Faith is Found In Christ Blog

Matthew 7:13-14, Matthew 25:23, Hebrews 2:17, 2 Thessalonians 1:8-10, Matthew 5:6, Romans 5:5

If you are looking for an easier life than following Jesus, it is readily available. Many have decidedly rejected the narrow way leading to life in order to have what they really want:  a few short years of the pleasure of sin and self-exaltation, (maybe they never left the broad way in the first place).

For those who love Jesus and desire Him as their deepest treasure, the way of the cross, the way of discipleship, is the most desirable way. At the end of that road is an old rugged cross and a glorious throne upon whom sits a glorious King, from whose lips we long to hear “well done my good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:23).

At the end of the narrow road awaits a King who has lead us out of the mire of sin and rebellion, by giving up His life for the redemption of us His bride, the church; and who has been raised by the power of God, who sits at the right hand of God, ministering in the presence of God right now; our true, merciful and faithful high priest (Hebrews 2:17).

However, at the end of the broad way, for those who refuse to repent and turn from sin and self and trust in Christ , they will “suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might” (2 Thessalonians 1:8-10).

The narrow road is filled with violence and opposition as we trust God and disown our own lives for the sake of Christ. It is a road which embraces the lovely wonderful cross, as we follow the one who walked it before us, as he took all of our sin to the cross and canceled our long standing debt.

The narrow road is filled with glory of God in Christ. The broad road is the road filled with self-exaltation and pride. It is filled with cold dead unchanged hearts and minds filled with worldliness instead of the things of God.

This broad road will be bursting at the seams with people who do not want Christ and who would not trust in Him. This road will be filled with people who went to church, but whose souls were not pierced with the Holy, white hot Spirit of God.

This road will end in eternal damnation, for God will cast those on this road into the lake of fire, without hesitation and without remorse as the name of Christ is praised.

The broad road appeals to everything in us, and that appeal is poisonous deception: there isn’t anything new on the broad road, it is riddled with everything we already want and have, and crowded with those who hate God and will encourage us to question our convictions about our wonderful savior. This road and these people must be exposed and avoided at all costs.

The narrow road is the Godly road, because it calls us to come and see and be satisfied in Jesus, and to go and die to sin and self in following Jesus.  The narrow road is draped with the glory and praise of God.

The narrow road is filled with few who, “hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matthew 5:6),  “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5). Those on the narrow way desire Jesus, they want Him.

The entrance to the broad way leading to destruction, begins and ends with Adam and Eve at the garden with Satan’s question, “Did God really say…?” (Genesis 3:1).  The doors to the broad road leading to destruction, are marked with “authentic questioning” of God’s nature, His word, God Himself and the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is the best news in the world, about the best person who ever lived. The narrow road is constructed by satanic and flesh driven deconstruction of the most precious thing anyone can ever receive from God: forgiveness of sin and Faith and trust in His precious Son, in whom is eternal life.

The broad way is crowded with many “authentic” co-questioners, rushing headlong to the throne of judgement, while casting God’s glory and authority to the side in favor of their own wisdom, which is dangerous folly. The broad road is a dangerous Hubris with eternal consequences.

May God give us ever more grace through Christ to find and stay on the narrow way as we follow Christ in to eternal life.

Thank God for Jesus Christ, for He is just so worthy.  

Colossians 1:15-20, Ephesians  1:18

“Everything”. “All”. “The entire thing”, “All of it”. 

These words leave nothing out. They entail everything. There is one word in the New Testament that describes all of these words: πάντα.It literally means “everyone, everything, all things”. When Paul uses it in Colossians chapter 1:16, he writes, “all things were created through him and for him”.

When God created the world, it was in view of His beautiful Son.

His election of sinners before time began was in, through and aimed at the supreme worthiness of Christ and God has so ordered our lives, that they might ring with the supremacy of God in Christ.

Mark Jones, author of “Knowing Christ”, wrote in relation to Colossians 1:15-20, “.

