BY JOHN PIPER
February 23, 2005
The glory of Jesus Christ shines more clearly when we see him in his proper relation to the Old Testament. He has a magnificent relation to all that was written. It is not surprising that this is the case, because he is called the Word of God incarnate (John 1:14). Would not the Word of God incarnate be the sum and consummation of the Word of God written? Consider these summary statements and the texts that support them....
In a Preface to Paradise Lost, C. S. Lewis writes:
“The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is - what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used. After that has been discovered the temperance reformer may decide that the corkscrew was made for a bad purpose, and the communist may think the same about the cathedral. But such questions come later. The first thing is to understand the object before you: as long as you think the corkscrew was meant for opening tins or the cathedral for entertaining tourists you can say nothing to the purpose about them. The first thing the reader needs to know about Paradise Lost is what Milton meant it to be.” ....
BY KAREN HINCKLEY
For most of the unbelievers I know, repentance conjures up an image of a thin-lipped man in a black suit pointing a bony finger and hissing, "Repent, sinner!" They see Christians as masochists groveling at an angry God's feet, flogging themselves bloody and staggering under impossible loads of responsibility. I've done my time in the grit-your-teeth school of repentance, so I understand where outsiders get their misconceptions. But how can I tell them what repentance really means?....
BY E. CALVIN BEISNER
When the Apostle Paul sought to answer the objections of the Jews in Pisidian Antioch (Acts 13:13-48), he referred repeatedly to Scripture as a reason for his faith. When he found a promise of the coming of the Messiah in the Testament, he attributed that promise to God Himself, believing the Old Testament to be God’s own Word....