What Wondrous Love Is This!

From Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution by Steve Jeffery, Michael Ovey, and Andrew Sach

The Lord Jesus Christ did not come into the world to meet with his friends. He came to die for his enemies. He came to a people who had rejected his law and killed his prophets, who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, trampling his courts in the hypocrisy of their self-righteous religious observances. He came to nations that had exchanged the truth of the living God for a lie, the glory of the immortal God for man-made images, and the fountain of living water for cracked and broken cisterns. He came to a world stained with violence, to a people whose hands were full of blood and whose righteous deeds were like filthy rags, to a complacent humanity who proclaimed ‘Peace! Peace!’ while they waged war with God.

This is the biblical portrait of the people for whom Christ died. We were objects of wrath, rightly facing the unmitigated, everlasting fury of an incensed God, but now in Christ we have found mercy. We have been brought from death to life, from corruption to glory. We were slaves to sin, the world and the devil, but are now adopted children of our heavenly Father. We were stained with the filth of a wicked life and tormented by the pain of a guilty conscience, but are now pardoned and forgiven, standing blameless before him as a pure bride, clothed in the clean, white robes, of Christ’s righteousness.

Now contemplate the blistering holiness of our God, the Holy One of Israel, the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity. His eyes are too pure to look on evil; his voice shakes the heavens; at his sight the angels in glory hide their faces. Who can dwell with this consuming fire, with this everlasting burning? Who can ascend the hill of the Lord? Who can stand in his holy place? Yet this God took pity on us, this God stopped down to us and lifted us up to enjoy the blessing of restored relationship with him, that we may gaze upon his face for all eternity.

A penal substitutionary view of Christ’s death gives us an understanding and appreciation of God’s love. “If we blunt the sharp edges of the cross, we dull the glittering diamond of God’s love.”

Round the Sphere Again: The Women's Edition

Biblical Foundation
Kim Shay suggests a few books that will help women gain a solid foundation of biblical doctrine. (The Upward Call).

Gospel Freedom
Gloria Furman lists 6 ways the gospel frees women. One way: 

The gospel frees us from our exhausting preoccupation with style and beauty. As we become more conscious of the eternal promises of God which are guaranteed in Christ, the less captivated we are by fleeting things.

(Domestic Kingdom).

Divorce Reflection
From Wendy Alsup:

There is a supernatural gift in divorce, a unique experience of beauty and identification with God that can rise out of the ashes of devastation in your life. When you feel most abandoned, most shamed, and most betrayed in this life, that is when the gospel can seep into your psyche in a way it never has before.

Read the whole piece at Practical Theology for Women.

Theological Term of the Week

Old Testament apocrypha
A collection of books included in the Old Testament canon of scripture by Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians but not by Protestants; also called deuterocanonical books, especially by Roman Catholics.

• From The Belgic Confession:

Article 6: The Difference Between Canonical and Apocryphal Books

We distinguish between these holy books and the apocryphal ones, which are the third and fourth books of Esdras; the books of Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Jesus Sirach, Baruch; what was added to the Story of Esther; the Song of the Three Children in the Furnace; the Story of Susannah; the Story of Bell and the Dragon; the Prayer of Manasseh; and the two books of Maccabees.

The church may certainly read these books and learn from them as far as they agree with the canonical books. But they do not have such power and virtue that one could confirm from their testimony any point of faith or of the Christian religion. Much less can they detract from the authority of the other holy books.

• From 40 Questions About Interpreting the Bible by Robert L. Plummer:

Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians (Eastern Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox, etc.) have some additional books in their Old Testaments that Protestants do not consider Scripture … . Protestants refer to these books as the Apocrypha, though Roman Catholics call them the deuterocanonical books (literally, the “secondly canonical” books, because they were formally recognized as canonical at a later time—as opposed to the protocanonical, or “firstly canonical,” books). These books were written by Jews in the roughly five-hundred-year period between the Old and New Testaments (430 B.C.—A.D. 40).

Protestants do not consider the Apocrypha as Scripture for a number of reasons. 

1. The Jews who authored the books never accepted them into their canon. This is a weighty argument in that those who wrote and preserved these books put them in a different category from the recognized Hebrew Scriptures. Indeed, comments within the Apocrypha distinguish contemporary writers from the divinely inspired prophets, who had long been silent (1 Macc. 4:41—46; 9:27; 14:40).
2. The Apocrypha contains clear factual errors and, from the standpoint of Protestants, theological errors (such a praying for the dead, see 2 Macc. 12:43-45).
3. The Roman Catholic Church did not officially recognize the books in the Apocrypha as canonical until the Council of Trent in 1546. In fact, Jerome (A.D. 340-420), the translator of the Vulgate (the official Roman Catholic Latin Bible for more than a millennium), claimed the books of the Apocrypha were edifying for Christians but were “not for the establishing of the authority of the doctrines of the church. At the Council of Trent, Roman Catholics recognized the deuterocanonical books in reaction to Protestant leaders who called for a return to biblical Christianity, stripped of later accretions and distortions. Roman Catholics include the Apocryphal books within their Old Testament canon, sometimes adding whole books and sometimes combining apocryphal portions with books Protestants recognize as canonical (for example, three additions to Daniel—The Prayer of Azariah, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon). These additions and combinations result in a forty-six-book Old t=Testament canon for Roman Catholics.
4. While there are some debatable allusions to the Apocrypha in the New Testament, New Testament authors nowhere cite the Apocrypha as Scripture (that is, with a formula such as “The Scripture says”). Almost every book in the Old Testament is cited as Scripture.

Learn more:

1. Got Questions.org: What are the Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical books?
2. Blue Letter Bible: What Is the Old Testament Apocrypha?
3. Blue Letter Bible: What Are the Contents of the Various Books of the Old Testament Apocrypha?
4. Blue Letter Bible: Why Were the Books of the Apocrypha Rejected as Scripture by the Protestants?
5. Bible Research: The Old Testament Canon and Apocrypha
6. Michael Marlowe:  Formation of the New Testament Canon
7. ESV Study Bible: The Canon of the Old Testament

Related term:

• canon of scripture
• New Testament apocrypha

1From The Canon and Ancient Versions of Scripture.

Filed under Scripture

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