“Christ did not come into the world for you. You came into the world for Christ”. While I believe this statement needs some nuance, I do think that this gets to the point of the entire Bible: Soteriology is aimed at Christology. The power of our Soteriology is Christological.

Christ is both the power and the aim of our salvation, because He Himself is the aim of all things.

There is so much power glory and beauty in Christ that Sin, Satan, the flesh and the world have no chance whatsoever.

When God saved Paul, God took Paul’s life and fired it like an arrow at the bullseye of the glory of Christ. This is why our salvation is untouchable: Because it is infused with the power of the glory of Christ.

Our salvation will never fail, because of the glory and worth of the object of our salvation. If you want assurance of salvation, look no further that the power of Christ.

The target that God struck with Paul’s redeemed life was not ministry, it was the exaltation of Christ.

The target that Christ is striking over and over and over again with the lives of all who put their faith and trust in Christ, is the unending eternal glory of Christ.

It is why God puts breath in our lungs and strength in our bodies.

May God take aim with our lives and strike dead center at the the eternal glory of Christ.

May Christ get all the glory He so richly deserves, for He is just so worthy. 

Philippians 3:1-11, Jude 1:24

My wife gets more lovely to me, the more we are married.

This is true of Christ in a way that is not true of my wife, or any other relationship for that matter. 

For the more that Christ reveals himself to me, – through His word, through worship (corporately and individually), through His gathered people and through the sacraments –the more He ,Christ, becomes more lovely to me than anything or anyone. 

The more that God reveals  Himself to me through Christ, the things of the earth lose their  luster. They don’t become bad or worthless, rather Christ just looks more appealing than they do to my heart.

Not only that, the beauty of God in Christ makes those other things more enjoyable. This happens through continually knowing Christ, for to know Him, is to love Him. 

To see Him by faith in the deep recesses of the soul and heart, is to adore Him.

The human soul will not repent from sin, unless it beholds God in Christ by the Holy Spirit. 

However, once the human soul and heart see Christ, and are filled with the Spirit of God, the human soul and heart are properly ruined for any other desire.

Paul writes in Philippians 3:8, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”Here, Paul gives the effect of Knowing Christ, : “counting everything as loss”.  Or to say it the other way around the cause of his “counting everything as loss”: The surpassing worth of Knowing Christ Jesus.

Paul relinquishing his life and the “security” which he had in Judaism, was demolished when He came to know Christ.

Paul’s entire person (soul, spirit, mind  and body) came into Christ’s glorious and authoritative hands on the road to Damascus, in Damascus and at the house of Judas at the Street called Straight (Acts 9).

God is doing this same work today.

 He drawing people to Himself, through the Holy Spirit. He is showing people Christ, and anchoring people to His glorious Son. This is why we preach, this is why we pastor, this is why we keep our hand to the plow in a world that hates God and loves sin: “Because God is stealing spoils of war as He saves the souls of men, women and children through the power of Christ”.

He did the same for you and me. He has the power and resources to do it over and over again as we stay faithful to preaching His word.

Thank God for Jesus, for He is just so worthy.

Be encouraged brothers and sisters, our God is just as powerful as He is Holy, and He is just as loving as He is Holy and powerful. Jude has rightly written,  “Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.”

Hebrews 2:10-12, Hebrews 6:18-20, Ephesians 2:11-22.

“Brother” ,”Family”. Such endearing biblical words. I have two older brothers and I would do anything for them. Through thick and thin, through arguments and disagreements, through fallouts and joys and pain, they will always be my brothers. We will always be related by our blood no matter what.

This truth of is magnified to a mind blowing and arresting level in Christ.

The writer of Hebrews writes in 2:10-12 “For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering. 11 For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source. That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers,  saying, “I will tell of your name to my brothers;
    in the midst of the congregation I will sing your praise.”

Christ is unashamed, at all times, to call you and I his family. All the time. Through doubts, weakness, intentional and unintentional sins, fears and hurts. There is person who advocates for me at the right hand of God, and He calls me his brother, and His father has become my father.

