The Beauty of Biblical Tension

"Yahweh —Yahweh is a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in faithful love and truth, 7 maintaining faithful love to a thousand generations, forgiving wrongdoing, rebellion, and sin. But He will not leave the guilt unpunished, bringing the consequences of the fathers’ wrongdoing on the children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation."  -Exodus 34:6-7 (HCSB)


The passage above is given to Moses and contains the most amazing thing this prophet could hear. As you read this passage one must consider the holiness of God and how that fits it. If one were to do a surface reading of this text, it may seem that there is a contradiction in who God is. 

The Word of God is filled with great tensions. Biblical tensions are two truths that appear to be contradictory, but are both taught as true in the Word. We must remember that when we find biblical tensions one truth doesn't trump another truth. Another example of biblical tensions is the incarnation; how can a Holy, eternal, creator, God take on a human body, entering time and history? The Trinity is another example, how can God be three persons and yet one? But we believe it, we accept these truths as God reveling himself. 

There is mystery with God, He has not revealed everything about himself, but he has revealed exactly what he desires for us to know. He has revealed all that is needed for a relationship with Him and salvation. Throughout history, God planned and promised to reveal His glory to His people. But how could the Lord "forgive wickedness" and yet "not leave the guilty unpunished"? We don't see the answers to this mystery in ancient nor modern Israel. We see that God had promised a person. In the Old Testament there was an atoning sacrifice, a propitiation to diminish the righteous wrath of God. Hope required a substation of suffering and death on the part of the innocent for the deserved punishment of the guilty. This hope also requited some kind of type of relationships between the offended and the offender. 

Before Christ was born, we see that people were wondering when would the Messiah would come. It had been over 400 years since they had heard from God. To put 400 years in prospective, we have been an nation only 231 years. The Lord had give the promise to Moses that he would raise up a prophet (Deut. 18:15-19). But when Jesus came, he took everyone by surprise, because he fulfilled not just the kingly prophecies of the Messiah, but he also fulfilled the prophecies about the suffering Messiah, who would be rejected and suffer in the place of his people. Jesus solves the riddle that the above passage raises. He shows us how God can forgive our wickedness while at the same time punish the guilty. 

 This is the beauty of the Gospel, God knew that the only perfect, innocent substitute is himself. God is faithful to us especially when we are not faithful to Him. God is faithful through the fact that he provided himself to be a perfect, spotless, innocent of sin, substitutionary, sacrifice for our sin and wickedness. So God became a man taking on flesh and blood named Jesus, lived a perfect live, and died a perfect substitution for your sin and mine. The Cross works out this mystery of How God can both "forgive wickedness" and yet "not leave the guilty unpunished?" All that is left for us to do is repent and believe in this substitute that has been give for us, otherwise we will find ourselves in the past last of verse seven, "But He will not leave the guilt unpunished."

10 Things To Do Before You Leave Your Church

I recently received a question about leaving a church from someone who is not a member of our church. Leaving a church is something that should not be taken lightly. When we join a church we are making a covenant with those who are part of that church. We are joining a family! Often times people will abandon their church for petty reasons. However, there are times when it becomes necessary to leave a church for the sake of one’s own conscience, or out of duty to obey God rather than men. The Bible gives the following reasons: heresy from the pulpit (Gal. 1:7-9), leaders of the church tolerate seriously errant doctrine (Rom. 16:17), Unholy living is tolerated in the church (1 Cor. 5:9-11), If the church is seriously out of step with the biblical pattern for church (2 Thess. 3:6, 14), and if the church is marked by gross hypocrisy, giving lip service to biblical Christianity but refusing to acknowledge its power (2 Tim. 3:5).

1. Pray.

2. Let your current pastor know about your thinking before you move to another church or make your decision to relocate to another city. Ask for his counsel. You may not want to do this, but it is helpful for you both.

3. Weigh your motives. Is your desire to leave because of sinful, personal conflict or disappointment? If it’s because of doctrinal reasons, are these doctrinal issues significant? You may need to seek council from someone who is more mature. We can often deceive ourselves, because the heart is desperately wicked (Jeremiah 17:9).

4. Do everything within your power to reconcile any broken relationships, church leadership included!

5. Be sure to consider all the “evidences of grace” you’ve seen in the church’s life- places where God’s work is evident. If you cannot see any evidences of God’s grace, you might want to examine your own heart once more (Matt. 7:3-5).

6. Be humble. Recognize you don’t have all the facts and assess people and circumstances charitably (give them the benefit of the doubt).

7. Don’t divide the body. There may be good times to divide, like if there is heresy being preached, but overall do not use your absence or threat of absence as a power play to get what you want.

8. Take the uttermost care not to sow discontentment even among your closest friends. Remember, you don’t want anything to hinder their growth in grace in the church. Deny any desire to gossip (sometimes referred to as “venting” or “saying how you feel” or “getting it off your chest”).

9. Pray for and bless the congregation and its leadership. Look for ways of doing this practically.

10. If there has been hurt, then forgive- even as you have been forgiven.

This list was adapted from Mark Dever's book "What is a Healthy Church?"

