Review: The Archer and the Arrow

Many years ago, I remember attending a service at All Soul’s, Langham Place, where the preacher was Richard Bewes. I had been ordained about six years at the time, had heard many sermons and had preached even more. But I was aware that evening of being on the receiving end of something special.

“I don’t how he is achieving what he is doing,” I thought to myself, “but that’s how I want to do it.”

Those who have heard the preaching of Phillip Jensen may have felt the same, and will therefore be instinctively interested in this attempt by another preacher, Paul Grimmond, to explain how Phillip does what he does so well, namely the exposition of Scripture.

As soon as you put it like that, however, you can appreciate the difficulty of the task. I would find it hard enough to explain to others how I do something. How much more challenging for someone else to explain it!

Those who have heard Phillip preach and teach, moreover, will appreciate that this is not just a matter of picking up a few hints and tips about techniques of presentation and preparation. Indeed, Grimmond’s own introduction cautions against the idea that the book might contain “five simple steps to preaching like Phillip.”

It is best, therefore, to approach this book simply as a ‘primer on preaching’ — which happens to have Phillip Jensen’s name on the cover and some of his input in the contents. If you are new to preaching, however, or even if you have been preaching for some time, you will undoubtedly come away the better for having read it. Its focus is on the basics, but those basics are also the fundamentals, and like piano scales or times-tables, they are things we need to get right if we are to move on constructively, and they are things we may need to revisit if we have become rusty or lazy.

The book takes its title, and its structure, from an analogy: comparing the sermon to an arrow. The word of the gospel is the arrowhead, the exegesis of Scripture forms the shaft, which carries the head to the target, and the feathers represent the whole of our theology which guides our preaching and its application.

The analogy is helpful, but it is important also to understand what the authors mean by these ‘parts’ and how they see them contributing to the overall task of preaching.

The ‘gospel’ arrowhead, for example, is not simply the repetition of the point that Christ died on the cross for our sins and we need to repent and get right with God. Indeed, one of the most helpful parts of the book, in my view, was the explanation that the gospel is every aspect of revelation when it is understood and presented in relation to Jesus. Every sermon, therefore, ought to be a ‘gospel’ sermon, from whatever part of the Bible the preacher’s material is drawn.

It is encouraging, also, to see so much emphasis on theology — something which English evangelicals have for a long time treated as if it were almost a dirty word. (The same might be said, incidentally, of ‘good works’!)

Many of those who so admired Phillip on his first visits to these shores overlooked the fact that Sydney clergy were required to spend not just three but four years in full-time theological education before being ordained, and that these years were spent in the library and the study, not in ‘student ministry’ on the nearby university campus. One reason for the paucity of English evangelical preaching in the second half of the twentieth century is undoubtedly that so few preachers had an undergirding theology, or even much grasp of the biblical languages.

But the book is equally emphatic that preaching is no mere academic exercise. Rather, it is part of our spiritual struggle, and the primary quality it calls for from the preacher is not a love of study or exposition, but the love of God and of those whom God has called the preacher to serve through his preaching.

The Archer and the Arrow is not the last word on preaching. But it will benefit anyone who is just embarking on a preaching ministry and many who have been preaching for years. If this is you, then buy it or borrow it, and make sure that you apply it.

John Richardson
9 January 2011

The Archer and the Arrow: Preaching the Very Words of God, by Phillip D Jensen and Paul Grimmond (Kingsford: St Matthias Media, 2010), pb, 148 pp, no index

Purchase here.

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The Pharisee, the Tax Collector and the New Perspective on Paul

This morning's sermon to a local congregation on Luke 18:9-14

Introduction

Like a lot of the Bible, our parable from Luke’s gospel this morning is both simple and complicated.

The simple lesson is quite obvious — don’t be like the Pharisee, arrogant and proud and looking down on other people. Instead, be like the tax collector, humble before God because, as v 14 puts it,

... everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.

And even this simple lesson is of profound significance. A society where the humility shown by the tax-collector prevails will be very different from a society where the attitude of the Pharisee prevails.

But the passage is also complicated because of its significance for modern theological debate, and this is something of which we also ought to be aware.

Theologians are rather like politicians. You might think you want nothing to do with them. But what they say and what they decide has a major impact on the rest of us. So long as there are politicians in the political field and theologians in the theological field, we have to endure a certain amount of disruption.