This is key to understanding our relationship to Christ and to God The Father, AND to each other: because Christ has called you His brother, you become some much more precious to me. 

Our relationships within the church should be marked by the words that Christ has spoken over our brothers and sisters, and the blood by which they and their sins were purchased. 

Our relationships are found and grounded in Christ reception of each other to himself, as he take us “into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.” (Hebrews 6:18b)

How sad a state we are in today in the church in the west, when Christian relationships are being cut off due to race, ethnicity, politics and other small trivial matters.

I wonder how much this grieves the Holy Spirit of God.  Christ himself has put to death anything that would keep us from our God, yet we step over the satisfactory death of Jesus to take up again the “dividing wall of hostility” that He has forever destroyed on the horrible bloody cross.

We disregard the death of Jesus, and tell God  “the death of your innocent and glorious Son isn’t enough for me to lay down my rights and my offenses”. Hypocrisy of the worst kind. 

This must both anger and grieve our Lord.

Christ has called you (whoever is reading this) my brother, and therefore, I am grateful to have you as my brother, both now and for eternity.

How precious our Lord is, and how loving our Father to give us Himself and to give Himself on account of us selfish sinners. May His generosity saturate our souls. May our relationships be colored by Jesus and all that He is.

Thank you my God for all that you are for us in Christ Jesus. 

Acts 2:42-47, Acts 5:12-16.

Community. It is a word thrown around in the present day Evangelical church, without much Biblical context I am afraid. A quick look at Acts 2 and Acts 5, one can see community present, however it is a product of something and not an aim to be achieved by a group of people.  

Maybe a better way to say it would be that the community experienced in Acts 2 and Acts 5 was a symptom of an inward reality in the lives of those in that community.

Much like having a cough or runny nose is a symptom of a cold or flu, the early church had symptoms of the indwelling presence of God in Christ Jesus. Luke tells us what those symptoms were in verse 42,”And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. 43 And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.”

Having everything common was nothing less than an outpouring of God Himself into the souls of every person whom God had, “delivered from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Colossians 1:13).

Christ became the reality that encompassed their lives, therefore, the response from their hearts and souls was the overflow of the power and love of the triune God expressed in and through Christ Jesus. The Holy Spirit was poured out on Christ’s body because it was poured out on Christ Himself in the presence of God, as He stands ministering  at the right hand of the father for us His bride. 

What a wonderful wonderful God we have. We lack nothing and could not ask for more from our God who loves us so dearly and is so worthy of praise and adoration from us. May God be praised.

What else should expect from the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God into the affairs of men? We should expect to see a laying down of all our pride and man-centeredness and a  celebration of the life of Christ in the life of His saints.

May we ask God to do this in our lives, for the sake of Christ name.

We in the book of Acts, a community of souls, who hunger thirst after the righteousness of God, who reject self-reliance and devoted to Christ and therefore reject siloed Christians lives.

The power of the love of the triune God put to death the secular siloed lives that they could have easily returned to. 

The point is they didn’t want to. Christ became the reality that their lives were reoriented around. This is the core of discipleship: The reorienting of our lives around the person, work and glorious Lordship of Christ. This is the work that the Spirit does in the lives of Christ’s Church, all for the sake of Christ’s glory and fame.

My church let me preach a couple of weeks ago and my Pastor came up to me after I was done preaching, and said, “can I take communion with you? Can we share Christ together?”.

What a beautiful display of how Christ has leveled all of the sin which would separate us from God and therefore would separate us from each other. 

My Pastor and I (and all those who love and cherish Jesus Christ) will eat again , together, forever.

It will not be the last supper of the one who was crucified. It will be the first meal, which Christ has promised to eat with His church, “when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed” (2 Thessalonians 1:10).

Thank God for Jesus, for He is just so worthy.

Hebrews 12:2, Ephesians 1:1-14, Galatians 2:6.

