This past Sunday was the last week of our eight month journey through the Bible tracing the metanarrative or grand story of God. Being the last sermon in the series, this sermon served two purposes: 1) a recap of the entire eight months and 2) an arrow pointing forward to our part in The Story.
Five Act Shakespeare Play
Along this journey we used N.T. Wright’s outline of a lost Shakespeare play with the final act missing. This ‘newly discovered’ lay is wonderful, full of drama, passion and amazing insight into the human soul – this play is destined to be a classic on par with Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. The only one problem is that missing last act….
So what do you do? Well, you pull together the best Shakespearean actors and actress on the planet – the ones that know all of Shakespeare’s other plays – you give them all the acts that you have – the first four acts – you have them study them, to enter into the story – to learn and know the characters in the play – then you put on the play with the actors living out the last act within the theme and direction of the first four acts.
This is us – we are in the fifth act of God’s story.
We have the first four acts recorded in the Bible – shoot, we even have the first and last pages of Act 5! We just don’t have the pages in the middle… so what are we going to do? I pray that we learn the first four acts with all our hearts, mind, soul, and spirit – let us enter into the God’s story with all that we are so that we can live out our part in the story in line with those who have gone before us – the cloud of witnesses as the author of the book of Hebrews says.
I don’t know if you all have heard or not, but I just found out that N.T. Wright released translation of the New Testament last fall called “The Kingdom New Testament.” While I have not read it (although I am saving my pennies to get it!), Scott McKnight gives it the following praise:
I just stumbled upon an interesting discussion today about God’s Righteousness that I thought you all might like. Specifically, it is a four part blog series about the current John Piper / N.T. Wright justification/righteousness debate written by J. R. Daniel Kirk, a New Testament Professor at Fuller Theological Seminary.
To summarize the debate [...]
At the heart of Biblical redemptive truth is the Blessed hope of the personal, glorious second advent of Jesus Christ. Salvation has to do both with the redemption of men as individuals and as a society. Salvation of individual believers includes the “redemption of the body” (Rom. 8:23). We must not only be saved from the guilt of sin, and delivered from the power of sin. Redemption is not completed until we are delivered from the very effects of sin in our moral bodies. The Biblical doctrine of the resurrection is a redemptive truth: it means the salvation of the body. This salvation will be realized only by the personal second coming of Christ.
So begins the introduction of George Ladd’s book The Blessed Hope: A Biblical Study of the Second Advent and the Rapture.
The Blessed Hope by George Ladd
A fairly easy read, this book tackles a very important issue into today’s church: the substitution of the rapture in place of the Second Coming of Christ.
Think for a minute – if you were to stop your average every-day Christian on the street and ask them what they are looking forward to when Christ comes back, what would they say? I guess that most of them would tell you that they are looking forward to the rapture when they will be taken out of this world.
Yet, Biblical the rapture is not our hope.
Our hope, our Blessed Hope – as Ladd would say – is with the return of the King of Kings. That we may dwell with Him on a renewed earth. That is what we need to be looking forward too – not a pre-tribulation rapture that takes us out of the world like a cosmic escape hatch. Continue reading The Blessed Hope: A Biblical Study of the Second Advent and the Rapture
This has been the toughest books I have read over the past year. Tough – not because of the reading level – but tough because the content forces you to rethink and test what you have been taught about death, heaven, and live beyond the grave.
I first picked up this book a [...]
If you look, you can tell my mood by what I drink or what shoes I have on. For example, when I’m feeling tired, wore out or otherwise miserable, I drink my coffee black. If I’m doing great or if I want to relax, then I drink some tea or coffee with cream and [...]
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