Peter Misselbrook's Blog
Oct 28 2019 - Isaiah 59 – The arm of the Lord

Israel's iniquities had separated them from God (v. 2) and brought about their exile from the land of promise. Verses 3-11 describe their iniquity in graphic detail. Isaiah 59:7-8 is quoted by the Apostle Paul in Romans 3:17 in his catalogue of Old Testament texts aimed at demonstrating that Jews who received the Law and Gentiles who had not known the Law have all alike rebelled against God and gone their own way; every mouth is forced to be silent as "the whole world [is] held accountable to God" (Romans 3:19).

In Isaiah 59, Israel makes her own confession before God:

Our offences are many in your sight, and our sins testify against us.
Our offences are ever with us, and we acknowledge our iniquities. (v. 12)

In verse 16, the Lord is pictured as looking around for someone who would be able to intervene – someone to heal the hurt of his people, rescue them from captivity and transform them from rebels into willing servants. But the Lord can find no one capable of such a task:

He was appalled that there was no one to intervene;
so his own arm achieved salvation for him,
    and his own righteousness sustained him (v. 16).

No one but the Lord himself has the power to save and transform this people. The Lord himself has to come to their aid. The chapter began with the assertion, "Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear" (v. 1), and now the Lord has stretched out his arm to save and to display his righteousness which reaches down (see v. 9) to rescue his people. This righteousness is displayed in God's vengeance executed on those who have held his people captive (vv. 17-18). The Lord will redeem his people and re-establish his covenant with them. Nor will they turn away from him again, for he will give them his Spirit to dwell in them so that his word is found in their hearts and upon their lips. They, their children and their children's children will serve the Lord rather than turning to idols (v. 21).

These verses find their ultimate fulfilment in the Lord Jesus Christ. As we have seen, verses from this chapter in Isaiah are quoted by the Apostle Paul as part of his argument that finds its conclusion in the assertion, "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). But Paul's whole purpose is to move from disease to remedy and so he continues by asserting, "all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood – to be received by faith" (Romans 3:24-25).

Jesus is the one in whom God has acted for our salvation. No human prophet or teacher or any other "hero" could have done this. Our salvation required the intervention of God himself in the person of his Son. He, the Suffering Servant has borne our iniquities and suffered the judgment our sins deserved. He has risen triumphant over sin and death. In his death and resurrection, Jesus has displayed the righteousness of God: "He did this to demonstrate his righteousness … so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus" (Romans 3:25-26). God's righteous anger against sin is satisfied and at the same time, those placing their faith in Jesus, though by nature rebels against God, are declared righteous in his sight and are embraced as his children.

Nor is that the end of the story for we whom God has saved through his Son are given the Spirit of his Son that we might learn to delight in doing the Father's will even as did Jesus.

Triune God, we thank you that when we were lost in sin and unable to save ourselves you came to our rescue in the Lord Jesus Christ. Help us now to live by the power of your Spirit and to make your service our delight. Help us always to be clothed with the breastplate of righteousness and helmet of salvation.

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Oct 28 2020 - John 1:1-28 – The Word made flesh

John begins his account of the life of Jesus in a very different manner from all the other Gospel writers. Mark begins his Gospel with the ministry of John the Baptist. Matthew begins with the family tree of Jesus, tracing his ancestors all the way back to Abraham – Jesus is the one in whom God's promises to Abraham and David will at last find their fulfilment. Luke traces Jesus family all the way back to Adam – Jesus is the one who has come to put right all that went wrong when sin entered into God's creation; he is the Saviour of the world. But John takes us back even further, to the time before the world was made; he begins his Gospel with a deliberate echo of the account of creation with which God's Word, the Bible, begins.

Jesus is the Word made flesh; he is God incarnate. He is the power through whom all things were created and the means by which God makes himself known to his creation – the one in whom the entire revelation of God finds its focus and clearest expression. He is the source of all life; he has come into a dying world to give it life. He has become part of the world he created that it might be created anew.

This is the wonder of the gospel. God has not remained far off but has come to us in his grace and mercy in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. He has come as the Word, come to communicate himself and make himself known. He has come to show us the glory of God but he has also come in grace to save. "The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ" (John 1:17). He is the truth in that he is the one who fulfils all that was written beforehand and who brings to fulfilment all of the symbols of the Old Testament – he is the truth of which they were the shadow. Above all, he reveals God as a God of amazing grace – a God who forgives the sinner at cost to himself. And through the fullness of God's self-revelation in Jesus we receive "grace upon grace" (1:16) – a never-failing stream of grace to meet us in all our need.

How are we going to respond to the God who stoops and speaks and saves – the God whose revelation of himself in all the Scriptures now finds its focus and fulfilment in Jesus? We can turn away from the light and skulk in the darkness of our own ignorance and rebellion, but that will be to our loss. Or we can come to the light, embracing Jesus as our light, our hope, our salvation.

Embracing him in faith gives us the power to become children of God. This is no mere acquisition of a title - 'the right to be called the children of God.' It is the power to become. The person, power and glory of God became a human being in him; he was God incarnate. And in him and through him the presence, power and glory of God finds its home also in us – in a life born of God with power to become a child of God, full of grace and truth. The power to become comes from him who in power became.