The ‘new perspective’

And this particular passage is significant for what it has to say about something theologians call the ‘new perspective on Paul’.

Now we have to say straight away that the term ‘new perspective’, singular, is misleading. There are actually several ‘new perspectives’ on Paul.

But the movement, as such, got under way in the 1970s and it has been gaining ground and adherents, not least in the Church of England, ever since. You may meet very few laity who have heard of it, but you will meet very few clergy who haven’t, and it affects how they treat you.

What these ‘new perspectives’ have in common is a conviction that the Reformation understanding of Paul — especially that which goes back to Martin Luther — was wrong.

Luther, they say, read into the New Testament his own personal concerns with Roman Catholicism, which he thought taught salvation by works.

Luther projected this onto New Testament Judaism, which he also saw as a religion based on salvation by works, and contrasted it with what he read — but misunderstood — in the Apostle Paul.

The problem is, according to the New Perspective, Judaism never was never a religion of works. Moreover Paul understood that.

The only difference between Paul and Judaism was over the importance of Christ and the need for Jewish rituals like circumcision and food laws. Paul’s argument with Judaism was that the boundary of God’s people was no longer marked by whether you were circumcised but whether you believed in Jesus.

Beyond that, however, there was complete agreement — both Paul and Judaism, according to the New Perspective, taught that faith is a response to God’s grace, issuing in a life of faithfulness, on the basis of which we will be judged as worthy or not of God’s kingdom.

Consequences

Now what are the consequences of this ‘new perspective’?

Well, the first, and most obvious, is that the Reformation got it wrong. It was wrong about Judaism. And therefore it was also wrong about Roman Catholicism.

Most importantly, though, it means the heirs of the Reformation are also wrong — and according to people like Bishop Tom Wright, the current Bishop of Durham who has written some outstanding books on Christianity, but is a strong advocate of his own version of the New Perspective evangelical Christians are the most wrong of all, especially in their understanding of salvation.

God and ‘Righteousness’

Now with all that in mind — but ‘on hold’, as it were — let’s have a look at the Bible passage for this morning. In Luke 18:9 we read this:

To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable ...

What is the problem here?

First and foremost, we’re told, Jesus spoke to people who were , ‘confident ... that they were righteous’. But this little word ‘righteous’ doesn’t quite mean ‘good’ or ‘blameless’, as we might assume.

Rather, it means ‘standing in a right relationship with God’.

The righteous person, then, didn’t necessarily have to be perfect. King David, for example, was an adulterer and a murderer. Yet in Psalm 51 he expresses absolute confidence in God’s righteousness and his own restoration.

There’s nothing wrong with thinking you’re forgiven and put right with God. We think we’re forgiven.

The problem is revealed as we read on: they were ‘confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else’. And what this means is brought out further in the parable.

Two Jews went up to the Temple

Two Jews went up to the temple to pray. What is the difference between them?

They are both Jews, they are both circumcised, they both know the law and respect it. But one is a godfearing and upright man, and the other is a traitor, and probably a cheat, who makes a living acting as an agent for the occupying Roman authorities.

Think ‘tax inspector for Hitler’ and you’re in the right sort of territory.

The Pharisee’s prayer

But there is another difference, and that is in the way they pray. The Pharisee prays like this (v 11-12):

God, I thank you that I am not like other men — robbers, evildoers, adulterers — or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.

And everything he says is true. So what is he doing wrong? First, he is confident he has done nothing that would really be a barrier between him and God. He is not a robber, an evildoer or an adulterer. He cannot think of a reason why God would condemn him.

Secondly, he knows he is not like those who obviously do deserve God’s condemnation — like the tax-collector, for example.

And thirdly, he is diligent in observing the requirements of his religion, he fasts and observes the Sabbath (literally, he fasts ‘twice a Sabbath’), and he tithes. He can think of several reasons why God should accept him.

Undeserved forgiveness

Now look at the tax-collector and his prayer. We are told, v 13, he:

stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and prayed, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

And Jesus said,

I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God.

And that word ‘justified’ means ‘counted as righteous’. At the end of the parable, he is what the Pharisee thought he was: in a right relationship with God.

