It’s a Story, True Enough, but Your Cliff Notes are Lousy
» S.D. Smith
“In recent years it has become popular to sketch the Bible‘s storyline something like this: Ever since the fall, God has been active to reverse the effects of sin. He takes action to limit sin’s damage; he calls out a new nation, the Israelites, to mediate his teaching and his grace to others; he promises that one day he will send the promised Davidic king to overthrow sin and death and all their wretched effects. This is what Jesus does: he conquers death, inaugurates the kingdom of righteousness, and calls his followers to live out that righteousness now in prospect of the consummation still to come.
Much of this description of the Bible’s storyline, of course, is true. Yet it is so painfully reductionistic that it introduces a major distortion. It collapses human rebellion, God’s wrath, and assorted disasters into one construct, namely, the degradation of human life, while depersonalizing the wrath of God. It thus fails to wrestle with the fact that from the beginning, sin is an offense against God.”
D.A. Carson
Emphasis mine. HT: Justin Taylor
August 26th, 2009 at 9:37 am
In our Christian witnessing, we regularly fail to communicate the absolute sinfulness of sin. It could be because we ourselves are guilty of underestimating God’s hatred of it and perhaps are much too comfortable with our relative “goodnesses.” Each of us would love our Saviour more if we recognized the awfulness of our sin and the precious price paid by Him to reconcile us to Himself. When we really grasp the truth that God is righteously angry and we are rightly objects of wrath, then we will worship and witness with an intensity before unrealized.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
I would add that the God portrayed above is a reactionary God, not the pro-active God I see in Scripture. In the end, it’s all about who God is, isn’t it? He is the only truly stationary truth there is, and everything we understand is chained back to who He is.
PS- Carson is my living hero…
August 26th, 2009 at 6:44 pm
Word up, fellows.