The Content of the Gospel

I'm sure my fascination with the Psalms will someday wane, but for now it's still going strong. The recent readings from the one year Bible plan (now linked at left) have been in Psalms 93-100. I had the privilege of sitting in a Sunday school class on the gospel of Luke one year, and we began by looking at the gospel as it was revealed in the Old Testament, identifying key themes and passages.

As soon as we had done this, it really opened up a new avenue of studying the OT to me. I was suddenly able to see the same gospel themes exposed in a great many places, and among them the Psalms.

My initial forays into the Psalms were borne, I think, of my own introspection and the comfort they brought to a naïve eighth-grader who felt like he was picked on more than his due in school. My second shot into the Psalms was more mature, guided by the realization that many of them provide glimpses into the nature of Jesus Christ and the Godhead. Many of the Psalms still remained a mystery to me, at least in the sense that I was looking for something in the white spaces, the background of the story.

(As an aside, this is a sometimes destructive tendency for me and has certainly put me into some rather poor doctrinal positions in the past. Ockham's Razor is certainly not the best thing to happen to Christianity, but it's a rather useful tool when dealing with difficult passages.)

The key was the content of the gospel, elements identified by their presence in obvious gospel passages (Isaiah 40-45, 53, and many others). They consist mainly of God's attributes:

• righteousness, judgment (94.1,15; 96.10,13; 97.2,6,8; 98.2,9; 99.4)
• power, might (93.4; 95.4,6; 96.3-5; 98.1)
• reign (93.1; 95.3; 96.10; 97.1; 99.1)
• mercy, lovingkindness (98.3)
• faithfulness
• salvation (96.2; 98.2,3)
• truth

Man's response to these attributes is uniformly supposed to be praise (a fact I find interesting, considering all of the emphasis we place on belief). See (95.1,2; 96.1-3; 97.8,12; 98.1,4-9; 99.3,5,9).

Not surprisingly, each of these occurs in great quanity in the Psalms. I've provided some references from our latest readings in the bulleted list.

If we chart these themes throughout Scripture, we'll find them in some measure in the almost spontaneous doxologies in the Pauline epistles and other letters, and in equal measure in the songs in Revelation (cp Re 14.6—"eternal gospel"). And they figure quite prominently in Mary and Elizabeth's songs in Luke 1, and in Simeon and Zarachrias' proclamations, also.

While the Psalms sometimes get a bit repetitive, it has been one of my constant delights to find them such a well of incredible depth. We so often shrink the gospel into a formula that it's difficult to keep in mind what it's really about.

On Worship

My feelings on worship are pretty easy to summarize:

God should not only be the object of worship, but also the subject.

In other words, our songs should not just worship God, they should be about God. Our inspiration should come not from our own actions, but from the person and work of Christ.

As a rule, this leads me to distrust "I tunes": worship songs centered on man in the act of giving praise. I rather prefer songs centered on the activities of God that inspire praise in us. Old standards like "O For a Thousand Tongues" and "Come Thou Fount" reflect on God's work as our redeemer and how he called us from darkness to light—and they do it without resorting to navel-staring at our own act of worship.

Songs that describe God in nebulous terms or that mitigate the force of his will and the power of his working bespeak a troubling trend in the modern Christian's perception of his Maker, Redeemer, and Friend. Losing such elements substitutes God with a feeling and reinforces, I think, the natural self-inclination of man. That is to say that man-centered worship really only caters to our depraved natures; it is perhaps one of the most subtle attacks by the enemy.

The Miracle of Regeneration

October has been a pretty slow month for writing here, for which I apologize. There have been some extenuating circumstances, though I should have been better about it, especially considering all the fodder from my current readings.

At left is a new link to a friend's blog, written as he goes through the Bible from the beginning. He's only written a few articles, but there should be plenty more in the pipe if he gains steam.


One of my predispositions in studying the Scripture is to look at physical things as a manifestation of the spiritual. We read of a heavenly pattern for the tabernacle, for example (He 8.5), and of the heavenly Jerusalem (Ga 4.25,6). There are many other hints that we're justified in looking at physical things this way, of course; it's one of the purposes of types and the institution of the Mosaic Law.

We're accustomed to looking at miracles as a purely physical phenomena—so the turning of water into wine is a miracle because it circumvents the usual physical requirements for that sort of process. Raising Lazarus from the dead is a miracle, too, hopefully for obvious reasons.

But it seems to me that these miracles in the physical realm—the laws of physics being suspended or contravened—might also be shadows of less tangible miracles. In other words, it really does make sense to use the raising of Lazarus as an example of how we are regenerated because our own regeneration is itself a miracle.

If we can accept this—and I think it is reasonable—I think it is also reasonable to suggest that it is a miracle in a spiritually-similar way: regeneration contravenes a spiritual law. This at its core, I think, denies the (semi-) Pelagian notion that original sin did not irrevocably impair the human will. If regeneration violates some spiritual law, then it stands to reason that the human will should not be able to, any more than I can expect to generate enough lift to fly by flapping my arms.