Kingdom Ready Blog

Jesus referred to himself as the Son of Man more than any other title in the Gospels. Though this title was most familiar to Jesus, nevertheless it is the most obscure to modern readers. Opinions vary on just what Jesus meant by calling himself the Son of Man. Some believe the title refers to an angelic heavenly creature. Others think it denotes Jesus’ human nature (as opposed to his divine nature). Many consider “son of man” to simply be Jesus’ way of saying “I.” Still others think the title relates to Jesus’ suffering and death or his future role as the returning cosmic victor. Rather than consider each of these theories in turn, instead we will build our understanding from the ground up, starting with the Old Testament. Then we will move to consider two extra-biblical Jewish texts before finally working on the New Testament.

Last week, a number of us produced the following video. Thanks to Matt and Blake of Plasma Productions, and Nathan for his last-minute willingness to jump in and read the script, this eight minute video is now on youtube and gathering steam. Please link to it or embed it on your own website. It lays out in plain language five big reasons why the Trinity doesn’t make sense.

Thinking Biblically about One of the Most Important Titles in the Bible

As Christians, we are so used to calling Jesus the Son of God that we can easily forget that the phrase “Son of God” has serious theological and biblical content. Though most believers conflate “Son of God” with “God the Son” and interchange a biblical notion for a philosophical one, I contend that it is a much better strategy to ground our conception in Scripture alone. In order to investigate divine sonship, I will first look at the two predominant prototypes—Adam and David—before moving on to think about how Jesus combines both layers of meaning. First, we begin in the beginning.

Is Paul quoting Isaiah 45 in Philippians 2? I have often heard people make this claim and it seems to be uncontroversial. However, I’m not really sure. Below is a table comparing these texts. Note, especially, the underlined words.

Our faith is under attack. Though many of us are not on the front lines, we all have the responsibility to be ready to make a defense to anyone who asks us to give an account for the hope that is in us (1 Peter 3.15). Sadly, in most churches we do not do well preparing and teaching our people the reasons why we believe what we believe. For example, why do we believe that there is a God? How do we know the Bible has been reliably transmitted? How can we be so sure that Jesus really was raised from the dead? These questions and many more are increasingly being asked, especially of those in college. What makes matters worse is that the anti-Christians, be they professors or fellow students, are often much better prepared to defend their position than we are. Does Christianity require a leap of faith regardless of the facts? What right do we have to say other faiths are in error if we cannot explain why our own is true? Questions like these have driven me to regularly expose myself to the field of apologetics (not apologizing, but defending or giving reasons for the faith). In this blog post I have collected together a number of resources that may help you give an answer to those attacking our faith.

This year my wife and I decided to celebrate Hanukkah with our family. We enjoyed it immensely and found it to be entirely compatible with biblical Christianity. My son Noah, asked for a couple of nights afterward if we could do Hanukkah that night, but we had to explain to him that it only lasts for eight days. Maybe you would like to celebrate it next year.

Yesterday, at school we were discussing the work of William Carey who wrote a persuasive piece designed to inspire his fellow Baptists to send out and support missionaries in 1792 called An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. His unrelenting desire to save the lost drove him to study languages incessantly. He was a shoemaker by trade who taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Dutch, and French. Eventually he moved to India with his family and some others to spread the gospel there. He translated the Bible into Bengali and Sanskrit and distributed it among the people. Below is a quotation that I found challenging. Part of his treatise included a series of tables listing the population of each known country in the world along with religious affiliation. He estimated that out of the 731 million people in the world 420 million were still in “pagan darkness.” Looking at statistics today, there are roughly two billion Christians out of 6.5 billion people. Are Carey’s words any less relevant today than when he penned them more than two centuries ago?

In Church History class I had to read Jerome’s twenty-second letter written to Eustochium (a wealthy Christian living in Rome). Most of the letter contains practical advice on how to remain celibate even while living within society. In this letter, which is very long, he relates an incredible story about his own life.

He had been really struggling to prefer the Scriptures over secular literature. He had a vision in which God condemned him as a follower of Cicero rather than of Christ. This scared Jerome straight and he never read worldly books again. (However, other early Christians, such as Augustine, believed that secular books could be read so long as one exercised discernment.) Here is Jerome’s first-hand account. I wonder what you make of it.

1Thes 5.22 [KJV]
Abstain from all appearance of evil.

It is amazing how one little word can change a meaning so much. I bet a lot of puritanical church rules were generated by a concern to avoid even the “appearance” of evil. Matthew Henry’s commentary (from 1706) says:

We should therefore abstain from evil, and all appearances of evil, from sin, and that which looks like sin, leads to it, and borders upon it. He who is not shy of the appearances of sin, who shuns not the occasions of sin, and who avoids not the temptations and approaches to sin, will not long abstain from the actual commission of sin.