So what has he done right? Has he said, “I will try to do better?” Has he said, “I will go home and live a life of faith in response to God’s grace, on the basis of which I will be adjudged worthy of God’s kingdom?”

No, it’s not that either. What has he done that puts him in a right relationship with God?

The answer is, nothing. Or rather, everything he has done put him in a right relationship with God. He was ‘justified’ when he stood afar off, not lifting his eyes up to heaven, but beating on his breast and saying “God be merciful to me, a sinner.”

Justification and the new perspective

You see everything the Pharisee said about himself was true: he wasn’t a robber, or an evildoer or an adulterer. He wasn’t like the tax-collector and he was diligent in his religious observances.

But when he came to the Temple, what he should have done was stood afar off, beating on his breast and saying, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.”

And the fact that he didn’t shows that although Judaism was a religion teaching grace and faith, what actually happened was that people looked to themselves for a positive assurance of their relationship with God, instead of looking to God.

And that is what human beings have always done — that is why we had to have the Reformation, and why it wasn’t a mistake. Because even Christians can forget they have nothing to bring to God, and can start relying on what they are like and what they are doing.

And from there it is a very short step to contempt for others and pride in ourselves.

The outcome

You see, I said at the beginning that if we live according to this parable it will have a profound affect on us and on society.

How will it affect us? For ourselves, it will keep us humble and thankful.

Do we come to Holy Communion, for example, aware of our unworthiness, as the Prayer of Humble Access encourages us to be, or trusting in our own righteousness — glad that we haven’t committed any obvious sins this week, and that we’ve generally done right and been good?

If we understand this parable correctly, we will always come to communion knowing that here God welcomes the tax-collector and the sinner — in fact he really welcomes to Communion the person who thinks they are not worthy to take Communion.

And it will affect society. What will a society be like that is run by people who are more confident about their relationship with God when they can see the fruits of that relationship in their own lives?

It will either produce people who are burdened with anxiety, like Luther was before his own flash of insight, or they will be moralistic, self-righteous and in the end merciless.

By contrast, a society where we all know that we all stand before God as undeserving sinners in need of undeserved forgiveness will be a society where we forgive others their sins as we have been forgiven ours. And I know where I would rather live.

So let us close by praying that God will help us understand this parable, and even more that he will help us apply it to our lives.

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Sermon Notes: Luke 16:1-13 (15), The ‘Unjust Steward’

Just out of interest, I thought I'd post my sermon notes for Sunday on the 'parable of the unjust steward'. I sweated long and hard over this one, though in the end the sermon itself was quite straightforward. There are still puzzling things in the text, but I think I'd almost got the hang of it. As readers will see, I went beyond the set lectionary reading (I was preaching 'away') in order to round off the point of the parable. These are raw notes, so the preached version varied somewhat.

Introduction

Opening question: Is your money working hard for you?

Lots of people these days have investments, whether it's in shares or bonds or in the bricks and mortar of a house. We don’t just save money – we want our money to do a bit more, to make money.

As one advertiser puts it, it makes sense to make sure your money is working as hard as you do.

Jesus agrees

And Jesus agrees – you’ll be pleased to know.

Here in Luke’s gospel this morning he is talking about attitudes to salvation.

Back in chapter 15:1, we discover that he was talking to a crowd of tax collectors and sinners – people most people regarded as beyond salvation, or at least beyond the pale.

And we’re told in v 2 that the religious leadership were complaining about this, because instead of having a go at them, Jesus welcomed sinners and ate with them.

So he began to tell parables. First he told a parable about a man who lost a sheep – wouldn’t you rejoice if you’d lost a sheep and found it? So heaven rejoices over a lost sinner who is found.

Then he told a parable about a woman who lost a coin – wouldn’t you rejoice if you lost a coin and then found it?

Then he told a parable about a man who lost a son. Wouldn’t you rejoice if your wayward child came home? And don’t be like the brother who resented the fact that his father was so pleased.

All these parables were really directed at the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, grumbling about Jesus welcoming lost sinners who were coming to him.

Disciples

But then in chapter 16 we have a parable told to the disciples: Jesus’ followers who would later take on the same task of reaching the lost.

And this time the parable is not about a man who has lost a sheep or a woman who has lost a coin, or another man who has lost a son, but about a rich man who has a useless manager.

Please note, the parable is about the rich man, not the shrewd manager – it is his reaction we have to watch.

