Grace Blogs

In yesterday’s Christian Essentials class, we explored the question, “What is the Trinity?”

One point I wanted to emphasize is that the Trinity is not a contradiction. It might sound like “deep philosophy” to say that it’s a contradiction and also say that’s OK, as if it that made it a profound truth. Now, I may be stating the obvious here, but a profound truth must be, well, true, and a contradiction is never true.

If God is true, and the Trinity is true, then we must be able to show that it is not a contradiction. To do this, let me try to make the case that the Trinity is a contradiction and then knock it down. But

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We kicked off the Fall Bible Studies this past Sunday. I have the great privilege of teaming up with Hugh to teach the Christian Essentials class a second time. We had a good start and I’m looking forward to the rest of our study. In the introduction, I offered a definition of Christian teaching…

“To teach is to come alongside another, in the power of the Holy Spirit, to seek an encounter together with the Truth: taking aim to perceive it more clearly, consider it more critically, embrace it more passionately, obey it more faithfully and embody it with greater integrity.”

Gary Parrett, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

I came across this while listening to Dr. Parrett’s

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Again this will be a continuation or the last post without rehashing it…

I’ll start out looking at a question that Hugh raised on the last post.

Matt. 25:33-40 is about separating sheep from goats, not separating sheep from sheep. Wouldn’t that take it out of the “rewards” category and put it into a discussion about judgment?

This goes to the whole question of the nature of the judgment. There will clearly be a separation of sheep and goats. Then, under some views of rewards, Jesus would have to gather the sheep and line them back up again for the ‘reward judgment.’ Now, that may be how it turns out to be, but that’s not how I see it. There is …

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This is a direct continuation from my last post in this series…

We have a picture in 1 Cor. 3:10-15 of a refining process in which (at the judgement) our deeds are revealed for what they truly are.

10 According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it. 11 For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. 12 Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw— 13 each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose

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In previous posts on this topic, I’ve laid out the background on the interpretive difficulty that we wrestled with in the last Christian Essentials class. As I’ve mentioned, the discussion revealed to me that I hadn’t thought through this issue very rigorously. I saw it as Grudem did, but I couldn’t answer (from the Scriptures) the sort of questions that were raised (see the bottom of the last post). With that setup, I’ll finally get on with how I worked through this issue.

[Disclaimer: I'm not claiming to give the answer, but just where I ended up and how I got there. I invite any input where you think I missed something or got something wrong.]

Going into the discussion, …

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As a next step in our analysis, we’ll look at the position that Dr. Grudem expressed that came under question.

Page 132 of our book contains the following paragraph.

The final judgment also provides us with motivation to live each day in obedience to God and thus to “lay up … treasures in heaven” (Matt. 6:20). Even though these treasures do not earn us our salvation, they do reward us for the good we have done.

Now, that doesn’t give us a whole lot of detail on what he means by rewards. To get a fuller understanding of what he means, we’ll look at his Systematic Theology.

Scripture also teaches that there will be degrees of reward for believers. Paul encourages the

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The goal of systematic theology is to analyze and distill what all of Scripture has to say about a particular topic. One of the first steps is to make a first pass at finding all of the passages that may speak to the topic under consideration.

In my initial background reading on the topic of rewards in heaven, I’ve identified the following passages as the best candidates to begin our analysis. Of course this is not a straight-line process. As we begin to look at these passages, they may suggest other passages; or, there may just be key passages that I simply missed, but you have to start somewhere.

At this point, I’ll just list the passages in canonical order.

“Do not …

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As I mentioned in a previous post, we had a good beginning to a discussion on what the Bible teaches about rewards for believers in heaven. I’m going to use this blog space as forum to lay out a more detailed Biblical analysis of the questions at hand. I’m going to break it up into multiple parts for two primary reasons: 1) if you are anything like me, when you see a blog post that requires you to scroll down to to see it all, you are most likely put it aside to read later, which often doesn’t happen; and 2) if I wait until I have time to sit down and write up the whole thing, I’ll never …

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After last week’s class, I had a conversation with someone about the need to always be willing to amend our theological views when we are shown that they are at odds with Scripture. That is, whatever system or understanding that we have must always bow to the clear teaching of the Bible.

I used as an example that even someone as well-studied and confident in his beliefs as John MacArthur had changed his position on a secondary theological issue. The issue has to do with the the eternality of the relationship between the first and second persons of the Trinity. Namely, has the Son been the Son eternally or did He become the Son at the incarnation? This will seem a …

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We wrapped up the 18 weeks of the Christian Essentials course with a review of the last two chapters of our book: “What is the final judgment?” and “What is heaven?” We had a good discussion over our author’s view of rewards in heaven and levels of punishment in hell. Of course the time we had didn’t allow us to get into the depth we would like to do the topic justice. I’ve been thinking about the subject since then and am doing some further study on it.

I’ll post my thoughts later on in the week (or maybe next week). In the meantime, I’d like to offer an excellent collection of resources available on the Internet (all from …

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