Short Studies in Biblical Theology

Most of us tend to approach the Bible early on in our Christian lives as a vast, cavernous, and largely impenetrable book. We read the text piecemeal, finding golden nuggets of inspiration here and there, but remain unable to plug any given text meaningfully into the overarching storyline.

Yet one of the great advances in evangelical biblical scholarship over the past few generations has been the recovery of biblical theology--that is, a renewed appreciation for the Bible as a theologically unified, historically rooted, progressively unfolding, and ultimately Christ-centered narrative of God’s covenantal work in our world to redeem sinful humanity.

This renaissance of biblical theology is a blessing, yet little of it has been made available to the general Christian population. For that reason I've teamed up with my friend Dr. Miles Van Pelt, who teaches Old Testament at RTS, to work with a series of world-class authors to begin to fill this gap. I am super excited about a series of books we are in the early stages of executing called Short Studies in Biblical Theology.

The purpose of Short Studies in Biblical Theology is to connect the resurgence of biblical theology at the academic level with everyday believers. Each volume is written by a capable scholar or churchman who is self-consciously writing in such a way that requires no prerequisite theological training of the reader. Instead, any thoughtful Christian disciple can track with and benefit from these books. It is exhilarating to begin to see how the whole Bible fits beautifully together. It certainly has been for me.

Each volume in this series takes a whole-Bible theme and traces it through Scripture. In this way readers not only learn about a given theme, but also are given a model for how to read the Bible as a coherent whole.

We are launching this series because we love the Bible, we love the church, and we long for the renewal of biblical theology among scholars to enliven the hearts and minds of Christ’s disciples all around the world. As editors, we have found few discoveries more thrilling in life than that of seeing the whole Bible as a unified story of God’s gracious acts of redemption, and indeed of seeing the whole Bible as ultimately about Jesus--as he himself testified (Luke 24:27; John 5:39).

The ultimate goal of Short Studies in Biblical Theology is to magnify the Savior and to build up his church: magnifying the Savior through showing how the whole Bible points to him and his gracious rescue of helpless sinners, and building up the church by strengthening believers in their grasp of these life-giving truths.

The first volume, by Graeme Goldsworthy, has just released. He traces the theme "Son of God" through the Bible. What a delight to launch the series with a man who is as much a father of the modern evangelical biblical theology resurgence as anyone alive today.

My dad is writing the second volume, on marriage. He just sent in the manuscript and it is going to be a stellar contribution. Other volumes under contract are Tom Schreiner on covenant and Jim Hamilton on work.

Here's what Richard Gaffin said to me as we interacted about SSBT and the need for it in the church today:

Well over a century ago, Geerhardus Vos, important for his pioneering work in biblical theology done out of a conviction of the divinely-authored, God-breathed unity of Scripture, pointed out that the new creation in Christ “is not something completed by a single act all at once,” but within the context of world history as it unfolds, “is a history with its own law of organic development.” He further observed, “It is simply owing to our habit of unduly separating revelation from this comprehensive background of the total redeeming work of God that we fail to appreciate its historic, progressive nature.”

The concern to Vos in his own day is still all too prevalent in the church today. A wide-spread tendency continues to treat the Bible, in practice at least, as if it has been dropped straight down from heaven into the hands of the individual believer, a tendency that in significant ways inhibits the life and hampers the mission of the church. This series of Short Studies in Biblical Theology holds important promise of helping to remedy this situation with its goal of providing pastors and their congregations with studies of key biblical themes that will foster a growing understanding and appreciation of the redemptive-historical flow and Christ-centered focus of Scripture as a whole. I look forward with anticipation to the appearance of these volumes.

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Real Glory

Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive his commendation from God.  --1 Corinthians 4:5

He will render to each one according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality . . .  --Romans 2:6-7

I think of Sarah Smith in The Great Divorce, the shining, luminous, utterly normal, glorified human being who lived a mundane life, in Christ, built on a million small acts of love and service in this life. And reaped what she sowed in the next.

What a day it will be. A day when true honor will be unveiled.

We hear that Eastern Asia is an 'honor/shame' culture. But more deeply the entire human race is an honor/shame race, some cultures making it more explicit than others. Tonight when the Rockets play the Warriors, we will see the quest for honor, for glory, here in the West, and the terrified fleeing from shame. It's one reason the rest of us watch the NBA playoffs, to get vicarious glory through our team's triumph.

And each of us senses varying degrees of shame and honor as we move through any given day. Maybe you don't notice it much because it's like a fish in water. Felt levels of honor and shame are what we are constantly immersed in. Our entire fallen existence is one of perpetually moving away from shame and moving toward glory.

What a day that will be. An unending day.

When real significance is unveiled. When a billion unheard of Christians who never made any real money and never wrote a book and never spoke into a microphone are introduced by the Lord Jesus to the universe. What will it be like?

