The Gospel Coalition

Some evangelical Christians believe that the best way to win the world is to be like the world. Looking like the world might help us gain a hearing for the gospel.

In Unfashionable: Making a Difference in the World by Being Different (Multnomah: 2009), Tullian Tchividjian demolishes the fallacy of such thinking. Instead, Tullian skillfully shows how we as Christians make the biggest difference in the world when we are most different from the world.

The power behind our proclamation of the gospel comes not from our being in step with the world, but from our being out of step with the surrounding culture. Once you sacrifice the counter-cultural nature of the gospel in order to be “cool” in the present, you abandon the greatest opportunity you have to make a difference that will last forever.

Unfashionable is a book of depth and breadth. Tullian doesn’t leave us with superficial spiritual sayings. The book demonstrates a passion for theology. Tullian goes deep into the truth of God’s Word in order to emerge with a robust, strengthened Christianity for the world we live in.

But the book also contains a variety of topics. In less than 200 pages, Tullian writes about:

• the atonement
• the purpose of Jesus’ resurrection
• God’s intention to renew the cosmos
• the loss of Truth with a capital “T”
• our culture’s hunger for trascendence
• the importance of the church’s “togetherness
• sex and lust
• greed and theft
• anger and truth-telling

This is a short, accessible book that ably covers a number of subjects. The thread that holds all of these topics together is the drum that Tullian beats page after page:

“Christians make a difference in this world by being different from this world; they don’t make a difference by being the same.”

“The more we Christians pursue worldly relevance, the more we’ll render ourselves irrelevant to the world around us.”

Tullian believes that a biblical understanding of Christology and eschatology will lead to a view of mission that will transform the church and the world. We are called to be God’s ambassadors in this world, to join him in his mission to redeem and restore the world.

“Since God is on a mission to transform this present world into the world to come, and since he’s using his transformed people to do it, our commitment to living unfashionably has cosmic implications.”

Unfashionable resonates with me. Like Tullian, I want it all. I don’t want to choose between the cultural mandate and evangelism. I don’t want to choose between Christ’s kingdom and Christ’s cross. I don’t want to choose between individual salvation and the connectedness of Christian community. I want it all.

Unfashionable is God-centered and gospel-soaked. And yet it is immensely practical. This book displays Tullian’s passion for Scripture and his heart for personal application. You will be convicted, challenged, and encouraged as you read. 

written by Trevin Wax  © 2009 Kingdom People blog

“Whoever believes in Me,
though he die, yet shall he live,
and everyone who lives and believes in Me shall never die.”
- Jesus, to Martha (John 11:25-26)

Disillusionment and despair filled Martha’s heart as she hurried out of the house to confront Jesus on the road. Why hadn’t He come sooner? He could’ve healed Lazarus and saved them from anguish and grief. In their conversation that day, Martha affirmed her belief that her brother would be raised from the dead on the Last Day, according to the Scriptures.

Jesus then declared that He was “the Resurrection and the Life.” The keys to life and death were in His hands. The message Jesus had for Martha was this: “the resurrection life you believe will flood the earth on the Last Day is present in Me now.”

 When people put their trust in Jesus, His resurrection power is released in their lives. We may die physically, but we cannot die spiritually. And what’s more, even physical death will be overturned by God on the Last Day.

The Resurrection of Jesus teaches us a vital truth: matter matters. The body is important. The Greek thinkers who believed matter to be evil and the spirit to be good were promoting a mindset foreign to the Jewish and Christian worldview. It is precisely because the body is valuable and God’s creation good that God has chosen to reclaim and redeem it, to stomp out the sin and destruction unleashed upon His beautiful world in the Garden of Eden.

We may taste death before Jesus returns, but one thing is certain: our coffins will not stay closed. Just as on Easter morning the grave could not hold Jesus, at the trumpet call of the Last Day, neither will the grave be able to hold the remains of those who are “in Christ.”

What was true of our Messiah in the dim light of Resurrection morning will be true of us in the noonday sunshine of the Last Day.

Our Lord is risen and exalted.

Though we die, yet shall we live. We too await the day of our bodily resurrection, when we will receive the transformed and eternal bodies that God has prepared for us.

written by Trevin Wax  © 2009 Kingdom People blog

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

[Written for a religious arts festival sponsored by the Clifton Lutheran Church, of Marblehead, Mass.]