The  church of the Western world is the product of an unbiblical soteriology. We are a church which wants the benefits of Christ (forgiveness of sins and eternal life), but we do not want the benefactor: Christ . However, the entire Bible is presented the other way around. If I have Christ, then I have all the benefits. Christ Himself is my reward; because in Christ I get God, and having God is the deepest and most desired treasure. We want a Christ who keeps us from eternal damnation, but one who does not sit on the throne of our lives nor satisfy our souls…..and we have successfully created this kind of Jesus, a Jesus who is ultimately secular, who looks like us, sounds like us, loves like us, and loves what we love. Foolishly, we think this “Jesus” we have invented is able to save us from the fires of God’s righteous eternal Judgement. This is horribly dangerous and completely incompatible with the Scriptures from start to finish. Yet we are persistent in our belief in this false-Jesus as we trade hours of time with God in His word, in prayer and with God’s people, for hours of time in entertainment, pleasure and idleness.

Could it be that the Jesus that we have created actually “saves” us from actually believing in and trusting in the Living God? Could it be that the Christ of the New Testament (the only Jesus there has ever been) actually threatens our unbelief and therefore we must drown Him in our own pride and idolatry?The issues and problems we are seeing here in the church in the west have been growing under the surface for a great deal of time. It is our unwavering commitment to a man-centered “gospel” which pedals the benefits of Christ, without calling people to God who is Christ Himself.  It is Soteriology in a vacuum divorced from the glory and and supremacy of Christ, “The Founder and Perfecter of our faith” Hebrews 12:2. Lest we forget, our salvation is aimed at the glory of Jesus. He Himself is our salvation. Here is why Paul continually stresses two words in Ephesians 1:1-14: “In Him”.

The power of our salvation is Christ and the point of our salvation is Christ. The church in the western world has successfully removed Christ as both the power of our salvation and the point of it. This is why we should expect to see and do see churches full of unsaved people who do not and will not follow, love and worship Christ. What we in the western church want is God’s grace without the glory and grace of discipleship. We want Salvation without eschatology glory of Jesus. We Jesus to keep us from hell, but not a Jesus who makes us worthy of Him. We want Christ as Savior, without Him being God or Lord. Yet, there is no other kind of Jesus.  Jesus is Lord because God says so, no matter if we say it or acknowledge it. It is this Jesus who alone is able to save, and it is This Jesus alone who we are called to follow (Mark 8:34 – 9:1).

It is only in the church in the West (the richest and most comfortable church in the world, with access to the most resources) that there could be a massive fallout over something that God has clearly and decisively put to death: Race and ethnicity. Here in the west, while the church is bursting at the seems in other countries much more hostile to the Gospel, we here in the west have the audacity to be pre-occupied with something as trivial as race. How sad for us. This is nothing other than the shame of our self-love, self- absorption and unwavering indulgence of secularism. It is direct result of our unbelief in the God who is barreling toward us to get all the Glory He so richly deserves. Here in the west we are unwilling to call people to follow Jesus to the cross. We are unwilling to call people to follow Him at all. We have allowed the church to be filled with self-reliant, self-righteous secular people, instead of Christians.

May God grant us repentance and faith In Christ, for When He comes, He will show no partiality (Galatians 2:6). (edited) 

Romans 5:8-10

On Easter Sunday, they day we celebrate the most glorious event which has taken place on the face of the planet –the resurrection of The Son of God, which was preceded by His being slaughtered in our place on the cross, for our sins — I was putting up current rods.

My wife asked me to hang four curtain rods up in our house. I told my wife I would hang these curtain rods earlier last week, however, when it came time to do it (as it the case most of the time) I did not want to do what I said I would do. It was an inconvenience to serve her, and my attitude and actions toward her, spoke this louder to her than my words of love.

My attitude was saying, “serving you, like I said I would, is an inconvenience to me”. I hung the curtain rods, but my attitude was full of passive aggressive anger and frustration, not love and care and joy for the very opportunity to serve her. This is sin.

I was inconvenienced by my wants and needs having to be put last and my wife’s needs and wants needing to be placed first. I could feel the hands of my heart holding on to what I wanted and my attitude let my wife know this clearly. God help me for I am a sinner.