Recap

The story is simple, subtle and amusing. A rich man had a man managing his affairs who was useless, so he called him in for a staff review.

The manager realized the game was up, and that he would lost his management post. What was he to do? The answer was make friends while you can, call in the debtors and get them to rewrite their bills.

The question – as in each of the previous parables, is how is the man going to react? And what can we learn from this?

And the way he reacted is in v 8, and it is a bit of a surprise this time. We might expect rage. Jesus said, “The master commended the dishonest manager ...”

Two points to make here. There is no doubt (in my mind) that this is still the man in the parable, not Jesus, though actually it doesn’t really matter.

Secondly, the word ‘commended’ means almost ‘bragged about’, ‘boasted about’, ‘praised publicly’ – ‘Look, I’ve had this useless manager for years, but you’ve got to admire him in the end’.

And the reason is, Jesus says, because the rich man could recognize a shrewd man – a ‘wheeler-dealer’. Commending someone who has cheated you twice over is a strange reaction, but Jesus says

... the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light.

Warning

And that’s the message to us – or rather the warning. These guys doing the wheeler-dealing in the city, they all know what it takes to make money work for them.

But Christians are stupid when it comes to money and worldly wealth. He asks, “What are you doing with your money?” And most of us would say we’re investing it. And he would say, “Are you?”

In v 9, he says,

... use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.

And that’s the question: is your money working to gain you a place in heaven, or is it just making you more money? In fact, the question becomes, “Is your money working for you, or are you working for your money?”

We all like to think we are shrewd about money. But the disciple who is not investing their money in their heavenly future is not shrewd at all!

Parallels about wealth

And to bring this out, Jesus draws some parallels. In v 10, your trustworthiness in big things is measured by your trustworthiness in small things.

The contrast is not between ‘little’ and ‘much’, but what doesn’t matter and what does. And the parallel in v 11 draws this out: worldly wealth is not the same as true riches.

And v 12 makes a third point along the same lines. Your worldly wealth doesn’t even belong to you.

Someone was once told a rich man had died. He asked, “How much money did he leave?” The answer, “All of it.” And that’s how much you and I will leave – it is not ours. If it were, we could take it with us.

We can’t take it with us. But it could be we are going somewhere where we will be welcomed because of how we have made our money work for us, we will be given something of true value, and it will be ours to keep forever.

Working hard for the money

Donna Summer once sang a song titled, “She works hard for the money.” What she meant was, she works hard to earn money. But what a lot of us don’t realize is that we are working hard to serve money.

We think the money is working for us, but actually we are working for it. Jesus caps this parable with a saying in v 13:

No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.

And he uses an unusual word here – not ‘money’ but ‘Mammon’. He only uses it twice in his teaching: once in this saying and once in the parable where the NIV has ‘worldly wealth’.

Why does he use it? Because it gets across the idea that money easily takes on a life of its own, it becomes not just money but a force, a power, something that rules us, instead of us ruling it.

You see, we are like the master in the parable. If we were shrewd we would recognize the wisdom of money working for us, making us friends in the next world. Unfortunately, too often we become the servant of money itself.

Denoument

Now our set reading stops there, but we have to read on, because remember all this started with the reaction of the pharisees to Jesus welcoming sinners.

How do they react to this idea? V 14 tells us:

The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus.

And isn’t that going to be most people’s reaction. Try telling your mates at work, or your family, really our money should be working hard for us, making us friends in heaven.

Won’t they sneer at you? But what made it worse was these were the religious leaders. They ould find a way of squaring the circle. You can have God and you can be just the same as everyone else when it comes to money and material things.

They loved money, we are told, and yet they also wanted to appear to be looking forward to eternity – to the coming of God’s heavenly kingdom and to the place where our kind of money and wealth would be worthless.

Jesus said to them, v 15:

You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of men, but God knows your hearts. What is highly valued among men is detestable in God’s sight.

The Pope’s visit has raised the suggestion that the big challenge in our society is between aggressive atheism and faith. The big challenge Jesus raised was between half-hearted faith and wholehearted faith. As a disciple, I think this is a much bigger challenge to me. And I think the same is true for all of us.

