Shalom Aleichem...
Reflections is a weekly Christian Teaching Ministry. Each week we will talk about the Bible and lessons we can put to use in our daily life. We will try to, on a weekly basis, provide to you stories, thoughts, and just easy ways to live your life on a straight path.
THIS WEEK'S TEACHING....June 4, 2018
As we continue our walk through the upcoming Bible Study Class, Understanding the Gospel of Jesus Christ, I want to try to give you all come perspective of the Good News and exactly how it can and will effect your lives if you only have faith and believe in Him.
Christian apologist Josh McDowell once said: “The resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of the most wicked, vicious, heartless hoaxes ever foisted upon the minds of men and women, or it is the most fantastic fact of history.”
Since the advent of Jesus Christ men and women have been willing to die for the gospel’s truth. It started with the 12 men who knew Jesus best, the disciples who saw the resurrected Lord and risked and gave their lives for the truth of this fact. The gospel has changed millions of lives of people who have responded to its message. It claims to be the exclusive and only way to God and has given offense to those in a pluralistic mindset. Jesus himself said in John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. Peter echoed this in Acts 4:11-12, “This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, . . . And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among people by which we must be saved.”
What is the gospel? What must I do to be saved? Did God choose me or did I choose him? How does the gospel affect my current life? What does it mean for my future? Can I lose my salvation? These are some of the questions that this lesson is designed to answer.
The study of the Gospel will be broken down into four separate segments: 1) the definition of the gospel and the five basic points of the gospel message, 2) theological past aspects of the gospel, 3) theological present aspects of the gospel, and 4) theological future aspects of the gospel.
Why is this issue important? For those of you who have not heard or believed the message of the gospel your eternal future depends on it, heaven or hell, bliss or torment, with God or without him? Others of you might say I already know the gospel so why is this topic important for me? First, I would say we are forgetful people and need reminders and review (cf. 2 Pet 1:12). Second, I would ask those that know the gospel, do you know it well enough to be able to share it with others? If you fall into either of these groups than you must get involved in this Bible Study which will be starting in September. More to follow....I love you all.
DID YOU EVER WONDER???
Alright, here goes. I’m old. What that means is that I’ve survived (so far) and a lot of people I’ve known and loved did not. I’ve lost friends, best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, mom, relatives, teachers, mentors, students, neighbors, and a host of other folks. I have no children, and I can’t imagine the pain it must be to lose a child. But here’s my two cents.
I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don’t want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don’t want it to “not matter”. I don’t want it to be something that just passes. My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it.
Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gouged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are only ugly to people who can’t see.
As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph.
Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.
In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out.
But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything…and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.
Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself.
And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out.
Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.
BOOKS OF THE BIBLE...A TEACHING
LIGHT BEYOND THE DARKNESS: THE COMING KING (6–12)
Isaiah has now established the backdrop against which he worked as a prophet. The people to whom he was sent were the heirs of great promises but appear to have forfeited them. By the end of his prefatory chapters, darkness has closed in upon them. Grace has been exhausted; nothing but judgment lies ahead.
As we shall see, this is the position which Isaiah sketches in a very dramatic way in 6:1, but by the end of this section, darkness (6:1) has been replaced by singing (12:2, 5) and salvation (12:2–3), and the Lord in all his holiness (6:1–3) is dwelling in Zion in the midst of his people (12:6). Darkness and judgment, then, do not, after all, have the last word. Far from it, for the very promises that appeared to have been forfeited—the David-promises of 1:25–27 and the Zion-promises of 4:2–6—are the very things that come to pass (9:1–7; 11:1–9; 12:1–6). The exhausting of grace (5:4) has been superseded by the triumph of grace.
How then does Isaiah present this surprising hope, the dawning of the great light beyond the darkness, the coming King? The section falls into three parts. It opens with Isaiah’s account of his experience of the forgiveness of sins at the hands of the holy God (6:1–7), his call to be a prophet (6:8), and the strange commission the Lord gave him (6:9–13). This opening is matched by the song (12:1–6) in which individual (12:1–2) and community (12:3) enter into salvation through the turning away of divine anger (12:1), are commissioned to worldwide prophecy (12:4–5), and have the Holy God dwelling among them (12:6). This is a very full inclusio, with sin, salvation, commissioning and divine holiness bracketing the whole section.
