Growing In Grace

I have come to believe that, sadly, most churches today have been assuming the gospel. Even the best Bible believing and teaching churches have allowed the gospel to play second fiddle to various other things. Many of these things are good things, for example my own church background proclaims that we are to keep, "The main thing, the main thing" referring to teaching straight through the Bible. However, in many cases teaching "line upon line" has caused us to treat Bible teaching as something that can (and/or should) be leveraged over and above the gospel. This is so grieving because it means that we have reduced the gospel to something that get's us in, but doesn't keep us and grow us. I have come to agree with Tim Keller when he says, "The gospel is not the ABC's of Christianity, it is the A-Z's." In this post I want to propose a way of viewing Scripture as a twofold breakdown of Law and Gospel. Martin Luther, Theodore Beza and many o...

In the Old Testament we get an unfolding vision of God and His attributes through the stories of the people that He called. First we see that He is the creator that made man in His image, giving man the commission as the 'king priest' of the garden, ruling and subduing creation while expanding the borders of the Garden. Adam failed to crush the serpent and so he was removed from the Garden temple sanctuary. God repeated Adam's commission to his children, choosing Abram to be the father of a new nation (a corporate Adam) that would once again be commissioned to be a nation of priests.  Eventually God gave them the Holy Land (a new Garden for corporate Adam) and called them to grow it's boarders. Just as the Garden had been the place where man "walked with God" experiencing God's presence, the land of Israel was home to the tabernacle which was where the presence of God rested. The purpose of these stories in their fullness is to teach us that God is incre...