Seeing Easter through the Smokey Shadows of Exodus

"13 Remember Your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Israel—You swore to them by Your very self and declared, ‘I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of the sky and will give your offspring all this land that I have promised, and they will inherit it forever.’” 14 So the Lord relented concerning the disaster He said He would bring on His people." -Exodus 32:13-14

The above passage has puzzled many theologians, preachers, and Christians. For a moment it would appear that God has changed his mind. But is that what is really happening here? Does God really change his mind? A tension seems to appear here in the word of God. One thing I often comfort these who are grieving or struggling to understand God's providence is "God doesn't deal in plan B, God only deals in Plan A!"  How should we think about this passage? Let me give you a few things to consider about this text.

1. Scripture teaches us that the perfections of God are unchanging. Scripture is clear that God does not change his mind (Numbers 23:19). God is perfectly Holy (Psalm 99 and Isaiah 6), He is without error and he has no equal in all of the existence of heaven and earth. Just think what horror it would be for us if God could change, because the issue would be does he change for the better or for the worse. In this passage, God's Holiness is burning against sinners. It still burns against sinners today!

2. Scripture teaches us that the purposes of God are unchanging (Psalm 33:11 and Isaiah 36). We see from God's word that he governs every detail of life and that his purposes are unchanging. In the above passage in verse 13 Moses remembers what God had promised in the past, and Moses calls God to remember. Do you think it is strange that Moses would ask God to remember something? The reason that Moses prayers and intercedes for Israel, is because this is what Moses is crated to do. God made Moses to be the mediator. The story of God is still unfolding, but we must remember that part of His plan is to send a mediator that goes before him and the sinful people His Holiness desires to crush.

3. Be Encouraged because God always provides a mediator. We see something in this prayer/plea from Moses that points us straight to the Cross of Jesus Christ. As the men of Beth-shemesh said in 1 Samuel 6:20, “Who is able to stand before the Lord, this holy God?..." God made and sent Moses for this moment in redemptive history. Moses stands before God pleading for God's people, a shadow of the true mediator Jesus Christ. Moses stands as part of God's unfolding plan to demonstrate his mercy and grace. We are reminded in Romans 8:34, "Who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is the One who died, but even more, has been raised; He also is at the right hand of God and intercedes for us."

Though these smokey shadows in Exodus, we see God both condemning Israel and providing a mediator for them. Moses stands as a flawed, sinful human mediator who points us to the mediator who will come. Moses points to the coming of a perfect mediator who will never fail to stand before God on our behalf. Praise be to God that we have a perfect, Holy, Resurrected mediator today and forever! Happy Easter!

The Church: A Kingdom of Worshipping Priests & Reigning Kings

“Jesus told her, “Believe Me, woman, an hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.” John 4:21

Pastor Brandon Wright preached the above passage during revival last week. The theme of the revival was the above title: The Church: A Kingdom of Worshipping Priests & Reigning Kings. We were able to bless him and his family with a Love Offering of $1007. Thank you church family for your financial support, attendance, verbal encourage- ment, and prayer support!

All of his messages were excellent, but I particularly enjoyed when he preached the above passage. He made the point that asking a question like, “Where are we going to worship, this mountain or that one?,” is almost the same as asking, “What musical style shall we worship with?” The real issue is the heart. It has always been the heart, not the location or music style. God wants more than just our actions or singing. Dr. Carson once asked the very pointed question about worshipping God with music. He asked, “Are you worshipping God, or are you worshipping yourself worshipping God?” Dr. Carson cuts us where we need to be cut. All of life is worship, not just what we sing on Sunday morning (1 Cor. 10:31). If we don’t feel something in the morning worship, could it be us? Could it be that we have not worshipped God well all week, and now we don’t feel anything? I think the answer is yes.

Let us remember these truths as we go about worshipping God all week! 

Stitched in Prayer and Love!

“And the King will answer them, ‘I assure you: Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did for Me.’ –Matthew 5:40

In the above passage Jesus Christ is giving us a glimpse of the end of time. We are seeing the judgment seat of Christ. He is not specific on how we do all of these things, but I would like to highlight one. We have a ministry at Grace Baptist Church, where some of our ladies make prayer blankets, pillows, shawls… They meet every Sunday evening at around 4:45 pm for about an hour or two. These faithful ladies stitch together these gifts to give to those who are terminally ill, having a difficult time through grief, or just running low on hope. I will be the first to admit, when I first heard about this ministry of the church I was skeptical. I wasn’t sure how people would really respond, but I was wrong to be skeptical. Since I have been pastor over the last six months, I have personally given away two of these prayer blankets to individuals with terminal cancer, and both were very well received! You see they are more than just blankets, pillows, shawls… They are reminders that God has not forgotten them in their suffering, and that they are being lifted up in prayer. Let me share a short story with you from my week,



Last Sunday, I requested a prayer blanket from the ladies for John Maskew, my good friend James’ Dad. James and I grew up together, James' Dad John was diagnosed with bone cancer about four weeks ago. After I preached the AM service Sunday at Grace Baptist, I got I text from James asking me to call him. When I did, he told me that his Dad, John, had passed away that morning around 9 or 10 am. I had given the blanket to James to deliver to his father last week. John was touched by the blanket. He said, “It is so soft.” He was so very touched that our church had ministered to him, loving him and lifting him up in prayer. John slept with the prayer blanket his last night on earth. He was reminded that day that God had not forgotten him in his broken and sickly condition. Thank God for the ladies of Stitched-n-Grace and the needs they are meeting for those who are hurting. If you like they are always looking for more help with this ministry, please stop on by on Sunday Afternoons.