“The Power in the Blood” = “The Power of Christ’s Atoning Death”

When the Scriptures say we are redeemed by Christ’s blood, we are not to think that His plasma or corpuscles have some supernatural property.  His blood was normal human blood, just as His entire body was fully human in every aspect.  The “power in the blood” that we sing about lies in the atonement He wrought by the shedding of His blood, not in the actual fluid itself.  So, when the Bible speaks about the blood of Christ, it uses the expression as a metonymy for His atoning death. – John MacArthur (born in 1939), from his book, “The Murder of Jesus.”

This is post number 1,600!

 

Abiding with Jesus

We are too much like the bird we read of in the old Saxon story.  When the first missionary was preaching in the royal hall, he told of the peace which the gospel brings to sinners and the rest which souls find in Jesus.  After his sermon, an ancient chieftain spoke his mind and compared himself and his countrymen, in their unrest, to the bird which, just then, attracted by the light, flew into the bright hall through the open window, flitted through the warmth and light, and passed out again into the darkness and the cold by a window on the other side of the banqueting hall. 

The simile might well apply to our transient fellowship.  We have brief communings, and then away we pass into worldliness and indifference.  Oh, would it not be blessed if we could abide with Jesus forever, building our nest in His palace!  How heavenly our lives if we could walk with Him, as Enoch did, in our businesses, in our families, in all places and at all hours!  If, instead of now and then climbing the sunny peak of fellowship and standing near to heaven and conversing with the Son of God we could forever dwell in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus – how much more noble a life to lead!  Imitate Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, in her abiding unmovingly near her beloved ones.  Abide with Jesus evermore.

From: Flashes of Thought: Being One Thousand Choice Extracts from the Works of C. H. Spurgeon, Alphabetically Arranged, and with a Copious Index [no editor's name given] (London: Marshall Brothers, Limited, n.d.), p. 1.

 

God Provides Everything

All is provided that man can need to quench his soul’s thirst.  To his conscience, the atonement brings peace.  To his understanding, the gospel brings the richest instruction.  To his heart, the person of Christ is the noblest object of affection.  To the whole man, the truth, as it is in Jesus, supplies the purest nutriment.  Thirst is terrible, but Jesus can remove it.  Though the soul were utterly famished, Jesus could restore it. – Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892)

 

Departing from Definitions

Catholic Christendom has not, always and everywhere, remained faithful to what it confessed at Chalcedon.  In the Lutheran churches, for example, a form of Eutychianism emerged that serves that church’s peculiar view of the relationship of Christ’s body to the physical elements of the Lord’s Supper.  This may be seen in the Lutheran representation of the “communicatio idiomatum” (“communication of attributes”), whereby our Lord’s divine nature at His virginal conception virtually “divinized” His human nature by communicating its attributes to the human nature.  Thus, the latter is ubiquitous, Lutherans insist, and is really physically present “in, with, and under” the elements of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.  But, such a christological construction, in the words of Charles Hodge, “form[s] no part of Catholic Christianity.”

From: A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith by Robert L. Reymond (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1998), p. 615.

 

On the Trinity

In every creative and redemptive act, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit operate together in fellowship with one another but, nevertheless, in ways peculiar to each of them.  It is not possible for us to spell that out in terms of any demarcations between their distinctive operations, if only because, within the coactivity of the three divine Persons, those operations perichoretically contain one another and pass over into one another while remaining what they distinctively are in themselves.  It is only from within the incarnate economy of God’s saving self-communication to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that we can say anything at all about this.  The primary distinction was made there, of course, for it was the Son, or Word of God, who became incarnate, was born of the virgin, Mary, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and rose again from the grave, and not the Father or the Holy Spirit, although the whole life and activity of Jesus, from His birth to His death and resurrection, did not take place apart from the presence and coactivity of the Father and the Spirit.  And, it is in the light of what the Lord Jesus Himself revealed about His relation to the Father and the Spirit, and what He did for us in His miraculous works and saving acts, thereby manifesting on earth the works of the Father, that we are able to discern something of the way in which the Father and the Spirit participated in the economy of redemption.  This enables us to believe that what God is toward us in Jesus Christ and in His manifestation in the history of salvation as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, He really is antecedently and eternally in His triune Self.

From: The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being, Three Persons by Thomas F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996), p. 198.

Thomas F. Torrance (1913-2007) taught Church History and then, for the majority of his career, Christian Dogmatics, at the University of Edinburgh (1950-1979).  This book, published when he was 83 is, in my opinion, the finest book on the doctrine of the Trinity published in the 20th century.

 

The Second Advent

The coming of the Son of Man shall be sudden and unexpected.  He will come in His own strength and with great power.  He will throw down all opposition, destroy His enemies with swift destruction, and establish His religion and government in a great part of the world as suddenly as lightning darts from one part of the heavens to the other.  But, before these things come to pass, He must suffer many things and be rejected of this generation.

From: The Life of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Containing an Accurate and Universal History of Our Glorious Redeemer, from His Birth to His Ascension into Heaven, Together with the Lives and Sufferings of His Holy Evangelists, Apostles, and Disciples, Who have Sealed the Divine Truth of Christianity with Their Blood, to Which is Added a Full Defense of Christianity Against All the Objections of Atheists, Deists, and Infidels, the Whole Properly Adapted to Promote the Knowledge of Religion by J. Fleetwood, B.D.; 2 volumes (Carlisle: L. Smith, 1792), 1:301.

