The popular saying quotation "Preach the gospel; use words if necessary" is helpful but also misleading.
If the gospel were primarily about what we must do to be saved, it could be communicated as well by actions (to be imitated) as by words.
But if the Gospel is primarily about what God has done to save us, and how we can receive it through faith, it can only be expressed through words. Faith cannot come without hearing.
These [genealogies and censuses] are directly irrelevant to your life. Your name is not on the list. The reasons for the list disappeared long ago. You gain nothing by knowing that “Koz fathered Anub, Zobebah, and the clans of Aharhel” (1 Chron. 4:8). But when you learn to listen rightly, such lists intend many good things—and each list has a somewhat different purpose. Among the things taught are these:-David Powlison, Understanding Scripture: An Overview of the Bible's Origin, Reliability, and Meaning
You “apply” a list of ancient names and numbers by extension, not directly. Your love for God grows surer and more intelligent when you ponder the kind of thing this is, rather than getting lost in the blizzard of names or numbers.
- The Lord writes down names in his book of life.
- Families and communities matter to him.
- God is faithful to his promises through long history.
- He enlists his people as troops in the redemptive reconquest of a world gone bad.
- All the promises of God find their “Yes” in Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 1:20).
Let us then see the Father as full of love to us. Do not see the Father as one who is angry, but as one who is most kind and gentle. Let us see the Father as one who from eternity has always had kind thoughts towards us. It is a complete misunderstanding of the Father that makes us want to run away and hide from him. The Psalmist said, 'They that know you will put their trust in you.' How sad that we cannot stay long with God in spiritual meditations! The Father loses the company of his people because they are so ignorant of his love to them. His saints keep thinking only of his terrible majesty, severity and greatness, and so their hearts are not drawn to him in love. We must learn to think of his everlasting gentleness and compassion. We must remember his kind thoughts towards us which have been from eternity. Let us remember how eager and willing he is to accept us. If we did this, then we would not be able to bear one hour's absence from him. Instead, we find it difficult to spend even one hour with him. Let then this be the first thought that we have of the Father, that he is full of eternal love to us. Let our hearts and thoughts be filled with his love to us, even though many discouragements may lie in our way.This is what our Father is like toward us in Christ. To see the Scriptural backing for what Owen says here read Ephesians 1:3-14, keeping in mind that this whole section is praising what (specifically) the Father has done.
Friendship arises . . . when two or more . . . discover that they have in common some insight or interest. . . . [A]s Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth?—or at least, Do you care about the same truth? The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend. . . . That is why those pathetic people who simply “want friends” can never make any. The very condition of having friends is that we should want something else besides friends. Where the truthful answer to the question “Do you see the same truth?” would be “I don’t care about the truth—I only want [you to be my] friend,” no friendship can arise. Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travelers.
In the late fourth century (or early fifth century) A.D., Patrick was growing up in (what is now) northeast England. His people were “Britons”, one of the “Celtic” peoples then populating the British Isles, though Patrick’s aristocratic family had gone “Roman” during the Roman occupation of England, So Patrick was more culturally Roman than Celtic; his first language was Latin, though he understood some “Welsh” spoken by the lower classes. His family was Christian; his grandfather was a priest. Patrick had acquired some Christian teaching, and he undoubtedly knew the catechism, but he became only a nominal Christian; he ridiculed the clergy and, in the company of other “alienated” and “ungoverned” youth, he lived toward the wide side.
When Patrick was sixteen, a band of Celtic pirates from Ireland invaded the region; they captured Patrick and many other young men, forced then onto a ship, sailed to Ireland, and sold them into slavery. The pirates sold Patrick to a prosperous tribal chief and druid named Miliuc (Miliuc moccu Boin), who put Patrick to work herding cattle.
During his years of enslavement, Patrick experienced three profound changes. First, the periods when Patrick was isolated in the wilderness herding cattle connected him with what theologians call the “natural revelation” of God. He sensed with the winds, the seasons, the creatures, and the nights under the stars the presence of God; he identified this presence with the Triune God he had learned about in the catechism. In his (more or less) autobiographical “Declarations” Patrick tells us
After I had arrived in Ireland, I found myself pasturing flocks daily, and I prayed a number of times each day. More and more the love and fear of God came to me, and faith grew and my spirit was exercised, until I was prayed up to a hundred times every day and in the night nearly as often.
Patrick became a devout Christian, and the change was obvious to his captors.
Second, Patrick changed in another way during the periods he spent with his captors in their settlement. He came to understand the Irish Celtic people, and their language and culture, with the kind of intuitive profundity that is usually possible only, as in Patrick’s case, from the “underside”.
Third, Patrick came to love his captors, to identify with them, and to hope for their reconciliation to God. One day, he would feel they were his people.One night, after six years of captivity, a voice spoke to Patrick in a dream, saying, “You are going home. Look! Your ship is ready!” The voice directed him to flee for his freedom the next morning. He awakened before daybreak, walked to a seacoast, saw a ship, and negotiated his way on board.
The data for piecing together the next quarter century of Patrick’s story are limited, and scholars disagree when interpreting the scant data we have, but the story line runs something like this. The ship probably too Patrick to Gaul, though perhaps England. He may have spent considerable time in Gaul (perhaps with the monastic community of St, Martin of Tours), and he may have gone to Rome, but he eventually returned to his people in England. His training immersed his mind in the scriptures, and grounded him in the basic orthodox theology that prevailed in the Western Church of that time. He then served for years as a faithful parish priest in England.
One night, at the age of forty-eight – already past a man’s life expectancy in the fifth century – Patrick experienced another dream that was to change his life again. An angel named Victor approached him with letters from his former captors in Ireland. As he read one of the letters, he “imagined in that moment that [he] heard the voice of those very people who he knew in Foclut, … and they cried out, as with one voice ‘We appeal to you, holy servant boy, to come and walk among us,’”When Patrick awakened the next morning, he interpreted the dream as his “Macedonian Call” to take Christianity’s gospel to the Celtic peoples of Ireland.
