The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

But we get a totally different picture of salvation, faith, and forgiveness if we regard having life from the kingdom of the heavens now—the eternal kind of life—as the target.

We who profess Christianity will believe what is constantly presented to us as gospel. If gospels of sin management are preached, they are what Christians will believe. And those in the wider world who reject those gospels will believe that what they have rejected is the gospel of Jesus Christ himself—when, in fact, they haven’t yet heard it. And s

Indeed, in the current world of accepted knowledge one can’t even know the truth of a moral theory or principle, much less a specific rule. You could never grade someone for holding Utilitarianism or Kantianism to be true or false. One can only know about such theories and principles, and think about them in more or less clever ways. You can bright

One of the most influential writers in the conservative camp today is John MacArthur. He has defended the view that you cannot have a “saving” faith in Jesus Christ without also intending to obey his teachings. You must accept him as Lord, hence the name Lordship salvation.9

In other words, if he were to come today he could very well do what you do. He could very well live in your apartment or house, hold down your job, have your education and life prospects, and live within your family, surroundings, and time. None of this would be the least hindrance to the eternal kind of life that was his by nature and becomes avai

The best translation of dikaiosune would be a paraphrase: something like “what that is about a person that makes him or her really right or good.” For short, we might say “true inner goodness.” Plato (following Socrates) tries to give a precise and full account of what this true inner goodness is.

The sensed irrelevance of what God is doing to what makes up our lives is the foundational flaw in the existence of multitudes of professing Christians today. They have been led to believe that God, for some unfathomable reason, just thinks it appropriate to transfer credit from Christ’s merit account to ours, and to wipe out our sin debt, upon ins

Going to the source of action is a major part of what he has in mind by saying that one must “go beyond the goodness of scribes and Pharisees.” One must surpass humanly contrived religious respectability “if one is to mesh their life with the flow of the kingdom of the heavens” (5:20).

The Gospel on the Right