“Everywhere one goes he finds the gaping graves swallowing up the dying. Tears of loss, of separation, of fjnal departure stain every face. Every table sooner or later has an empty chair, every fireside its vacant place.

“Death is the great leveller. Wealth or poverty, fame or oblivion, power or futility, success or failure, race, creed or culture — all our human distinctions mean nothing before the ultimate irresistible sweep of the scythe of death which cuts us all down.

“And whether the mausoleum is a fabulous Taj Mahal, a massive pyramid, an unmarked spot of ragged grass or the unplotted depths of the sea one fact stands: death reigns.

“Apart from the gospel of the kingdom, death is the mighty conqueror before whom we are all helpless. We can only beat our fists in utter futility against this unyielding and unresponding tomb.

“But the good news is this: death has been defeated; our conqueror has been conquered. In the face of the power of the kingdom of God in Christ, death was helpless. It could not hold him, death has been defeated; life and immortality have been brought to life.

“An empty tomb in Jerusalem is proof of it. This is the gospel of the kingdom.”

- George Eldon Ladd, The Gospel of the Kingdom

Baptist21 will be hosting an event at this year’s Southern Baptist Convention. Take a look at their first promo video. This one features Ed Stetzer.

Russell Moore’s article for Christianity Today on the importance of the resurrection body is a must-read. And by the way, Moore has a new website, one that allows video comments!

Mark Driscoll encourages preachers to be clear, not clever on Easter Sunday. He gives a short summary of N.T. Wright’s landmark work on the resurrection as well.

Yesterday, I posted a book review of Christian George’s Godology. Ed Stetzer has a good interview with Christian here.

John Piper reflects on his writing leave and how writing books is much like birthing a baby.

Tim Keller has a new book.

Ben Witherington III reviews the newest book by Bart Ehrman.

James MacDonald asks if your church is vertical.

Sam Rainer responds to the Newsweek cover story on the decline and fall of Christian America.

Tim Challies offers two excellent posts this week: one on different prayer postures and the other on the dangers of “the watchblogs.”

Top Post this Week at Kingdom People: Let My People Go! A Meditation for Holy Week

Moved by His incomprehensible love for mankind, the Triune God was pleased not to abandon our rebellious and corrupt race to the misery and hell that it justly deserved, but to undertake to save a great multitude of human beings who had absolutely no claim on His mercy.

In order to bring this plan into execution, the second Person of the Godhead, the Son, took unto himself a full human nature, becoming in all things like his brethren and sisters, sin excepted. Thus he became the Second Adam, the head of a new covenant, and he lived a life of perfect obedience to the Divine Law.

Identifying with his own, he bore the penalty of human sin on the cross of Calvary, suffering in the place of the sinner, the just for the unjust, the holy Son of God for the guilty and corrupt children of man.

By his death and resurrection he has provided the basis

• for the reconciliation of God to humans and of humans to God;
• for the propitiation of a righteous Trinity, justly angry at our sins;
• for the redemption of a multitude of captives of sin whose liberty was secured at the great price of His own blood.

He offered himself as an expiatory sacrifice sufficient to blot out the sins of the whole world and secured the utmost triumph over the enemies of our soul: sin, death, and Satan.

Those who repent of their sins and believe in Jesus Christ are thus to be absolved from the guilt of all their sins and are adorned with the perfect righteousness of Christ himself. In gratitude to him they are to live lives of obedience and service to their Savior and are increasingly renewed into the image of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

This good news of salvation by grace through faith is to be proclaimed indiscriminately to mankind, that is to every man, woman, and child whom we can possibly reach.

- Roger Nicole

Few authors can take theology and make it fun to read. Christian George is one of the few. His new book is Godology: Because Knowing God Changes Everything (Moody, 2009) and includes a foreword by J. I. Packer.

Godology is all about God. Each chapter creatively describes an attribute of God. Christian is rare in that he is able to take his subject matter very seriously while not taking himself too seriously. No easy task. And in the meantime, he leaves us with sparkling writing about a subject of utmost importance.

Godology is funny:

“It is easy to ignore the role of the Holy Spirit and treat him like the ‘red-headed step child’ of the Trinity.”

It is memorable:

“God doesn’t want to be our footnote; He seeks to be our title.”