This I believe is the fundamental problem with me and all of humanity. We want and desire a God who poses no inconveniences to us getting our own way as we pursue our own way and all of our sinful desires.

When God does not move out of the way, as we pursue sin and selfishness, we not only wrap our hands around our sinful desires, we reach for the very throat of God (and others) as an inconvenient obstacle to our sinful desires.

Not much has changed since the fall. We are all naturally like Cain toward God Himself and therefore toward others. We are all much worse than we think we are.

This is the reason why we die.

To sinfully fallen people, the God who has every right to our worship, the God who’s glory is the aim of all His pursuits, is the only God who exists, and therefore the God who must be murdered.

Here is why Christianity stands apart from every other religion, even the other monotheistic ones (Judaism and Islam): It is only in Christianity that God decisively acts to redeem His glory by taking on the offenses of those who have soiled His glory and attempted to dethrone Him from his rightful place.

God is the God who willingly embraces all of our sinfulness and all the inconveniences that come with it (hostility toward Him and therefore toward others made in His image, evil, death, hell and the grave) with purpose and joy. I am not that way, but I want Him to make me like this, like Him.

How God could love us like this, is beyond me, but I am so grateful that He really does love who we really are at the cross. Paul writes in Romans 5:8-10, ” but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.”

The kind and loving God who mercifully and lovingly tells us the truth about who we are to Him (His enemies), make His enemies His sons. He alone is to be exalted and celebrated and proclaimed to all nations. Truly John Piper is right, when He wrote, “let the nations be glad!”

God has done this profound work, in order that His name may be praised and that man might have Him as their only hope, security and desire, forever. For it is the praise and Glory of God where mankind finds its deepest and only hope.

Thank God that God remains committed to His glory as the aim of His love for us. Paul gives us the reason for God’s abundant love and mercy to Godless sinners like me, He writes in Ephesians 2:7, “so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus”.

The only God who exists, is the inconvenient one and the cross tells us so.

Every single sin comes from a heart to suppress God’s right to His glory in us; it is an attempt therefore, to enslave God to our own conveniences. We all want the best deal on God in this life that we can get. May God forgive us of this sin.

Therefore, from this view of sin, the crucifixion shows us that love is not love, rather that God himself is love. God is love, and, thank God, that He Himself, does not stoop to loving like me, selfishly. At the cross and resurrection of The Son of God, God emblazons Himself as the perfect standard of Justice, Righteousness Holiness and perfect Love.

This He does, “to the praise of His glorious grace” Ephesians 26. Therefore, the term “love is love” is so sinfully servile and full of endless evil triviality.

Next to God Himself as the definition of love, the term “love is love” is exposed as vacuous sin-craving evil, which resides in the sinful heart of mankind.

Salvation comes from the heart and mind of the triune God. The amazing thing is that no one must compel God to love sacrificially. We must be redeemed by Christ’s cross, filled with God’s Spirit and made Holy in order to love God as He deserves and to love like God loves us, sacrificially.

It is not natural to me to imitate God, yet God is more than able to transform me, in order that I would love not only my wife, but also my enemies, like He loved me, His enemy. God never has to be compelled to love, it is at the very core of His nature, and He has been like this from eternity past, where the plan of salvation was thought of and agreed upon within the trinity.

This is an astounding revelation into the God that we will have forever in Christ Jesus.

It is His Holy redeeming love that redeems us from not only the penalty of Sin, but also the power of it. He accomplishes this by allowing us to be united to Christ in His sinless life, atoning death and His wonderfully powerful resurrection from the dead.

Such grace and mercy can only come from within the trinity. It is unearthly and heavenly sweet. Oh my God my God, thank you for Jesus Christ.

Isaiah 40:1-31, 2 Thessalonians 1:10

Often times, God’s allowance of “gratuitous” evil in the world, becomes an accusation leveled against God by the agnostic or atheist.

The accusation is usually stated, “If an all good, all loving and all powerful God exists, then why is there such gratuitous suffering and evil in the world?”; or “an all good and all loving and all powerful God cannot exist due to the gratuitous evil in the world”.

on the face of it, this questions seems reasonable.

