2 Kings 16:7: Ahaz sent messengers to Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria, saying, I am your servant and your son. As we’ve seen in the sermon this morning, the changes Ahaz makes to the temple are intended to ingratiate himself to Tiglath-pileser and reflect Ahaz’s chastened sense of his own position in the world. Yahweh said the Davidic kings were sons of Yahweh; but Ahaz declares himself a son of Tiglath-pileser. Yahweh says that the Davidic kings are enthroned next to... Read more
Easter is about faith, because Easter is about light. Jesus came as Light from the Father of lights into a world darkened by sin and death, and His light shone especially at the resurrection. At His resurrection, His “appearance was like lightning, and His garment as white as snow” (Matt. 28). By His resurrection, He became “the first to proclaim light both to the people and to the Gentiles” (Acts 26). At the resurrection, the Father exalted Jesus as the... Read more
Thanks to Toby Sumpter, Peter Roise, and Joshua Appel for the discussion that led to these observations. How should we take the phrase “because of the king of Assyria” in v. 18? It has sometimes been taken to mean that Tiglath-Pileser forced liturgical changes on Ahaz, but recent studies of Assyrian religious policy has cast doubt on the notion that the Assyrians required conquered what Dale Ralph Davis calls “semi-independent vassal states” to conform to Assyrian religion. It has also... Read more
1 John 1:7 says “if we walk in the light as He is Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin.” We expect the sequence: If we walk in light, the blood of Jesus cleanses us, and we have fellowship with one another. Only if our sins are cleansed and our consciences clean can we walk in light as a fellowship of light. Without clean... Read more
2 Kings 16:12 describes Ahaz’s consecration of the altar built from the prototype in Damascus. Three times in that verse he is called “the king,” and in this designation, the author of Kings picks up the technique employed in 1 Kings 13 to describe Jeroboam’s consecration of the altar at Bethel. The parallels are clear: Both are consecrating illicit altars of their own design; Judah has its own Jeroboam in Ahaz. (Dale Ralph Davis makes this point). Read more
2 Kings 16:12 describes Ahaz’s consecration of the altar built from the prototype in Damascus. Three times in that verse he is called “the king,” and in this designation, the author of Kings picks up the technique employed in 1 Kings 13 to describe Jeroboam’s consecration of the altar at Bethel. The parallels are clear: Both are consecrating illicit altars of their own design; Judah has its own Jeroboam in Ahaz. (Dale Ralph Davis makes this point). Read more
Psalm 144:12 asks that the Lord make “our daughters as corner pillars cut after the pattern of a palace.” “Pattern” is TABNIT, the noun used to describe the pattern that Moses sees on the mountain and later guides the building of the tabernacle. “Palace” is HEYKAL, the word used for the temple. While sons are to grow as plants (v. 12a), daughters will be made according to the pattern of a temple/palace, a dwelling place. Read more
McGrath offers the following genealogy of the distinction of nature and supernature: Prior to the 12th century, theologians defined grace as a “gift of God” without distinguishing various kinds of gifts. But this left open the question of whether “all of God’s gifts” should be “identified as God’s grace.” Is free bestowal the defining quality of grace? During the 12th century, this was addressed by distinguishing between gifts that were natural (datum – “given”) and gifts that were additional to... Read more
CS Lewis said that the courtly love tradition arose from “Ovid misunderstood.” Medieval soteriology might be said to have arisen from “Augustine misunderstood.” Everyone was Augustinian and no one wanted to be Pelagian, but Augustine’s actual teaching was confused by transmission problems both of his own works and of conciliar endorsements of his doctrine. McGrath notes that the strongly Augustinian Council of Orange (529) remained virtually unknown between the 10th and 16th centuries, and Pelagian works and even one of... Read more
What happens to Paul’s doctrine of justification if “faith” in the phrase “justified by faith” is a name for Jesus, as it appears to be in Gal 3:23, 25, on analogy with the use of PISTOS as a name in Rev 19:11? Or, perhaps, if “faith” is shorthand for “faith of Jesus,” understood in Hays’s sense as “faithfulness of Jesus”? This wouldn’t undermine the Protestant insistence that faith is the proper human response to God, a point that can be... Read more
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