Great God, thank you that you have not left us in darkness and ignorance. You have come to us and shown us the light of your glory, truth and grace in the Lord Jesus Christ. You have made yourself known and embraced us in your love in Jesus. Live in us by your Spirit and help us to shine in the darkness and to make you known.

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Dec 1 2020 - Introduction to the first letter of John

Who wrote these letters?

Many scholars argue that the Epistles of John have a different author from that of the fourth Gospel. However, Howard Marshall, having carefully considered the various arguments concludes, "... there is little reason to attribute the outlook found in 1 John to an author of different outlook from that of the main body of the Gospel. It is, therefore, possible that both works come from the same author. In any case, however, the Gospel and Epistles stand so close together in terms of theological outlook that they must at least have been written by authors who stood very close to each other."

Why was this letter written?

B F Westcott points out that the letter we know as 1 John is not really a letter: it lacks opening salutation and closing subscription. He considers it to be more of a pastoral address. 

John writes to a church disturbed by false teachers. By the time John writes they seem to have left the church (2:19) but still have contacts with members causing them to question whether they could truly regard themselves as Christians. John writes to provide "a careful statement of the apostolic understanding of Christianity for the benefit of his friends so that they might see where it was distorted by the seceders and confirm their own understanding of it and their place in the company of God's people." (Marshall).

The claims which John denies at the beginning of the Epistle probably represent those of the false teachers: they claimed to have fellowship with God and to be sinless (1:6, 8, 10); They may have believed that God was light and have said that they lived in the light (2:9). It is evident that they held unorthodox views about Jesus: They did not believe that Jesus was the Christ or the Son of God (2:22; 5:1, 5); they denied that Jesus had come in the flesh (4:2; cf. 2 Jn. 7); they did not see the need to obey the commands given by Jesus (2:4). It seems that they felt that they had moved beyond the elementary stages of orthodox theology to a new position of superior spirituality.

John emphasises that: Faith is linked with orthodoxy – particularly a right view of Christ; faith cannot be separated from love; faith expresses itself in righteousness, obedience and the avoidance of sin; faith should lead to the assurance that we are children of God

Such teaching is equally vital for the church and the world today. We need this call to learn afresh "that faith must rest on God's revelation of himself in his Son, Jesus Christ, that faith and love cannot be separated from one another, that Christians are called to a life of perfect love, and that they can enjoy assurance and certainty in their knowledge of God" (Marshall).

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Oct 28 2020 - Introduction to the Gospel of John

Who wrote this Gospel?

In the early church there is almost universal attribution of the Fourth Gospel to the apostle John: "Certainly from the end of the second century on, there is virtual agreement in the church as to the authority, canonicity and authorship of the Gospel of John" (Don Carson). Many contemporary scholars question this attribution, but Carson, after a detailed examination of the arguments, concludes that the author, who is referred to in the gospel at 'the beloved disciple,' is indeed John the son of Zebedee. He thinks that John was in Ephesus when he wrote his Gospel in about 80 AD.

Characteristics and Theology

John's Gospel focuses almost entirely on Jesus' ministry in Judea in contrast with the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark and Luke), which focus on his ministry in Galilee. These perspectives are complementary rather than contradictory. Indeed, John's narrative sheds light on puzzling features of the Synoptic narratives such as Jesus being able to borrow a donkey for his entry into Jerusalem. Such features would be more easily understood if Jesus had visited Jerusalem on previous occasions.

John is concerned to demonstrate who Jesus is, to explain the salvation that he has come to give and to demonstrate that Jesus is the fulfilment of the entire sweep of the Old Testament, "He is the new temple, the one of whom Moses wrote, the true bread from heaven, the true Son, the genuine vine, the tabernacle, the serpent in the wilderness, the Passover" (Carson). Jesus has brought in the eschaton, the age of fulfilment; the Spirit has been given and eternal life is now available to all who trust in him.

Why was it written?

The purpose of the Fourth Gospel is stated by the author in 20:30-31. Carson argues that the purpose of the work is evangelistic; it is intended particularly for Jews and Jewish proselytes to convince them that the Messiah they long for has come and is Jesus. Carson writes, "Part of his goal, then, in writing an evangelistic book for Jews and proselytes, is to make the notion of a crucified Messiah coherent. The intrinsic offence of the cross he cannot remove. What he can do, what he feels he must do, is to show that the cross was there from the beginning of Jesus' ministry (Jesus is early announced as the Lamb of God, 1:29), and that the cross is at one and the same time nothing less than God's own plan, the evidence of the people's rejection of their Messiah, the means of returning Jesus to the Father's presence, the heart of God's inscrutable purposes to bring cleansing (Jn 13) and life to his people, the dawning of the promised eschatological age, God's astonishing plan to bring glory to himself by being glorified in his Messiah."

Both Don Carson and George Beasley-Murray suggest that John's gospel may have been organised from material preached by the Evangelist. Beasley-Murray concludes, "No doubt the synoptic Gospels reflect a like process, but the Fourth Gospel is supremely the preacher's gospel – every episode in the book shouts out to be preached – and it is so because it is the product of a highly effective preacher's proclamation of Christ in the Gospel." 

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Peter Misselbrook