However, what is implied in this question is a hidden assumption by the atheist or agnostic that betrays their finiteness: They assume that they know the depth of the mind and heart of God and call into question His allowance of evil and suffering in pursuit of His glory and righteousness.

They assume that they know God’s mind exhaustively. and that they know every reason why God would have and have found all of those reasons to be unsatisfactory.

They are assuming that God should have should have had another plan than the current one.

The atheist or agnostic who levels this claim against God, is immediately crushed under the vacuousness of their own understanding.

They are claiming to know that God has no sufficient reasons to allow the evil and suffering in the world. It is a fantastic and wild claim, which they could in no way uphold.

For, what if God allowing evil and suffering in the world, (which would include the innocent suffering of His one and only Son), is an arrow striking dead center on the bullseye of God’s glory?

And what if, the allowance of evil and suffering in the world, which would include the innocent suffering of Christ on the cross, is the means by which eternal souls who hate God are saved from God’s wrath?

If these are even possibly true, then the atheist or agnostic who would level the charge of gratuitous evil against God is placed in very dangerous predicament. Their unbelief or dislike of God due to the problem of evil, shows itself to be what it always was: a liability with eternal consequences.

The atheist or agnostic who would level the charge of evil and suffering in the world, as an indictment against God’s existence or His holy and righteous character, would hastily answer “yes” to Isaiah’s questions in Isaiah chapter 40.

“Do you not know?
    Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
    Have you not understood since the earth was founded?

The atheist or agnostic who would level the charge against God of gratuitous evil in the world, would answer Isaiah, “yes I do know, and if God would have but sought my counsel, I could’ve given Him much better plan. How thoughtless of Him to not have put time on my calendar for a meeting”.

The incredulity of the atheist is not against evil in the world.

It is against God who allows evil as He pursues His own glory.

The atheist and agnostic who will not repent and and put their faith and trust in Christ, the king who suffered the weight of all their evil at the cross, will be crushed under the weight of their sinful and evil incredulity against God. They will be shocked with the same face of incredulity as they look into the face of Christ “when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed” (2 Thessalonians 1:10).

The deception of sinful incredulity on the part of the atheist or agnostic who would level the charge of gratuitous evil against God’s existence or goodness, does have an appointment to meet with God; it however, will be the last appointment they ever have with Him. Then will come ever lasting death in the lake of fire.

May God grant boldness in these last days to preach the Gospel, and may God grant us all the grace and mercy which are in Christ Jesus.

Mark 8:22-26, 8:27-9:8

Every couple of years, I have to go get a prescription for new glasses. The optometrist has to test my eyes, to see which lenses will give me the best focus for my eyes to see clearly.

Mark, the writer of the 2nd gospel, being the masterful writer that he is, under the inspiration of the Spirit of God brings his audience’s eyes into the best focus possible in chapter 8:22 – 26, as Jesus heals a blind man at Bethsaida. It is clear from the text, that the blind man “saw everything clearly” after Jesus had healed his eyes…and that Jesus’ own disciples did not yet see as they ought to. (Mark 8:18-21).

Jesus, through Mark, is leading  his audience to the very same place: a place for their eyes to be opened not only by Jesus, but to see who Jesus really is…..and therefore, what that entails for them. The two are inseparable.

In order to do this, Christ must ask them two fundamental questions in 8:27-30, “Who do people say that I am?………But who do you say that I am?”.Here, we find what some scholars have referred to as the beginning of the Gospel of Mark. That is to say, that Mark 1:1 – 8:30 was a long introduction leading up to this pivotal point where Jesus discloses who He is, who God the father says He is and what it means for Him to be the Son of God.

Jesus Christ has been revealed to be the Son of God through his unparalleled ministry of miracles and exorcisms in the previous chapters; however here, the narrative takes a sharp turn as Jesus, through the Spirit of God is saying to His audience and to us “who do people say that I am?…..But who do you say that I am?”.

