Christianity is Christ, and civilization is not necessarily Christianity. Christianity means the Gospel, and the Gospel means redemption from sin; and it behoves those at home and those abroad to seek to proclaim by lip and life the message of that Gospel as “the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.”
Friday, June 11, 2010
Power
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From Charles Cranfield's Shorter Commentary on Romans:
ReplyDelete...if [Romans] 1.18-32 does indeed declare the truth about all men, then it really does follow from it that the man who sets himself up as a judge of his fellows is without excuse. So we understand these verses as the revelation of the gospel's judgment of all men, which lays bare not only the idolatry of ancient and modern paganism but also the idolatry ensconced in Israel, in the Church, and in the life of each believer.
The preaching of the gospel is at the same time both the revelation of a status of righteousness before God for men and also the revelation of God's wrath against their sin. It is both, because the gospel events themselves, which the preaching presupposes, were both. With regard to the wrath of God, we conclude that, for Paul, its full meaning is not to be seen in the disasters befalling sinful men in the course of history: its reality is only truly known when it is seen in its revelation in Gethsemane and on Golgotha.
Additionally from Cranfield:
ReplyDeleteThe forgiveness accomplished through the Cross is the costly forgiveness, worthy of God, which, so far from condoning man's evil, is, since it involves nothing less than God's bearing the intolerable burden of that evil Himself in the person of His own dear Son, the disclosure of the fullness of God's hatred of man's evil at the same as it is its real and complete forgiveness.