The quiet in the land thought of the Kingdom in terms of quiet devotion to God, in prayer to him, waiting for him, and. Still further, and again inextricably connected with the Kingdom and the Messiah, was the conception of the Day of the Lord.
Many Witnesses, One Lord by William Barclay
John
Their answer was that this is the work of the Logos, the mind of God operating in the world. Let us again remind ourselves who the Logos is -- the Logos is the perfect expression of the mind of God.
Paul
What then is the use of the Law and the place of the Law in the new scheme of things. We have seen that the existence of the covenant relationship depended on the keeping of the Law.
The Letter To The Hebrews
The argument of the writer to the Hebrews is that Jesus is the only one in whom there is free and open access to reality and to God. Central to the thought of the writer to the Hebrews is the idea of the covenant, and in this connection he uses two other terms about Jesus. Quite clearly, for all its greatness this covenant is very imperfect. a) The Law is bound to be broken.
Being mortal men, they are born and die, and come and go with no permanency (7:23). c) The sacrifices of the old covenant are clearly ineffective, because day in and day out they have to be made over and over again. It is the claim of the writer to the Hebrews that that new covenant has come in Jesus Christ. Here a new and unknown priesthood is described, a priesthood which, as the writer to the Hebrews saw it, was the forecast and the symbol of the priesthood of Jesus Christ.
Let us then follow the argument of the writer to the Hebrews in chapter 7 to see what these passages say to him about the priesthood of Jesus Christ and its superiority to the existing levitical priesthood. Every stone in the edifice shows the superiority of the priesthood according to the order of Melchizedek to the levitical priesthood. The writer to the Hebrews had an almost unique sense of the total adequacy of the work of Jesus Christ.
James
They were apt to make plans in which God was left out of the reckoning (4:13-17). Riches are a perishing commodity, as evanescent as the flower doomed to wither in the heat of the sun (1:10, 11). 34;A man is not justified by works of the Law but by faith in Jesus Christ.
There is even a treasury of merit and the works of the patriarchs and the prophets will be. Alms is a good offering in the sight of the Most High for all that give it.(Tobit 4:7-11). All this is of the first importance, for it is quite clear that in the highest Jewish thought works are love in action, works are caring for our fellow- men.
For James works are very nearly exactly what Paul meant by the fruit of the Spirit. It is even more possible that what roused James's wrath was a. misinterpretation of the meaning of the word faith. It is maybe even more likely that Paul and James are speaking about different stages of the Christian faith.
First Peter
To put it very crudely, Peter is vividly aware of the propaganda value of the Christian life. He began by following Jesus and in that following had a progressive experience of the wonder of Jesus Christ. So then to Peter Jesus is the Guardian and the Protector of the souls of men.
It can easily be seen that Peter has a far more than exemplarist view of the work of Jesus Christ. Suffering, as Peter sees it, is not something which should come to the Christian as a surprise; it is an integral and inevitable part of the. And this is all the more so because the eyes of the Christian are ever upon the beyond.
It is on the basis of these and certain other NT passages that the doctrine of the Descent into Hell is founded. It is to that place of the dead that the doctrine originally held that Jesus went between his crucifixion and his resurrection. Assuming then that the passage does mean that Jesus went to the place of the dead, what interpretations of it have been suggested.
The Letter Of John
The ever-recurring note of the letter is recall to that which is already known. As the emanations grow more distant from the true God they grow more ignorant of the true God. At the end of the series there comes a power distant from, ignorant of, hostile to, the true God and that. power is the creator of the world. evolution is from divinity downwards.".
The spirit of man is imprisoned in the evil flesh of the body, and only a special kind of knowledge can enable the spirit to escape from the body. No Gnostic could possibly believe in a real incarnation; he could not believe that the Son of the true God could ever take upon himself a body which is essentially evil. The heretics denied the fulness of the incarnation; they refused to believe that Jesus came in the flesh (4:2, 3).
Fourth Gospel and see again the greatness of the promise of the Spirit in the fourteenth and the sixteenth chapters. It should be possible for the man of the world to look at the man of Christ and to be compelled to say: "Here is life such as I have never known and life which I want to know.". Above and beyond all else, there is the test of love. 34;By this it may be seen who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil;.
II Peter and Jude
Heretics and orthodox alike sought for their writings the lustre of the great names of the past. Its writer had intended to write a treatise on the Christian faith, but he had had to lay it aside to take up his pen to deal with this evil thing which had come into the life of the Church (3). This was typical of the Gnostics, who had to supply each of their acons and their emanations with a genealogy and a history.
But the Day of the Lord is inevitably on its way and will burst upon them in destruction and in judgment. There are those who are the enemies of the Cross of Christ, whose god is their belly, and who glory in their shame. It will quote such a saying of Paul as: "Christ is the end of the law, that.
The Gnostics allowed this immorality on three grounds: (i) Spiritual things are provided for the spiritual nature and carnal things for the carnal nature; the carnal nature legitimately and properly expresses itself in the things of the flesh. ii). We have already seen in our examination of the principles of Gnosticism that the Gnostics believed that the world was created by an inferior god,. Not infrequently they took a further step and identified this hostile and ignorant god with the God of the Old Testament, who is said to have created the world.
The Revelation
It is the God of the holy prophets who sends his angel with the message (22:6). Apocalyptic belongs to the library rather than the market-place, and smells of the lamp. The hope and the prayer of the John of the Revelation is for the complete and total destruction of Rome.
In that year in the city of Smyrna there was erected the first temple of the divinity of Rome. We get this specially in the picture of the Beast in the notorious thirteenth chapter of the Revelation. 1.There is the Prologue in chapter I, which tells of the situation in the life of John in which the book was written.
At the end of the Millennium there is one grand conflict to end all conflicts. Commonest of all was the idea that the age of the world would correspond to the time taken for creation. The Revelation therefore lays down the majestic resources of the Christian in any rime of trouble.
The Kerugma
This first statement of the kerugma arises from a basic line of Jewish thought which we have noted before. So then this initial statement of the kerugma lays down three things. a) With the coming of Jesus Christ something new has happened. The coming of Jesus Christ does not mean simply an alteration, or. adjustment, or even a reformation of the existing order.
It is the fulfilment of all the hopes and dreams and visions which the Spirit of God has put into the minds and hearts of men in all the ages of the past. To the human situation he brings power, power to deal with the sin, the sorrow, the suffering of the human situation. It was with the figure of the victorious and the ever- living Christ that they confronted men.
The chosen people are those of every race and nation who have taken Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord. d)The mark of the new community is the possession of the Spirit. That which is offered is the life of the Age to Come or eternal life. That is to say, what is offered is a foretaste here and now of the divine life of God.
Preaching The New Testament Today
There is kerugma, which is the uncompromising statement of the facts of the Christian faith. In other words, there is the development of the kerugma into Christian theology and Christian ethics. There is homilia, which is the treatment of any subject in the light of the Christian message.
There is an equally large, if not still greater, amount of paraklesis, of the kind of exhortation which is a kind of Christian pep-talk. There is not a great deal of kerugma, for it is a strange feature of the Christian message today that it has become apologetic -- in both senses of the word -- rather than dogmatic -- again in both senses of the term. But the real disaster of the situation is the absence of didache, the neglect of the teaching ministry of the Church.
The great characteristic of the language and the thought of the NT is that it was completely contemporary. And further, it is the supreme characteristic of the NT that it uses categories of thought which were completely familiar to the people to whom it spoke. One of the worst of all mistakes is to standardize one religious experience, and to.