No missing authority. It’s all there in two words.

Maybe a reminder of some fundamentals will help us hang some flesh on this part. What is it that a congregation of the Lord Jesus is supposed to do? Believe and love. And so, how do they do this? Well, first they love each other (John 13:35), but they must also love those outside the congregation.

The gospel tells us that God loves us all and made us his adopted children, and so we must love one another as brothers and sisters in the same family. And just as is true in our earthly families, we may not much like each other, but we still love each other and we stand up for each other. Continue reading →

In Galatians 5, at the apex of his argument, after four chapters of elaborate explication, Paul declares a profound principle—one that the reader is to understand as being just as true as can be: “The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.”

This faith-love principle is stated this way to make clear that circumcision is nothing and hence cannot be a condition of salvation. Why is it nothing? Because it has nothing to do with faith or love. Plain and simple.

Now we have to study Paul (and the rest of Scripture) to put some meat on the bones of these few words, but we can’t explain them away or treat them as a mere rhetorical flourish. They are true—so true that those who ignored them were declared alienated from Christ! Continue reading →

One school of hermeneutics is called “flat” hermeneutics. In flat hermeneutics, it’s concluded that because all the Bible is from God, all the Bible is equally important. It’s just as important to understand how to worship or organize a church or manage the church treasury as to understand the gospel.

But Paul makes it quite clear that this is just not so–

(1 Cor. 15:3-5) For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. Continue reading →