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Hebrews: sliced and diced for preaching

One of life’s regular ‘chores’ is coming up with sermon series, sometimes for a long while ahead and covering quite long periods. We are already looking at the run-up to Christmas, and I therefore had to come up with no less than twenty-two slots!

Allowing for a couple of ‘specials’, this reduced to twenty — but still a lot. It occurred to me, however, that it has been a long time since we looked at Hebrews. The question then was how to ‘slice and dice’ the letter into a coherent and sufficient number of sections — not too long and not too short — for preaching on Sunday evenings.

Meanwhile, I’ve begun reading G K Beale’s The Temple and the Church’s Mission. This got me thinking about one way to divide up Hebrews, which resulted in the divisions and topics below.

The approach I’ve taken is to look at the letter as an exhortation to the people of the New Covenant to persevere in faith until we come to the true sanctuary of God and enter into our ‘heavenly’ rest by means of the effective sacrifice and priesthood of Jesus, the Son of God and Heir of Creation.

The proposed divisions and titles are as below. Hopefully they make clear the flow of the letter in this regard, and although some of the section divisions may seem unusual they seem to work quite well.

1-2:4               The Son of God and Heir of Creation

2:5-18             The Son and his brethren

3:1-19             The master of the house of rest

4:1-13             The goal of rest

4:14-5:14        A sympathetic priest

6:1-18             A promise to seize

6:19-7:28        A greater priesthood

8:1-13             The need for the new

9:1-14             The Old Covenant temple

9:15-23           The New Covenant blood

9:24-10:12      The New Covenant temple

10:13-25         The New Covenant life

10:26-39         Persevering in faith

11:1-16           Faith looking for fulfilment — from creation to Abraham

11:17-40         Faith waiting for us — from Abraham to the Exile

12:1-17           True sons and true heirs

12:18-29         Arriving at the true mountain

13:1-7             The true worship of God

13:8-16           The true priesthood of God

13:17-25         Summary — following your leaders

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Some (slightly rushed) thoughts for Trinity Sunday

(What I will be preaching later)

The Trinity — an embarrassing doctrine?

In the Church of England’s calendar, today is Trinity Sunday, but time was when the Church of England seemed to become a bit embarrassed about this.

Indeed the calendar was re-written so that Sundays after Trinity, which run from now until the run-up to Christmas became Sundays after Pentecost.

Pentecost seemed much more in keeping with the new mood of the Church. Pentecost was about experience — present experience of the Spirit in the life of the Church and the believer.

Trinity seemed to be about an obscure doctrine rooted in the Church’s past.

Pentecost was also up to date because of the charismatic movement. The Trinity was just old-fashioned.

On top of that, the Church had been through a period of academic doubt in the 1970s, with the publication of books like The Myth of God Incarnate, to which several prominent Anglican theologians had contributed.

This suggested that Jesus was never meant to be regarded — and certainly never thought of himself — as anything other than a human being, albeit one with an extraordinary sensitivity towards God.

But if Jesus was not God incarnate, then at least one person of the Trinity simply disappeared.

And then on top of that, the Trinity was so hard to explain, as anyone who’d ever invited Jehovah’s Witnesses into their living-room could testify. The evidence for the Trinity seemed to be obscure, and as anyone who has ever recited the Athanasian Creed would know, it all gets a bit tortuous and convoluted.

So for a time, the doctrine of the Trinity became something about which the Church was almost embarrassed. Certainly no-one was in a rush to take on the preaching slot on Trinity Sunday.

Not mathematics ...

One of the reasons for our problems with the Trinity was that the doctrine was always approached in terms of mathematics.

Hymns like ‘Three in one and one in three’ illustrate the problem. If God is one, how can God be three? If God is three, how can God be one?

One of the delights of Trinity Sunday was the various ways in which sermon illustrations would try and get round this. There was the Trinity as shamrock — three leaves on one plant. Or the Trinity as water, steam and ice — three forms of the same substance.

The basic problem with all these illustrations was that they overlooked one important factor — the Trinity is nothing like anything else. The Trinity is one of the things that is definitively ‘of God’ — something where you can’t compare God with anything else.

We should really save ourselves the effort of trying to find something like the Trinity, or trying to make it possible to understand the Trinity by comparing it with anything else.

... but relationship

There is, however, one important way in which we can begin to understand the Trinity in terms familiar to us.

