Gentle and Lowly

What’s the meaning of everything? What’s the telos, the aim, the macro reason and goal, for our small, ordinary lives? We are on solid footing, both biblically and historically, if we answer: “To glorify God.”

New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham notes that while Psalm 22:1 (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) was originally written in Hebrew, Jesus spoke it in Aramaic and thus was personally appropriating it.3 Jesus wasn’t simply repeating David’s experience of a thousand years earlier as a convenient parallel expression. Rather, every anguis

“So that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus”—what does that mean, for those in Christ? It means that one day God is going to walk us through the wardrobe into Narnia, and we will stand there, paralyzed with joy, wonder, astonishment, and relief. It means that as we stand there

Christ was sent not to mend wounded people or wake sleepy people or advise confused people or inspire bored people or spur on lazy people or educate ignorant people, but to raise dead people.

Have you considered what is true of you if you are in Christ? In order for you to fall short of loving embrace into the heart of Christ both now and into eternity, Christ himself would have to be pulled down out of heaven and put back in the grave. His death and resurrection make it just for Christ never to cast out his own, no matter how often the

But this is Christological error, if not outright heresy. The Son of God clothed himself with humanity and will never unclothe himself. He became a man and always will be. This is the significance of the doctrine of Christ’s ascension: he went into heaven with the very body, reflecting his full humanity, that was raised out of the tomb. He is and a

One way to think of Christ’s intercession, then, is simply this: Jesus is praying for you right now. “It is a consoling thought,” wrote theologian Louis Berkhof, “that Christ is praying for us, even when we are negligent in our prayer life.”4 Our prayer life stinks most of the time. But what if you heard Jesus praying aloud for you in the next room

One implication of this truth of Christ’s permanent humanity is that when we see the feeling and passions and affections of the incarnate Christ toward sinners and sufferers as given to us in the four Gospels, we are seeing who Jesus is for us today. The Son has not retreated back into the disembodied divine state in which he existed before he took