The answers to these two questions never changes. We are the ones who change. 

We either, through death to self through the power of the cross of Christ,  answer back to Jesus, “you are the risen Christ and my only hope in this world, come what may”; or like Peter in vs 33, we will automatically become the adversary of Jesus Christ by our rebuke of Jesus and His embrace of the cross as the Suffering Son of God.

There are only two kinds of people in this world: Those who are being saved, and those who are perishing. There is no in-between. This is the reality That God lives in all the time, we do well  to join Him there, for it is the place where He sees His Son and all the glory that is in Him.

In verses 8:31 – 9:8, God through His grace, is going to reveal and confirm who His Son really is: The suffering Son of God who is the apocalyptic Son of Man, the bearer of the rule and reign of God almighty. 

This is a treasure to behold, and desperately needed for Mark’s audience, who are suffering on account of Jesus. Their hearts need encouragement and strength. God knows exactly what they need: To see Jesus much, much more clearly. For it is the  revelation of God through Christ, which will make them brave.Nothing has changed from then to now. It is work of the Spirit of Christ in us, through suffering with Jesus, which glorifies Jesus and therefore makes us increasingly more brave to preach he Gospel, which saves souls no matter what color or class they are.

Much like the blind man, the disciples, Mark’s audience and most of all us 2021 who follow Jesus in a world that hates God, need desperately to see Jesus ever more clearly.

Thanks be to God, this is exactly what God wants to do: give us more and more of Himself in Christ.

“He is inexhaustible.” – Nicholas Alford 

Hebrews 12:2, Philippians 2:1-1, John 18

At 7:00PM on October 16th, a French teacher by the name of Samuel Paty was beheaded by an 18-year-old Russian Muslim refugee.

Allegedly, Paty, asked Muslim students to leave his class, before he showed them cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a class on free speech.

Turns out the allegations were fabricated and it never happened.

If you show insulting pictures of Muhammed, you get your head cut off, yet in western civilization, you can call Jesus Christ a racist (See here).

This should do nothing but set Christians at ease; because it does nothing but substantiate the validity of our worldview: Our lowly King, “who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” ( Hebrews 12:2). The Kingdom of God is so backward, and the one who knew this the most was Christ Himself. Nothing was going to keep Him from the cross. Muhammed (and his followers) reject ridicule. Jesus had no issues being mocked, while he was being nailed to a cross,  because it is there that He shows Himself to be the Son of God; not in His resistance to being ridiculed and mocked, but his embrace of it as the means by which God’s glory and righteousness is redeemed and eternal hope is offered to vile sinners (Philippians 2:1-11). Humble and lowly is He. It is on account of Christ’s humility in the crucifixion that God exalts Him to the highest place. For Jesus, the ridicule which He suffered was part and parcel of His devotion to His father’s plan. Jesus, who, “when he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly” (1 Peter 2:23. Jesus shows that He trusted Yahweh by his humble submission to the ridicule of the cross.

It was Jesus’s hand who stayed Peter’s sword, as a mob came to falsely arrest Him….lead by one of the disciples which He himself picked (John 18). After telling Peter to put His Sword away, he says to him, “Shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given me?”.

The shame and ridicule which Jesus suffers is played out under His complete control. It is Jesus who hand selected His betrayer. Here, we see the absolute submission and loving obedience of the eternal Son. He calls the one who will sign his death It was orchestrated in eternity past within the joy of the trinity.

The open shame of His false arrest, the kangaroo-court of a trial (where the world was really on trial before the true King and Judge), the merciless beating and whipping and his ultimate crucifixion on the cross was in order to uphold the righteous name and glory of God and therefore secure the salvation of God’s enemies (that is us).

We Christians ought to feel at ease because of the lowliness and humility of our crucified savior, Jesus Christ. We should see the one who left nothing on the table and drank the wrath that our sins deserved, down to the very dregs.

Our Godward insults have received retributive, divine justice in the brutalized and murdered body of Christ.

Thank God for Jesus.