My Kindle Books

I have some books and booklets available on Kindle covering a range of topics. Please have a look at them and feel free to purchase, review or recommend them to others. 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Singing-Hymns-Reformed-Worship-Miller-ebook/dp/B07S2V6DJ5/

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B086WRGBNX

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08T6T5R4M

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Women-Church-Leadership-Reformed-Egalitarian-ebook/dp/B09GNQYT5Z/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/My-Moments-Days-Reflections-Christian-ebook/dp/B0DGBRGZRZ/

 

Loyal Love

 I always enjoy the material from The Bible Project and this short video on a key Old Testament word, chesed or khesed, is no exception.

The word is a rich one, with English translations employing a wide variety of options to try to capture the scope of this rich Hebrew word.

The word occurs nearly 250 times in the Old Testament. Just within the King James Version alone, it is translated as: 'mercy' (149 times), 'kindness' (40 times), 'lovingkindness' (30 times) and 'goodness' (12 times) and several other variants.

Modern versions also utilise many different renderings to try to capture the sense of the word. If we look at a single test verse, 1 Kings 8:23, it reads (my translation): 'And he said, O Yahweh, the God of Israel, there is no God like you, in heaven above or on earth below. You keep covenant and lovingkindness [chesed] with your servants who walk before you wholeheartedly.'

In other versions, the word in bold 'lovingkindess' is rendered:

• mercy (KJV, NKJV)
• lovingkindness (ASV, NASB95)
• loyalty (CEB)
• steadfast love (RSV, NRSV, ESV)
• love (NIV, Good News)
• gracious love (ISV)
• loyal love (Lexham, 
• faithfulness (NASB)
• covenantal loyalty (NET)
• unfailing love (NLT)
• kindness (LSV)
• constant love (REB)
• loving-commitment (The Scriptures)

 From these a number of elements are clear enough:

• There is an element of emotion conveyed by 'love' and 'kindness'.
  
• There is an element of commitment conveyed by 'loyalty' and 'faithfulness'
• There is an element of constancy. This love is 'steadfast', 'unfailing' and 'constant'
• There is an element of this love being undeserved. It is 'gracious' and 'merciful'

That this is the love that God has for his people. This is his covenant love. It is no mere cold legal agreement - it is a loving commitment. It never fails. God remains faithful and loyal to his covennat promises at all times. And perhaps most wondrous of all, it is a love that we can never merit or deserve. 

This Old Testament language carries over in the New Testament concept of agape love. It is the same love Paul spoke about in 1 Corinthians 13 where we could easily substitute the Old Testament concept of chesed for the word agape in Greek which Paul used:

'Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.' (1 Cor. 13:4-8, ESV)

Pentecost

The Spirit of God had been active in the world since the beginning of creation. In the second verse of the Bible we read: 'The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters' (Genesis 1:2). Throughout the Old Testament and the Gospels, the Holy Spirit is mentioned numerous times. So, the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the believers on the day of Pentecost was not the coming of someone who had never before been active on earth.

What was different about the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost was not so much the fact that the Holy Spirit came to people, not so much the fact of his coming, but the permanence of his coming. At other times, the Holy Spirit came upon believers at significant times in their spiritual life. Indeed the Holy Spirit was seen to alight on the Lord Jesus at his baptism (Mark 1:9-11) when Jesus began his public ministry. What was different about the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was that the Spirit now came upon all believers—'they were all filled with the Holy Spirit' (Acts 2:4) and that the Holy Spirit now came to make his home inside believers, coming alongside them and residing in them as the helper, guide, comforter and advocate (the 'paraclete' that Jesus promised his people—John 16:7).

The Holy Spirit does not only work in the hearts of some who believe in Christ. He is with and in everyone, including you, if you trust and follow the Lord Jesus.

This is not something to make us worried or afraid. It is something to rejoice in. In the coming of Christ, he is Emmanuel, 'God with us'. In the coming of the Holy Spirit, he is 'God in us.' And so we can know we are never far from God because God is never far from us. Indeed, he is as close to us as the minds in our heads and the hearts in our chests. And he is in us to work God's love and holiness in us, to make us more and more like the Lord Jesus. So, let us welcome him afresh today and seek to follow his guiding light in us as he helps us better understand the Word of God and the Saviour to whom the Scriptures testify.

Why did God create the World?

 John Piper offers a God-glorifying answer to this profound question in the following sermon:

 

https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/why-did-god-create-the-world

Is the Righteousness of God the Gift of Righteousness?

