Theologia Crucis

The right sidebar of the main Dawning Realm page now features recent entries from Agapē Enthroned.

The daily prayer for forgiveness is nothing other than the humbling cry for justification, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:9-14, ESV).

The new blog Agapē Enthroned invites your comments on its essays relevant to the main message of Christianity. It complements this blog, which instead features updates to Absolute Paradox, Dawning Realm, and related web sites.

Three views on the Genesis days of creation now links to A natural selection of creation and evolution posts.

False doctrine is poison to the soul. An entire banqueting party drinking an admixture of arsenic can drink physical death from its cups. So an entire audience can invite spiritual and eternal death by listening to a sermon that contains an admixture of the poison of false doctrine. A person can be deprived of his soul’s salvation by a single false comfort or single false reproof administered to him.

—C. F. W. Walther, The Proper Distinction between Law and Gospel, page 20

That’s why we need the church “in which the Gospel is rightly taught,” as the Augsburg Confession puts it.

Evening, morning, and noon
I cry out in distress and He hears my voice.

Psalms for evening, morning, and noon from The Lutheran Hymnal

A plan for reading the homologoumena in three months has been added to the Dawning Realm page on worship. Its lists of chapters to read are updated daily. To use the plan in family devotions, read one chapter in the morning and the other in the evening according to the month.

As those books of the New Testament that the early church universally recognized as apostolic, the homologoumena contain the entire Christian doctrine. Useful information on canonicity of the seven disputed books of the New Testament is provided by F. Pieper (1950) Christian Dogmatics, Volume I, Concordia Publishing House.

The homologoumena in eight months or eight weeks

Quick introduction to the gospel accounts

Have you found one verse a day is not always enough to combat the constant attacks of the Murderer? See the “Daily Devotions” in the “Words of eternal life” folder of the Augsburg Aggregator.

Evening, morning, and noon

I cry out in distress and He hears my voice.

To facilitate prayer, the worship page of Dawning Realm now has a link to these noon prayers as well as a frame with the Daily Devotions.

The chapter of that title in The Living Word* inspired adding this photograph to illustrate the defeat of your enemy.

* G. Wingren. The Living Word, Eugene, Oregon:Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2002

Appendix to What does it mean to seek the kingdom of God? Matthew 6:33 and Luke 12:31 in the Contexts of the Sermon on the Mount and the Lucan Parables:

Promises of the Creator’s provision for people’s needs in this age abound throughout the canonical writings. Are such promises exceptions to the rule that all Scripture confers hope (Romans 15:4), or do they imply that the hopefulness of Scripture regards not only hope in Christ seated above at the right hand of the Father, but also hope in having an improved life in this world?

Jesus dealt specifically with the relationship between eschatological hope and the needs of this life in his discourse on anxiety (Matthew 6:25-34; Luke 12:22-34), the clarity of which has been clouded by reading preconceived ideas into the text. North American evangelicals naturally see in Matthew 6:33 a blessing only for the few who commit themselves to achievement in a purpose-driven life…

Making God’s gift of “all you need from day to day” conditional on “serving the kingdom of God” would challenge the hopefulness of Scripture. Applied consistently, this interpretation leaves the believer asking, “Am I committed enough that I can depend on God to give me that rare blessing — or even to meet my needs?”

Jesus, however, did not tell his disciples to seek the kingdom, much less to serve the kingdom, in order to secure earthly blessings. (Warren’s changing seeking the kingdom to “serving the kingdom” accommodates the doctrine of eternal security, which makes literally seeking the kingdom unnecessary for believers.) Rather, Jesus relieved the disciples’ anxiety about the needs of this life with the argument that since the Father feeds and clothes even the birds and lilies, he will much more feed and clothe those of much more value. Had he taught that only the disciples have greater value than the lilies and birds, the disciples would have worried about whether they truly seek the kingdom. The thought behind the argument is instead that according to the Father’s love, a man is of much more value than the lower creation (Matthew 12:12). Indeed, the Father’s provision for people’s needs in this age does not depend on their seeking the kingdom, for his love extends to the unjust as well as the just (Matthew 5:45; Luke 6:35-36; Acts 14:15-17; 17:24-27). Thus, Jesus gave the discourse on anxiety not to motivate the disciples to committed service driven by the prospect of a rare blessing, but to instill in those “of little faith” (Matthew 6:30…) a firm confidence in their Father’s love displayed in his care even for the birds, which “neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns,” and for the lilies, which “neither toil nor spin.”

For only with such trust in his love can the disciples seek the kingdom (i.e., eternal life) by faith in the words of Jesus rather than by goal fulfillment or other human efforts (Luke 10:38-42). Since the Father who is pleased to give them the kingdom will also continue to provide everything they need in this age even without their anxious toil, they have nothing to fear and are freed from bondage to money…

This exhortation to seek good things, both of this age and of the age to come, by faith in the loving Father is also found in the address to “Our Father” that precedes all petitions of Lord’s Prayer…

In conclusion, the promises that the Father lovingly satisfies the temporal needs of all sinners are hopeful, but not in the sense of turning disciples’ hope to earthly things. They were instead written to impart strong confidence that he is so benevolent that he valued the whole world enough to give his Son to purchase eternal life for it in spite of its unworthiness. How can I believe God’s love for all people (and thus for me) moved him to sacrifice his Son for us if I do not believe it moves him to meet our needs in this age?

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