Within these brackets, Isaiah first addresses the situation in Judah (7:1–9:7), when King Ahaz faces the crisis of fresh invasions from the north (see Introduction, pp. 22–23) and decisively rejects the word of God calling him to faith (9:7). In parallel with this, Isaiah turns to the northern kingdom of Israel (9:8) where the same tragedy has occurred: the word of God was sent but was rejected. Isaiah’s addresses to Judah and Israel follow parallel courses dealing with judgment on disobedience (7:18–8:8; 10:5–15), divine preservation of a believing remnant (8:9–22; 10:16–34) and the hope of a coming King (9:1–7). Between the brackets of chapters 6 and 12, the internal chapters 7–11 have their own inclusio: 7:1–17, the king who failed and destroyed the dynasty of David; 11:1–16 the true Davidic King who will rule over the whole perfected creation.
In this section we find a principle and a problem. The principle is the place Isaiah accords to hope in the life of the people of God. He always sees hope for divine action against all the odds of human merit and deserving (cf. 1:25–27; 4:2–6). The bright future is not brought about by a gradual improvement or by clever human planning: it is a work of God; it comes as the outworking of the logic of his faithfulness; it dawns because he is as true to himself in mercy as he is in judgment. We have seen in the brief outline above that Isaiah presents two topics in sequence: the preservation of a believing remnant of the people, and the bursting-in of the great hope. This is a deliberate juxtaposition because, on the one hand, the remnant is caught up, inevitably, in the darkness that comes upon the disobedient people—faith is never a certificate of immunity—but, on the other hand, in the darkness they have the cordial of hope, the durability to hold on because of the light which God’s promise holds before them (cf. 2 Cor. 3:12; Col. 1:5; 1 Thess. 1:3; 5:8; 2 Thess. 2:15–16). It is for this reason that Isaiah presents the great hope as if it were about to dawn immediately beyond the Assyrian darkness (e.g. 8:21–9:2; 10:28–11:3)—in order that they might be buoyed up in hope just as Christians are by the scriptural truth of the imminence of the return of the Lord Jesus.
The problem raised by chapters 6–12 is that the message which the people actually needed to hear is not brought to them. The whole upshot of the preface (chs. 1–5) is that through sin they are not what they ought to have been (ch. 1), nor what they were meant to be (chs. 2–4), nor what they might have been (ch. 5). It is precisely the answer to this problem that Isaiah discovers in the Lord’s dealings with him personally (6:1–8). Furthermore, the inclusio provided by 12:1–6 focuses on this very truth—people who have found comfort in place of divine anger and rejoice in a God of salvation. So why are chapters 7–11 lacking any message about atonement and forgiveness? The answer is that Isaiah met people where they were and brought them a message that they could see as relevant. They were not yet ready to face their sinfulness and hear a gospel of pardon, but in the circumstances of the time (see on 7:1ff.) they could not fail to see the inadequacies of existing royal leadership and their need for a different, perfect son of David. True prophet that he was, Isaiah plunged pragmatically into the situation that faced him and provided both an exact diagnosis of the present and a confident vision of the future. Yet, returning as he did in chapter 12 to the ‘salvation’ theme of chapter 6, he implies that somehow, within the promise of the royal Messiah, there lurks the Lord’s answer to the problem of sin and judgment. In this way Isaiah lays the foundation on which he will presently build the theology and prediction of atonement which we find in chapters 40–55, centred on the Servant (52:13) who is also David (55:3).
Motyer, J. A. (1999). Isaiah: an introduction and commentary (Vol. 20, pp. 76–78). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
HAVE A SAFE AND BLESSED WEEK:)
Ho'omaikaʻi ka Pua iā kākou