And best of all, Godology is thoroughly biblical:

“Because Jesus was man, God identifies with us…because Jesus was divine, we identify with God.”

Godology focuses on the attributes of God and then shifts to our response to God’s revelation. The spotlight is on God, but Christian does not leave out our reponse. This book is as much about spiritual disciplines and practices as it is about God and theology.

Christian demonstrate an openness to disciplines from different traditions, a willingness to learn from the church throughout different ages and in other manifestations. (One chapter includes a section on the medieval labyrinth!) But Christian does not engage in such disciplines in order to find favor with God. Instead, the ancient practices are clearly described as ways of responding to the majesty of the God we see in Scripture. His emphasis on prayer, memorization, meditation and Scripture reading showcase the passion all Christians should have for knowing God and for making God known.

What makes this book stand out is not its content, but the accessible way in which it is written. Teenagers, college students, and young adults with little theological knowledge will be able to pick up this book and receive an informative book that is easily understandable (and even entertaining!). If you are looking for a book to pass on to others, Godology is one you will want to pick up.

written by Trevin Wax  © 2009 Kingdom People blog

Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all. (Isaiah 53:4-6) 

Last November, Mumbai, the largest city in India, was the target of a series of coordinated terrorist attacks that killed 173 people. Two of the victims were from Brooklyn, New York – a Jewish Rabbi and his wife, both in their late 20′s. Kashmiri militants entered the rabbi’s home and slaughtered the parents. The nanny found their 2-year-old son, Moshe, sitting in a pool of his parents’ blood.

When the memorial service took place in Brooklyn, New York, the two-year-old boy cried out for his slain parents. “Ima! Abba!” he said, using the Hebrew words for mother and father. Little Moshe’s weeping wail echoed through the synagogue, drowning out the voices of the hundreds of people mourning his parents’ death.

Do you ever ask Why? Why does God allow this kind of pain? Why is it that the world is such a messed-up, broken place? And yet why is it that we can see so much beauty in this world together with so much ugliness?

I have often wondered what it must have been like for those suffering in the Holocaust to have witnessed a beautiful sunset from behind the barbed wire of the concentration camps. How do you look at a gorgeous sunset, and at the same time see smoke from the smokestacks rising to the sky, smoke coming from the piles of burning bodies of men, women and children?

Why do the innocent suffer? Asking this question leads us to Jesus. Why did Jesus, the Innocent One, suffer the way he did? Isaiah gives us answer as he focuses on the suffering Servant. It is an ancient prophecy about Jesus Christ.

And Isaiah says of his people: “We like sheep have gone astray, and yet God has laid on him the iniquity of us all!” In other words, we are to blame. Our evil is responsible for the brokenness of the world.

Our powerful God created us to reflect his image, to rule wisely over creation. And we rebelled. Our good God called out a people, the children of Israel, to be the light of the world, the people through whom his blessings would flow. And they rebelled.

But where we as humans rebelled against God, and where Israel revolted against the Lord, Jesus submitted to the Father’s plan. He laid down his life in obedience. Where we as humans failed in our task to reflect God rightly and where Israel failed in her task to shine God’s love to the rest of the world, Jesus remained faithful. He accomplished God’s will in its fullness.

So there he is, upon the cross. Crushed for our iniquities. Bearing our sorrows. Taking upon himself our sin, our shame, our evil, our pain. The perfect Son of God puts himself in our place, taking the evil we have perpetrated against God, and suffering its horrible consequences.

You see, the cry of little Moshe was once the cry of Jesus. “Abba! Abba!” he cried in the Garden of Gethsemane. “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me. Yet not my will, but yours be done.”

It is because of the cross that we know God is not absent from our suffering and pain. It is because of the cross that we can experience forgiveness and reconciliation and peace with God.

And so, as we see the evil of this world, and admit and confess the evil present in our own hearts, we too cry out: Abba! Abba!

Jesus is God’s answer to our cry.

written by Trevin Wax  © 2009 Kingdom People blog

Related Posts:
Let My People Go! A Meditation for Holy Week
It is Finished!

In recent years, the phrase “Already/Not Yet” as a description of our understanding of the kingdom of God in its present and future state has become very familiar. I took it for granted that this understanding had long been the dominant one in evangelicalism.