This is something which actually comes from the Eastern churches. In recent years, people have begun to think about the Trinity less in terms of mathematics, more in terms of relationship.

We have to ask, why would anyone come with the doctrine of the Trinity in the first place. As we’ve already seen, it is a very complicated doctrine — unnecessarily complicated, we might say.

The answer lies in the revelation of Jesus — both what he was like and what he said. We get an idea of this from the prayer in John’s gospel that takes up John 17, and it begins with the very first verse:

After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed: “Father, the time has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you.”

The ‘father-son’ relationship points us towards the existence of the Trinity, and to its nature.

The eternal son

The idea of ‘son of God’ isn’t unique to the New Testament. In the Old Testament, the Messianic king was spoken of as God’s ‘son’. So the phrase in itself meant nothing more than someone in a special relationship with God.

But the way Jesus spoke about the father, clearly suggested a relationship beyond this. So in v 5, Jesus speaks to the Father about ‘the glory I had with you before the world began.’

This already hints at an eternal relationship — one that exists outside time. But it is not just the duration of the relationship that is special, but the quality. So twice in this passage, in vv 11 and 22, Jesus talks of himself and the father being ‘one’. And in v 21 he says to the Father, ‘you are in me and I am in you.’

To put it crudely, it is not just that the Father and the Son have been together a long time, but that they are intertwined. They are ‘one together’.

Perichoresis

The technical theological term for this is ‘perichoresis’. I think I’m right in saying it derives from a term meaning ‘dancing round’, but the core idea is that the identity of the persons in the Trinity arises from the relationship with the other persons.

It is easiest to understand this — if we can understand it at all — in the way we speak about ‘father’ and ‘son’.

You can be a person without needing other people. You can be a person on your own, and if the whole world were wiped out whilst you were up in a satellite orbiting the globe you’d still be a person.

But you cannot be a father without a child. You cannot be a son without a parent. So in the godhead, the father actually cannot be the father without the son, and vice versa. The persons of the Trinity are who they are because of the other persons.

And for them to be who they are eternally, the relationships have to be eternal. The father is only the eternal father if there is an eternal son, and vice versa, whilst the Spirit is also caught up in this.

Augustine thought of the Trinity as the eternal love between the Father and the Son. And he is certainly the Spirit who proceeds from the father through the Son.

The centrality of relationship

The Trinity, then, is to be understood relationally, and that lifts the Trinity out of being dry theory to vibrant practice, for if the Trinity is relationship, then relationships are of eternal and fundamental significance.

And this is something else we see in the prayer in John, for at the heart of it, Jesus is praying for his disciples to be caught up in the relationship of the Trinity.

The Trinity is a relationship of ‘oneness in many’, and so Jesus’ prayer is for oneness for the many disciples. In v 11 Jesus prays:

I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name —the name you gave me —so that they may be one as we are one.

This is much more than a ‘prayer for Christian unity’. It is a prayer for the divine character — the disciples are protected by the divine name given to Jesus and used, v 12, to protect them:

While I was with them, I protected them and kept them safe by that name you gave me.

Mission

The church is to be a community in which the divine character — the name of God — is present and recognized. And so this ‘oneness in many’ is also central to mission. So in vv 20-23, we read:

My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, ²¹ that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. ²² I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: ²³ I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

Oneness in many is to be the outcome of mission and the evidence of the truth. And all one can say to that is how very far the church has therefore fallen from the truth!

Transcending ourselves

I began by saying that the character of the Trinity is unique to God, and that is true. We cannot explain the Trinity because there is nothing to explain it by.

However, that is not to say that the character of the Trinity is therefore irrelevant to the world. On the contrary, I have tried to show briefly that it is of the very essence of the world in which we live.

At heart, the Trinity is relational — it is about the eternal interrelationships of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each being what each is because the others exist as who they are.

But the other thing we can say about the Trinitarian God, because God has revealed it to us, is that he seeks out other relationships, to draw others into oneness with one another and with himself.

In other words, the character of the Trinity drives both creation and salvation — it drives the mission of the Church. And so throughout the prayer of John 17, Jesus speaks of being sent by the Father — in 3,8,18,21,23 and 25, and therefore he sends the disciples, who remain in the world (vv 13-18) to continue what Jesus came to do.

