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Showing posts from April, 2017

Church Renewal and the Word of God

There is always a need for a revival movement alongside the institutional church.  Like houses, institutions require constant maintenance and repair.  Sometimes they simply need to be abandoned, as when they suck so much cost into their repair that there is neither money nor energy for those who live in them to do what the institutions had been set up to do in the first place.  A revival movement can exist inside an institution, but it will often live parallel to it, sometimes supporting and sometimes opposing it.  And sometimes the reform movement will necessarily dismantle the institution and spring to life in new institutions.  We are witnessing this in the west in our day as mainline denominations so undercut orthodoxy and orthopraxy that they are no longer Christian institutions, while orthodox movements continue and reform into new institutions living faithfully under the Word of God. I have been looking at the notion of a ‘new covenant’ in Scripture in recent blog posts.  H

The New Covenant of God for His People (II): Jesus in Matthew's Gospel

Introduction The first essay on the new covenant (see: 13 March, 2017) noted, among other things, that key Old Testament prophecies of a new covenant envisioned no change to the Law.  Instead, Isaiah 59.20-21, Jeremiah 31.31-34, and Ezekiel 36.25-28 speak of a restoration of Israel from exile due to their sins—a restoration that would involve forgiveness and transformation of God’s people such that they would obey God’s Law.  These texts repeat the expectations stated already in Deuteronomy 30, where Israel’s failure to abide by the covenant, its exile due to this failure, and its restoration and ultimate obedience are already in view. These prophetic texts affirm a continuity of the Mosaic Covenant with the New Covenant.  There is not a change of covenantal stipulations or laws.  In this essay, I will note that the same perspective is in view in Jesus’ teaching and ministry as we find it in Matthew’s Gospel.  Jesus did not, as is sometimes erroneously thought, reject the Old