The following quotes caught my attention as I (Matt Smethurst) read Don Carson’s new little book, Prophetic from the Center (10Publishing, 2019).
Perhaps more common yet is the tendency to assume the gospel, whatever that is, while devoting creative energy and passion to other issues—marriage, happiness, prosperity, evangelism, the poor, wrestling with Islam, wrestling with the pressures of secularization, bioethics, dangers on the left, dangers on the right—the list is endless. This overlooks the fact that our hearers inevitably are drawn toward that about which we are most passionate. Every teacher knows that. My students are unlikely to learn all that I teach them; they are most likely to learn that about which I am most excited. If the gospel is merely assumed, while relatively peripheral issues ignite our passion, we will train a new generation to downplay the gospel and focus zeal on the periphery. (4–5)
It is easy to sound prophetic from the margins; what is urgently needed is to be prophetic from the center. (5)
When we insist that as a matter of first importance, the gospel is Christological, we are not thinking of Christ as a cipher, or simply as the God-man who comes along and helps us like a nice insurance agent: “Jesus is a nice God-man, he’s a very, very nice God-man, and when you break down, he comes along and fixes you.” The gospel is Christological in a more robust sense: Jesus is the promised Messiah who died and rose again. (12)
The cross and resurrection are not nakedly historical events; they are historical events with the deepest theological weight. (13)
From the beginning, sin is an offense against God. God himself pronounces the sentence of death (Gen. 2–3). This is scarcely surprising, since God is the source of all life, so if his image bearers spit in his face and insist on going their own way and becoming their own gods, they cut themselves off from their Maker, from the One who gives life. What is there, then, but death? (14)
In all our sinning, God is invariably the most offended party. That is why we must have his forgiveness, or we have nothing. (15–16)
The God the Bible portrays as resolved to intervene and save is also the God portrayed as full of wrath because of our sustained idolatry. As much as he intervenes to save us, he stands over against us as Judge, an offended Judge with fearsome jealousy. . . . How often when we preach the gospel are people terrified? (16, 18)
To be saved from our sins is to be saved not only from their chaining power but also from their consequences—and the consequences are profoundly bound up with God’s solemn sentence, with God’s holy wrath. Once you see this, you cannot fail to see that whatever else the cross achieves, it must rightly set aside God’s sentence, it must rightly satisfy God’s wrath, or it achieves nothing. (21)
Any approach, theological or evangelistic, that attempts to pit Jesus’s death and Jesus’s resurrection against each other, is not much more than silly. (24)
The Bible never asks us to believe what is not true. By the same token, one of the principal ways the Bible increases and strengthens faith is by articulating and defending the truth. (30)
We are not saved by theological ideas about Christ; we are saved by Christ himself. (31)
The new humanity in [Christ] draws in people from every tongue and tribe and people and nation. The gospel . . . is not universal in the sense that it transforms and saves everyone without exception, for in reality, those whose existence is connected exclusively to the old Adam are not included. Yet this gospel is gloriously universal in its comprehensive sweep. There is not a trace of racism here. (34)
Humility, gratitude, dependence on Christ, contrition—these are the characteristic attitudes of the truly converted. (41)
When the gospel truly does its work, “proud Christian” is an unthinkable oxymoron. (41)
Corinth speaks to the lust for endless innovation that casually cuts a swath away from the practices and beliefs of other churches, while quietly side-stepping the careful instruction of the apostle. . . . Always be suspicious of churches that proudly flaunt how different they are from what has gone before. (43)
The gospel is boldly advancing under the contested reign and inevitable victory of Jesus the king. (45)
There is no place for triumphalism in the church of the blood-bought, in the church led by apostles who eat everyone’s dirt at the end of the procession. (49)
A Christianity where believers are not patient and kind, a Christianity where believers characteristically envy, are proud and boastful, rude, easily angered, and keep a record of wrongs, is no Christianity at all. (51)
The conventions and expectations of the world are pervasive and enslaving. The gospel must be worked out for these women, and demonstrated in the life of the church, so that it issues in liberation from the wretched chains of idolatry too subtle to be named and too intoxicating to escape, apart from the powerful word of the cross. (53–54)
[Pondering how the gospel transforms various areas of life] must be done, not by attempting to abstract social principles from the gospel, still less by endless focus on the periphery in a vain effort to sound prophetic, but precisely by preaching and teaching and living out in our churches the glorious gospel of our blessed Redeemer. (54)
Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?
In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