And Jesus also speaks of returning to the Father, not in isolation, but preceding the disciples who will also be drawn into the relationship of the Trinity. So although he is no longer remaining in the world, he prays in v 24,

Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.

And v 21 expresses this same hope. The prayer is for all the disciples, present and future (and we may certainly add, past), that:

... all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us ...

The indescribable, indefinable Trinitarian relationship is ultimately to be shared. That is the what flows from the nature of that relationship, and that is what should inspire us in our mission for God.

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Expository notes on 1 Timothy 2:9-15

We are preaching through 1 Timothy on Sunday mornings, and I’ve been working on these notes for the benefit of our lay preachers. Given the effort involved, I thought I’d post them here.

As before, the key to preaching/interpreting this section of 1 Timothy is to set it in the context as a whole. Overall, this is the command to be given through Timothy in 1:3 that ‘certain men’ (undoubtedly, people in the Ephesian church) should cease teaching false doctrine that, according to 1:7, had something to do with the Old Testament law.

This false doctrine was imperilling the spiritual lives of individuals (1:6;19, cf 6:21). It was leading to ‘speculations’ (1:4 —NIV “controversies”), rather than encouraging faith in the gospel and the love which flows from it, and “meaningless talk” (cf 6:20, “godless chatter”), instead of true teaching and the testimony of the gospel.

The heart of this gospel is given in the ‘trustworthy saying’ of 1:15: that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, and the fact that one of the sinners saved was Paul, saved when he was persecuting the church, shows that it is all of grace.

Meanwhile, the false teaching was disrupting the church, and an internally disrupted church becomes a socially disruptive church, known for its faults, and disturbing the local community rather than acting as salt and light.

Thus at the beginning of chapter 2, Paul recalls the church to what it should be like: a community of prayer for the salvation of all people, because this is what God wants (2:4). They are saved through the mediatory death of Christ, which is itself the testimony born by Jesus (2:6 —which he upheld publicly before Pontius Pilate, 6:13, cf the kings and those in authority of 2:2). And from this flowed Paul’s (true) commission to preach the gospel of grace to the Gentiles — the gospel which Paul now wants re-emphasised in Ephesus.

The men, specifically and in particular, should be giving the lead here, not quarrelling amongst themselves but praying as Paul has instructed all should pray.

But why has Paul picked on the men? (The word in v 8 is anēr, which can be an adult male or a husband, but only rarely ‘people’, and certainly not here.)

He now goes on to address ‘women’ (NB, not ‘the women’). Clearly, therefore, there is something about the men as men that matters to what he is saying, and equally there is something about women as women.

The genders, however, are not treated by Paul in isolation but in relationship to one another. Almost invariably, where Paul speaks about or to men as men, it is in relation to women as women.

And so here: we must assume Paul speaks as he does to the men and the women because he has something to say about their relationship with one another — as indeed is born out in 2:12. But still, why this concern here?

The answer lies, I suggest, in the subject matter which begins in chapter 3 with the same words as began 1:15, “This is a trustworthy saying ...” It would be very easy to overlook the importance of this, and also its positioning in the flow of the text.

In 1:15 it introduces the central tenet of our faith. In 4:9 it introduces another fundamental statement about our faith (given in 4:10). In 3:1, then, it cannot merely be an aside, or a ‘please note’ comment. Rather, it is central to the points he is making.

He is writing the letter because false teaching is disrupting the church. How is the false teaching to be eliminated and replaced with true teaching which will stabilize the church and restore it to its proper role and function towards the world? 

Overall, what he is writing is about “how people ought to conduct themselves in God’s household, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth” (1 Ti 3:15). Central to this will be the “noble task” of the overseer. This is why he draws attention to this aspiration. But what should the overseer be like? The qualities to which Paul refers in chapter 3 are familial, relational, qualities (beginning with being “the husband of but one wife” — Lynn H. Cohick, Women in the World of the Earliest Christians, gives examples of polygamous marriages around this time). And this is why Paul has first had to deal with the individual qualities of men and women, addressing their weaknesses and failings.

Significantly, Paul did not go straight from the false teachers of chapter 1 to the ‘noble overseers’ of chapter 3. If he had, then those who thought of themselves as possible candidates to replace the false teachers might not have seen the faults prevalent throughout the whole church and, no doubt, affecting themselves. First, he has to recall the church to its true task of seeking the salvation of all people — this is why Christ died for sinners (1:15), and this is what God wants for everyone (2:4). The aspiring bishop must first know that is purpose behind the task to which he aspires.

