Selected Reading

I read these this week and recommend them to you.

Atonement

3 Reasons I Changed My Mind About Penal Substitution
“Actually reading the Scriptures in their cohesive entirety, and seeing the Old Testament repeatedly preview the gospel, showed me that Jesus bearing our sin and its penalty is central—not peripheral, and not artificially imposed—to the story’s vast sweep.” — Daniel Hames

(This is one reason we don’t want to “unhitch” from the Old Testament. The Old Testament sacrificial system, which was obviously substitutionary, foreshadows Jesus’s sacrifice, and gives us the needed background for understanding the substitutional nature of his sacrifice.)

Church History

Edward Dering and His Stuning Lenten Sermon
“Whatever Queen Elizabeth I might have expected by inviting Edward Dering to preach a Lenten sermon in her presence, it was certainly not an outspoken rebuke.” - Simonetta Carr.

Good Friday

Christina Rossetti, “Good Friday”
Michael Haykin says this poem “bears witness to a faith both thick and deep.”

“Man of Sorrows”
“God designed us as emotional beings. Emotions, feelings, and moods are God’s idea. Therefore, they are not, in and of themselves, sinful. In fact, they can be beautiful expressions of our creation in God’s image. Jesus was a deeply emotional being. His grief in the garden makes that abundantly clear.” - Bob Kelleman