It was not until recently that I discovered the gridlock that existed between Dispensationalist and Covenant theologians in the 1950′s and 1960′s. Scholars and pastors within the evangelical world had a difficult time coming to an agreement on what the kingdom is, much less the timing of its arrival. 

The Gospel of the Kingdom: Scriptural Studies in the Kingdom of God by George Eldon Ladd (Wm. B. Eerdmans) was first released back in 1959 and is still in print today. In this short book, Ladd leads us through the relevant Bible passages about the kingdom in order to bring scholars and teachers to a consensus.

The Gospel of the Kingdom is a ground-breaking work. Ladd is able to take truths from both the Dispensationalist side and the Covenant side and fit them together in a way that makes the best sense of the biblical picture.

First, Ladd explains what the kingdom of God is. It is a rule, not a realm. The kingdom can be defined as the “reign of God.”

After defining the kingdom as “God’s reign,” Ladd then explains the timing of the kingdom of God. Specifically, he shows how the kingdom of God can be both present and future. The kingdom has been inaugurated, but not yet consummated.

Also helpful is Ladd’s description of the role of the church: 

“Love is that gift of the spirit, above all others, which will characterize our perfected fellowship in the age to come. This love we now enjoy, and the church on earth will be a colony of heaven, enjoying in advance the life of the age to come.” (74)

The Gospel of the Kingdom is illuminating, clarifying and (thankfully) brief. It is amazing that Ladd manages to fit all of this great theological teaching into 140 pages.

There is a reason this book is still in print. It is unmatched in its clarification of what the kingdom of God is, and how the kingdom of God can be already present but not yet here in its fullness.

written by Trevin Wax  © 2009 Kingdom People blog

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.  (Titus 3:11-14)

Paul’s letter to Titus speaks of Jesus Christ giving himself for us in order to redeem us. When we think of redeeming things, we think of coupons. Or we may think of the slave trade in the United States two hundred years ago, and the possibility of buying freedom for a slave.

But the people in New Testament times would not have associated redemption with these things. When a first-century Jew heard about redemption, they thought back to the Exodus – that great moment in Jewish history when God delivered the Israelites from bondage in Egypt.

God appeared to Moses and promised deliverance, saying, “I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from slavery to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment.”

Moses went before Pharaoh, King of Egypt, with a message from the Lord, King of the world. God says, “Let my people go!” Pharaoh refused. So God poured out his wrath upon Egypt, destroyed the Egyptian army, and thereby rescued his people from foreign captivity.

Today, we do not find ourselves enslaved to a foreign nation. But the Scriptures teach that we are in bondage. Human beings are enslaved to sinful desires and lusts. We are in captivity to the Evil One, who is a greater Enemy than Pharaoh ever was. We are enslaved to the curse of death, as we watch our loved ones snatched away and realize that our own death awaits us.

But just like God destroyed the power of Pharaoh in order to rescue his people and take them to the Promised Land, God has now acted through the person and work of Jesus Christ to redeem us as well. The grace of God has appeared that we might be freed from our sinfulness. Jesus Christ has come to give himself for us, that we might be redeemed, bought back, no longer in captivity to the Enemy.

As Jesus was dying upon the cross two thousand years ago, the voice of God the Father resounded throughout the universe, sending the clear and unstoppable message to Satan and all the forces of hell – LET MY PEOPLE GO!

God delivers us from our sinfulness. He delivers us from our self-centeredness. He delivers us from slavery to the Evil One. He delivers us from condemnation, nailing the accusations of the Evil One to the cross where Jesus died. He even delivers us from death itself.

The passage we read before says that God is purifying for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works. We have left behind our old way of life and are now on our way to God’s Promised Land.

We are delivered from evil for good works.

We are delivered from death for a new life.

We are delivered from sin for righteousness.

Our master is no longer Satan, but Jesus Christ, the King of kings. We now have hope. We now have peace.

And we await the return of Jesus Christ, when on the Last Day, the Day of Resurrection, even the curse of death will be overturned forever.

When the unveiling of Jesus Christ the King takes place, all who are in the graves will hear the voice of the Crucified and Risen Lord, and Death will be dealt its final blow, as Jesus shouts to the graveyards, “LET MY PEOPLE GO!” And those who hear the voice of the Son of God will live.

written by Trevin Wax  © 2009 Kingdom People blog