Is the Righteousness of God the Gift of Righteousness?

Another interesting article on the "righteousness of God" - a key phrase, especially in Paul's Letter to the Romans.

I think the view Bird explains here is probably the correct one. The phrase means "a righteous status from God." Bird's article gives those of us who take this, the classic Protestant line, some food for thought though!

Is the Righteousness of God, God's Covenant Faithfulness?

Is the Righteousness of God, God's Covenant Faithfulness?

Anyone vaguely familiar with the New Perspective on Paul and N. T. Wright's views on 'the righteousness of God' in Paul's letters (specifically Romans and Galatians) will find this article by Michael F. Bird interesting.

The King Rises

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

With these words, Christians all over the world will begin the celebration of Easter.

Please read Luke 24:1–12

Most Jews in New Testament times probably believed in resurrection, which is the concept that the dead will rise in their bodies from the grave to have a new life with God. But what they believed in was a general resurrection of all the dead at the end of time. No one expected that for one man the resurrection would happen, not at the end of the world, but right in the middle of human history.

But early on the Sunday morning, on the third day after Jesus was crucified, died and was buried, that's exactly what happened. When it did, nothing would ever be the same again.

In the evangelical tradition, the focus tends to be on the cross rather the resurrection. Yes we believe in the resurrection and we focus on the bodily resurrection in contrast with the liberals who deny it. But I don't think we actually grasp the importance of the resurrection all that well. If we're not careful the resurrection can become merely the happy ending after Good Friday, the evidence that the sacrifice of the cross worked. Yet in New Testament terms the cross and resurrection go together as parts of Christ's saving work.

We need to really take hold of this: Christ's death took our sins away, but Christ's resurrection brings us new life. Salvation in biblical terms is about far more than sin management or sin removal, it is about transformation from what we were to what we will be. For that we need more than pardon or forgiveness, amazing though these blessings are. We need to draw new kind of life, eternal life, from Christ's own resurrection life. That's what happens when enter into a living relationship with the risen Christ. When we believe in him, we enter into union with him, so that his death becomes ours and takes our sins away, and his resurrection life becomes ours as well. When that life flows into us, it begins a process of changing us from the inside out. We start to become the kind of people God always wanted us to be. We need more than for the slate to be wiped clean. We need to replace the slate altogether with a new iPad. And that's what the resurrection means in spiritual terms for us.

Paul wrote in Romans 4:25 (Good News Bible): "Because of our sins he was given over to die, and he was raised to life in order to put us right with God."

Happy Easter to all my readers!

The King's Tomb

Please read Mark 15:42–47
 
The Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday is very much the forgotten day of Holy Week. In Christian tradition it is usually called either "Holy Saturday," "Easter Eve," or sometimes "Black Saturday." It is the day when the body of Jesus lay in the tomb after his burial late on the Friday afternoon and the earth-shattering events of the Sunday morning.

The Gospels tell us the tomb where Jesus was buried belonged to a wealthy and influential citizen of Jerusalem called Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin. He had been a secret disciple of Jesus, yet after Jesus had died, when the other disciples fled, it is Joseph of Arimathea who "comes out" as one of Jesus' followers and he went to Pontius Pilate to take custody of the dead body. Joseph then used the tomb he had presumably purchased for his own use when the time came and laid Jesus to rest in it instead. This in itself is an extraordinary act of service and love that Joseph showed to his Saviour.

The question often asked is what happened to Jesus in between his death and resurrection while his body was in the tomb. What was going on when his body lay in the tomb? The traditional version of the Apostles' Creed says that after being "crucified, dead and buried, He descended into hell." There is no real biblical evidence for this credal statement however. Modern versions of the Creed sometimes change this to "He descended to the dead" or "to the realm of the dead" which ties in with the idea of Hades as simply the place where the dead go, rather than a place where they go to be punished as Hell (or Gehenna) suggests.

This raises the whole question of what theologians call "the intermediate state" between death and resurrection for all of us. It is too big a subject to go into in any detail here, but I think the correct view is that for us when a Christian dies their soul goes at once to a part of heaven and they are consciously in the presence of Jesus. When non-Christians die their souls go to a place usually called Sheol in Hebrew or Hades in Greek. It is not "Hell" as we think of it, but a sort of shadowy waiting place where their souls dwell until the last judgment. Hell, whatever it is, is only entered into after the judgment at the end of time.