That strange day when every name of every famous unregenerate man is suddenly difficult to remember, slipping through the fingers of our memory, suddenly lost to oblivion. Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Lebron James all have a chance at true glory. The window is still open. But if they persist on their current trajectories, they are actually becoming smaller and smaller, more and more deeply inconsequential with each passing day. This frothy, unsatisfying glory they've found, and which the rest of us are after, and which is so difficult to get, can be left behind for the real thing, which is free for anyone. All it requires is dying. Committing self-glory suicide. Liquidating the accounts of self-honor we're amassing and re-investing in Mark 10:43-45. Solid, substantial, permanent, invincible greatness. Not this ridiculous preening and parading, so transient, so ephemeral. Here for a moment, then gone forever.

What a day. When God brings to full blossom the seeds of resplendence planted and cultivated in this life in quietly faithful men and women who laid down their arms against God and gave up. Our jaws will drop.

What if God's assessment of things, which we always knew to be true, in our heart of hearts, will rinse this world clean once and for all? What if the glorious men and women of this world, the end of which is right around the corner, are not the glorious men and women of the next world, the end of which will never come?

I find myself reminded, even rebuked.

What Is the End Result of a Christian's Sins?

Goodwin:

God often blesses us when we are not aware of it. God lets you fall into a sin perhaps, and that drives you to the throne of grace, with outcries for help, as the apostle's word is in Heb 4:16, as a man undone utterly and forever, if God pity you not.

This prayer, though in itself a less good than thy sin was evil, yet to you is turned a far greater blessing than your sin has evil in it (as to you).

Such is his goodness. Your sin shall be pardoned, and though it be a loss in itself, yet to you, having so great a consequent and effect of it, you come off a gainer. God has blessed you with a further increase in the heavenlies, and it shall never be taken from you.

--Thomas Goodwin, preaching on Ephesians 1:3, in Works, 1:63

Dazzling the Eyes of Angels

In his little book Saved by Grace on Ephesians 2:5 John Bunyan considers God's 'carriage' toward sinful men and women. How does he come to us? In what heart? What is the look on his face, the tone of his voice? 

God comes to the sinner while he is in his sins; he comes to him now, not in the heat and fire of his jealousy, but in the cool of the day, in unspeakable gentleness, mercy, pity, and bowels of love: not clothing himself with vengeance, but in a way of entreaty, and meekly beseeches the sinner to be reconciled to him.

It is expected among men that he who gives the offense should be the first in seeking peace; but, sinner, betwixt God and man it is not so. God is the first that seeks peace.

O sinner, will you not open? Behold, God the Father and his Son Jesus Christ stand both at the door of your heart, beseeching you to be reconciled to him, with promise to forgive all your sins if you will but comply.

O grace! O amazing grace! To see a prince entreat a beggar to receive alms would be a strange sight; to see a king entreat the traitor to accept of mercy would be a stranger sight than that; but to see God entreat a sinner, to hear Christ say, 'I stand at the door and knock,' with a heart full and a heaven full of grace to bestow upon him that opens, this is such a sight as dazzles the eyes of angels. 

--John Bunyan, Saved by Grace, in The Works of John Bunyan (Banner of Truth), 1:350

The Cross and Relational Annoyances

'. . . and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.' --Ephesians 2:16

Goodwin, preaching on this text:

We are to look upon Jesus Christ hanging upon the cross as an equal arbiter between both parties, that takes upon himself whatever either party has against the other.

Lo, here I hang, says Christ dying, and let the reproaches wherewith you reproach each other fall on me, the sting of them all fix in my flesh, and in my death die all together with me; lo, I die to pacify you both. Have then any of you something against each other? Quit it, and take me as a sacrifice in blood between you: only do not kill me and each other too, for the same offense; for you, and your enmities, have brought me to this altar of the cross, and I offer myself as your peace, and as your priest.

Will you kill me first, and then one another too?

--Thomas Goodwin, Works, 2:381

Most Like a Crucifixion

Reading The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis for the first time and came upon this passage today. How I need to hear this, again and again.

We must go back to our Bibles. The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church. He is to love her as Christ loved the church–read on–and gave his life for her (Eph 5:25).

This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife receives most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is–in her own mere nature–least lovable. For the Church has no beauty but what the Bridegroom gives her; he does not find, but makes her lovely. 

The chrism of this terrible coronation is to be seen not in the joys of any man’s marriage but in its sorrows, in the sickness and sufferings of a good wife or the faults of a bad one, in his unwearying (never paraded) care or his inexhaustible forgiveness: forgiveness, not acquiescence.

As Christ sees in the flawed, proud, fanatical, or lukewarm Church on earth that Bride who will one day be without spot or wrinkle, and labors to produce the latter, so the husband whose headship is Christ-like (and he is allowed no other sort) never despairs.

--C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, pp. 105-6

Acts 1:8

Discerning a Pastoral Call

Dennis Johnson:

Ministry under the Reign of Grace