The discussion of men and women is introduced first in this context. Before Paul can talk about the households from which the leaders should be drawn, he must talk about the failings of the men and women who individually and collectively comprise those households.

The failings of the men were addressed in 2:8 by the command to them to be leading in prayer, not taking up their time in the business of disputing amongst themselves.

The instructions to the women begin in 2:9 with a call to ‘clothe themselves’ appropriately. The English translations treat this first of all as a literal instruction about dress: “I also want women to dress modestly ...” (NIV). However, the section ends with an instruction which is clearly metaphorical: “... [dress] with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God” (2:10). 2:9, referring to the mode of dress also uses a word which is used at the end of v15 with reference to the manner of life: “propriety”.

Moreover, the verb translated “dress” elsewhere means “adorn”, “make oneself beautiful”:

For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their hope in God used to make themselves beautiful. (1 Pe 3:5, NB Peter refers to the godly qualities of the women as the means to this beautifying.)

I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. (Re 21:2)

I would suggest, then, that Paul begins his admonition to the women by calling on them to beautify themselves with the qualities of modesty (NIV “decency”) and propriety (not to ‘dress down’ with ‘modest clothing’) and to compliment this with outward “good deeds”. It is these qualities, not expensive clothing and hairstyles, which the women of the church should ‘display’ to the world, because they ought to accompany a profession of godliness (2:10). In other words, Paul does not encourage ‘dowdiness’, but he does encourage personal qualities as the thing which should be most sought after and most noticeable amongst the Christian women.

Secondly, what women are learning about the gospel should also not lead to them being a ‘disruptive’ force. In those times women sometimes did learn ‘esoteric’ subjects, such as religion and philosophy (see Cohick, op cit). As we see later, however (5:13), some were not putting this new learning to good use.

Such instruction and learning, however, generally took place in the home or homes of disciples (see 2 Tim 3:6), and would have been much more personal than the situations we tend to envisage when we think of ‘teaching’. And one thing Paul does not allow is that (at very least in that context) a woman should instruct a man.

Why not? Modesty and propriety might have something to do with it, but so too does the fundamental relationship of men and women. It is possible that Paul means no woman should instruct any man. It seems more likely, however, that he means no wife should instruct her husband (NB the change from plural to singular: “a woman to teach or to have authority over a man”), or perhaps (also?) someone else’s husband.

For Paul, Adam and Eve are the archetypal ‘couple’ (compare 1 Cor 11:3-12; Eph 5:31). In the creation order, Eve was formed as the companion to Adam and (as Eph 5 indicates) their relationship ought to have modelled or imaged that of Christ and the Church, just as every marriage ought to now. The Fall, moreover, entailed some reversal of this ordering. Adam “listened to” (ie obeyed) his wife (Ge 3:17) — and apparently was silent when the encounter with the snake took place (Ge 3:6). There is thus not only an impropriety in a woman exercising authority over a man but a danger in the man being on the receiving end of this.

In the context, we should, I suggest, see this as addressing the issue of what godly families should be like, and indeed Paul ends with a reference to such. The meaning of ‘being saved through childbearing’ is difficult, but most likely it refers to the life of the godly household and partnership. In 5:10, the godly widow is “well known for her good deeds, such as bringing up children (teknotropheō, compare 2:15, teknogonia)”.

In short, we have here instructions for the example women should set in the community and the life they should lead in the family.

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Sermons: Joshua 1-2, 3-4

We have started a new series on the book of Joshua, to take us up to Christmas (no, there is no obvious link!).

Joshua 1-2 can be downloaded here and 1-2 can be listened to inline here (excuse the fact that I keep calling Rahab Rachel!)

Joshua 3-4 can be downloaded here and 3-4 listened to inline here.


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The First Chapter of Ruth

On Sunday evening I was very pleased to begin our new sermon series on Ruth. Unfortunately, I've had to step aside to let others do the next two chapters! I really would like to have done this myself as it is such a fascinating book, but meanwhile here is the first chapter for downloading. The download should open in a new window and the file is about 7mb.

Alternatively you can 'stream' it here (listen to it 'live').

John Richardson

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