But what about Jesus when he died? One biblical piece of evidence is that on the cross, Jesus said the thief, "Today, you will be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43). This would suggest that Jesus went to "Paradise" after he died. So what is Paradise? Well if we look at 2 Corinthians 12 we see that Paul calls the same place "heaven" and "paradise" so it would seem that Paradise is another word for heaven or at least a part of heaven. So after he died, Christ both in a part of heaven and in the realm of the dead, but not hell according to Scripture.

My own view, tentatively held, is that all the dead go to Hades, but part of Hades somehow overlaps with and is touched by heaven and is this place is called Paradise. Only those who are right with God can go there and they are in God's presence there. The word "paradise" comes from the Persian language and means a "walled garden" - which could mean it is both in Hades, but separated from the main part of Hades. If this is the case, then it is possible to affirm both that Christ was in Paradise while he was dead, but also that he descended to the realm of the dead or descended to Hades. He may even have been able to visit all parts of Hades, not just Paradise as 1 Peter 4:6 suggests.

But all this is not something I would be at all dogmatic about!

The important point is that Jesus was really dead, really buried, and really went to the realm where the dead go to show it. But only until the third day came...

The King Dies

Please read Matthew 27:33–53
 
Today is Good Friday, the most solemn day in the Christian year when we mark the crucifixion and death of Jesus. At a purely human level, the cross remains a shocking and sad event. The death of a young man, murdered by his powerful enemies, convicted of a crime he didn't commit, tortured to death, an idealist who paid the ultimate price for this principles of love, justice and freedom. Because of all this I hesitated to say that Christians "celebrate" Good Friday. We commemorate it and we are profoundly moved by it, but it is hard to celebrate a man's bloody and brutal murder. These are what we might call the "human interest" elements to the story and they tend to be the focus of dramatic treatments of Christ's death whether in paintings or in cinema.

Yet the Bible's focus is not so much on the human interest elements as on the theological meaning of the death of Jesus. It is in the profound spiritual truths of what Christ's death accomplished as atonement or reconciliation with God, expiation of sin, propitiation of wrath, redemption from slavery, victory over Satan, release from punishment and deliverance from death (to name just some things that the New Testament says the cross of Jesus Christ has done for us) that the death of Jesus finds its true meaning. It is because of what the cross means for broken and guilty humanity that it is transformed from the waste of a good life to the greatest use of a good life that has ever or could ever happen.

He died that we might be forgiven,
He died to make us good,
That we might go at last to heaven,
Saved by His precious blood.

The question the death of Jesus poses to you today is this: will his death have been in vain for you or not? Because the true meaning of the death of Jesus can only be fulfilled in the lives of those who are in spiritual union with him, and the benefits of what Christ has achieved on the cross are only shared with those who want them. Do you want forgiveness for your past and transformation for your future? Do you want a relationship with God through Jesus? That's what Christ is even now offering you through the cross. To accept it he only looks for you to trust and follow him in faith. This Good Friday, let the King's death change your life forever.

The King's Feast

Please read Mark 14:12–26
 
The Thursday of Holy Week is often known as "Maundy Thursday." Maundy is an old word for the ritual of footwashing. It was on the Thursday of Jesus' last week that he washed the disciples feet to show the need for Christians to serve each other. Some Christian traditions still have footwashing as a ritual to show our humility and duty of service to others, especially our duty to the poor. (This is the origin of the monarch distributing "Maundy Money" today.)

But this post is about another rite that Christ introduced on the same day; one which is observed by almost all Christians - the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, also known as the Eucharist (Thanksgiving) or Holy Communion, or as we might also call it "The King's Feast."

Imagine the scene in the upper room that Thursday night. The disciples have gathered with Jesus to celebrate the Passover meal, just as they had every year since boyhood. They had probably eaten this special meal twenty, thirty or forty times before on previous Passovers. It's as traditional to them as Christmas dinner is to us. Then, in the middle of the meal, Jesus does something totally new and unexpected. He switches from commemorating, through the meal of roast lamb, the exodus from Egypt in Moses' time and now looks forward to a new exodus - a new deliverance for God's people - through his own death as the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.

The meal is as simple as possible. Bread and wine. Bread symbolising Christ's body broken for us on the cross; wine symbolising Christ's red blood poured out to seal a new covenant between God and his people. The eating and drinking of the bread and wine symbolising the living relationship of faith and obedience that depends on Christ and draws on Christ for spiritual nourishment and life. And the sharing of the loaf and cup with fellow believers symbolising our unity and comradeship as Christian pilgrims on the Way together.

A simple meal of bread and wine and yet the greatest feast this world affords and the foretaste of the great King's feast to come when Christ returns in glory.