Most of us want a guarantee of something before we’re willing to step forward into whatever that something is.
I’ll take this medicine if it can be shown that it has worked for others. I’ll buy this car if other owners of the same type of car like it. I’ll take this job if they can guarantee that I won’t be laid off in the next year.
We want a promise or even a sign proving to us that someone or something is reliable. And the thing is we’re not that different from those in the first century.
One of the ways people throughout the history of the church have come to understand the individual themes and the overall story of the Bible is by looking at the ways biblical authors related to one another’s writings. They quote, allude, and echo back to specific statements and more fluid ideas their contemporaries have made in the past. It seems they do this because God is the ultimate author of Scripture and because the writers themselves were soaked in the story they were moving forward with their writings.
What is life when it looks as if everything is coming undone at the seams?
For Job, life was like a house built upon the solid rock of a particular theological truth. A truth that stands behind and underneath every terrible, horrible, awful thing that comes into our lives. The rock upon which Job saw his house built was this: God is behind the trouble.
Isn’t it amazing to think about the fact that you can open a Bible at home, on break at work, on your phone while your standing in line at the store and in that same moment be reading the very words of God?
What God has done for us with the Bible is not unlike what he did for us through the birth of Jesus. On Christmas we celebrate the truth that God stepped down into creation in the person of the Son. Matthew tells us that at that point in history God was “with us” like never before.
What a remarkable thing it is to have the angels of God rejoicing because a sinner has repented of their life thus far! Could it be, though, that there’s an even more remarkable thing going on in this verse that is often not noticed? Before we get there, let’s track (at least for a moment) what comes before verse 10.
As Jesus began to pray to his Father in John 17 he did so with two major goals in mind: 1) being glorified so he could glorify the Father and 2) eternal life by way of knowledge for those given to him. For this short article I want to focus in on the second major goal of Jesus—eternal life by knowledge.
How are we to view those who try to lead the church astray?
Some see people who bring a different teaching that isn’t orthodox as a gift to the church because they’re rescuing her from her old way of thinking. Some view these so-called teachers as doing nothing more than trying to help those trapped in a system of thought and a way of viewing the world that is abhorrent to the rest of mankind. They’re here to help; not to harm.
The Apostle John can write generically and specifically within the same sentence (as he often does throughout his gospel and his letters). Here, he writes that God gave his one and only Son. In the context, God is clearly the Father; however, even though we know in the specific sense that God is the Father we shouldn’t ignore the general fact that God has given something. If we solely focus on the Father giving his Son, we can forget that God has given of himself.