 

The Enemies of Christ are Sometimes Close to Home

Assuredly, my friends, religion does not save us by the mere fact of our being brought into intimate contact with it.  Those who have known most about it in early youth, the sons of religious parents, sometimes turn out to be its worst enemies.  They appear to speak with authority when they say that they have tried it and found it wanting.  They are like soldiers who, after making themselves perfectly acquainted with their general’s resources and position, go over to the enemy and place their knowledge at his disposal.  This sad sight, as many of us know, has been repeated in not a few conspicuous instances in this and the last generation, as well as in instances which are not conspicuous.  Christ is set in the firmament of the spiritual heavens for the fall of these unhappy souls.  He is, to them, “a savor of death unto death” (2 Corinthians 2.16).  He is ever, in Himself, loving and merciful, “not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3.9).  But, in all generations, there are souls of whom He says, in sorrow, “If I had not come and spoken to them, they had not had sin.  But now, they have no cloak for their sin” (John 15.22).  He is “set,” against the tenor of His own blessed will, for the fall of many.

From: “Results of Christ’s First Coming,” a sermon on Luke 2.34, preached at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, England, on Sunday, December 17, 1876.  Published in: Advent in St. Paul’s: Sermons Bearing Chiefly on the Two Comings of Our Lord by H. P. Liddon; 2nd edition (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1889), pp. 252-253.

H. P. Liddon (1829-1890) was Canon and Chancellor of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, England.  His most important book is The Divinity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ: The Bampton Lectures for 1866 (1867).

 

The Creator-God

The Bible correlates the Creator God not only with primal creation but also with a coming new creation (Isaiah 65.17-18; Acts 3.21; 2 Peter 3.13; Revelation 21.1-8) and with the regenerative recreation of penitent mankind (2 Corinthians 5.17ff).  The eternal Christ, the mediator of divine creation, is openly manifested in the incarnation as the one through and for whom God made the universe and through whom God redeems rebellious mankind and the disordered cosmos (John 1.1-3; 1 Corinthians 8.6; Colossians 1.16; Hebrews 1.2, 10)…The “whence” and the “whither” of the universe cannot be divorced; in Christ, the whole creation has its basis (Revelation 3.14) as well as its final goal (Hebrews 1.11-12).

From: God, Revelation, and Authority by Carl F. H. Henry; 6 volumes (Waco: Word Books, 1976-1983), 6:112.

 

“Jesus is Lord!”

The claim “Jesus is Lord” is not simply a confession of His deity.  It is that and more.  The important eschatological point that this claim makes is that, in Jesus Christ, the threats to God’s promises being fulfilled have been conquered objectively and will be realized fully in the age to come.  There are no powers, authorities, thrones, or dominions that can thwart His purposes, although they may present fierce opposition until they are finally destroyed.

From: The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way by Michael Horton (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), p. 527.

 

Jesus Christ, the Lord of Glory

In seeking to form an estimate of the significance of this list of designations ascribed to Jesus in Matthew, it does not seem necessary to attempt to draw out separately, as we attempted to do in the case of Mark, the evidence they supply to the primary emphasis laid in Matthew upon the Messianic dignity of Jesus and that they supply to the recognition of the divine majesty of His person.  It lies on the very face of these designations that, by Matthew as truly as by Mark, Jesus is conceived, in the first instance, as the promised Messiah, and His career and work as fundamentally the career and work of the Messiah, at last come to introduce the promised Kingdom.  And it lies equally on their very face that this Messiah whom Jesus is represented as being is conceived by Matthew – and is represented by Matthew as having been conceived by Jesus Himself – as a “transcendant” figure, as the current mode of speech puts it, i.e., as far transcending in His nature and dignity human conditions.

So clear is this, in fact, that our interest, as we read instinctively, takes hold in Matthew of matters quite other than those which naturally occupy it in Mark.  In Mark, the attention of the reader is attracted particularly to the implications of the superangelic dignity ascribed to the Messiah; and he finds himself unpremeditatingly noting the evidence of the presupposition of His heavenly origin and relations, of His pre-existence, of His more than human majesty, of His divine powers and functions.  These things are so much a matter of course with Matthew that the attention of the reader is drawn insensibly off from them to profounder problems.  This Gospel opens with an account of the supernatural birth of Jesus, which is so told as to imply that the birth is supernatural only because the person so born is not of this world but, in descending to it, fulfills the prophecies that Jehovah shall come to His people to dwell among them and to save them from their sins.  From the very outset, therefore, there can be no question in the mind of the reader that he has to deal not merely with a supernatural life but with a supernatural person, all whose life on earth is a concession to a necessity arising solely from His purpose to save.  No wonder rises in him, therefore, when he reads of the supramundane powers of this person, of His superhuman insight, of His supernatural deeds.  That He is superior to the angels, who appear constantly as His servants and is, in some profound sense, divine, clothed with all divine qualities, strikes him as, in no sense, strange.  The matters on which he finds his mind keenly alert rise above these things, and concern the precise relations in which this superangelic and, therefore, uncreated Being is conceived to stand to the Deity Himself.

From: The Lord of Glory: A Study of the Designations of Our Lord in the New Testament with Especial Reference to His Deity by Benjamin B. Warfield (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1907), pp. 80-81.