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| James Smith (1802-1862) |
Ed Stetzer posted this great little article on the historical reliability of the Bible by Craig L. Blomberg (Ph.D. University of Aberdeen). It will be well worth your time to get equipped in this area.
The New Testament (NT) contains four biographies of Jesus (the Gospels), one history book of the early church (Acts), twenty-one letters (Romans to Jude), and an apocalypse (Revelation). While the letters and the apocalypse contain references to historical events, the Gospels and Acts are written as straightforward historical narratives. These are the NT books about which it makes particularly good sense to ask the question, "Are they historically reliable?" Twelve lines of evidence converge to suggest strongly that the answer is "yes."
First, we have over 5,700 Greek manuscripts representing all, or part, of the NT. By examining these manuscripts, over 99 percent of the original text can be reconstructed beyond reasonable doubt. We also discover that no Christian doctrine or ethic depends solely on one of the doubted texts. These facts do not prove that the NT is true, but it does mean we know what the original writers wrote. Without this assurance, the question of historical reliability is pointless.
Second, the authors of the Gospels and Acts were in an excellent position to report reliable information. Matthew and John were among the twelve disciples Jesus Himself chose; Mark was a close companion of Peter and Luke (who also wrote Acts) and traveled extensively with Paul. Even critical scholars who doubt the traditional attributions of authorship agree that these five books were written by followers of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which still puts them in a good place to tell the stories accurately.
Third, these five books were almost certainly written in the first century, within sixty to seventy years of Jesus' death (most likely in a.d. 30). Conservatives typically date Matthew, Mark, and Luke-Acts to the 60s and John to the 80s or 90s. Liberals suggest slightly later dates, typically placing Mark in the 60s or 70s, Matthew and Luke-Acts in the 80s, and John in the 90s. Even if one accepts the later dates, the amount of time separating the historical events and the composition of the five books is very short as compared to most ancient historical and biographical accounts, where many centuries could intervene between events and the books that narrated them.
Fourth, ancient Jews and Greeks meticulously cultivated the art of memorization, committing complex oral traditions to memory. Even before the Gospels or any other written sources about Jesus were compiled, Jesus' followers were carefully passing on accounts of His teachings and mighty works by word of mouth. This kept the historical events alive until the time they were written down.
Fifth, the ancient memorization and transference of sacred tradition allowed for some freedoms in retelling the stories. Guardians of the tradition could abbreviate, paraphrase, prioritize, and provide commentary on the subject matter as long as they were true to the gist or meaning of the accounts they passed on. This goes a long way to explaining both the similarities and the differences among the four Gospels. All four authors were true to the gist of Jesus' life, yet they exercised reasonable freedom to shape the accounts in ways they saw fit.
Sixth, the fact that these writers had distinct ideological or theological emphases does not mean they distorted history, as is often alleged. Oftentimes the very cause that a historian or biographer supports requires them to write their accounts accurately, for they know that their cause will be undermined if they are charged with bias or distortion. The first Christians had the uphill battle of promoting a crucified Messiah and His bodily resurrection. Had they been known to have falsified the details of their accounts to any significant degree, their movement would have been squelched from the outset.
Seventh, Luke's prologue (Lk 1:1-4) closely parallels the form and content of other works of generally reliable historians and biographers of antiquity, most notably Josephus, Herodotus, and Thucydides. The Gospel writers clearly believed that they were writing historically accurate works, not fiction or embellished history.
Eighth, the so-called hard sayings of Jesus support their authenticity. If the Gospel writers felt free to distort what Jesus originally said in order to increase the attractiveness of Christianity, why would they preserve unmodified His difficult and easily misunderstood teachings about hating family members (Lk 14:26) or not knowing when He would return (Mk 13:32)? The fact that they let these teachings stand indicates their faithfulness to recount true history.
Ninth, the fact that the NT does not record Jesus speaking about many of the topics that arose after His earthly life, during the time of the early church, supports its historical accuracy. For instance, early Christians were divided over how or whether the laws of Moses applied to Gentile converts (Ac 15). The easiest way to settle the controversy would be to cite Jesus' teachings on the matter, but the Gospels record no such teachings. This silence suggests that the Gospel writers did not feel free to play fast and loose with history by putting on the lips of Jesus teachings that could solve early church controversies.
Tenth, the testimony of non-Christian writers supports the details of the Gospels and Acts. About a dozen ancient Jewish, Greek, and Roman writers mention Jesus. Taken together, their writings attest to the basic contours of Jesus' life. Many names of people and places, as well as the exploits of first-century political and religious leaders, are attested in other writings of the day.
Eleventh, archaeology regularly confirms details about geography, topography, customs, artifacts, buildings, tombs, inscriptions, and graffiti that are mentioned in NT--the Gospels and Acts in particular.
Twelfth, the portions of the NT that were written before the completion of the Gospels and Acts confirm the historicity of these five books. For instance, Paul, James, and Peter show multiple signs of quoting or alluding to teachings and actions of Jesus in letters they wrote before the Gospels were written. Their quotes and allusions agree with what we find in the Gospels. This indicates that the Gospels are in tune with the very earliest writings about Jesus--the NT epistles. These earliest writings were in turn dependent on the authoritative oral traditions that were passed on by eyewitnesses to Jesus' life. Paul expresses this in 1Co 15:3-8, where he lists the beliefs he had "received" from these eyewitnesses when he became a Christian no more than two years after Jesus' death and resurrection. These are no late, slowly developing legends he is reporting!
"The first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every
day is to have my soul happy in the Lord"
