Posts tagged bible

“Jesus Christ, who is King; who is GOD; comes not to BE served, but to serve.”

That is what is noble. That is what is honorable. That is what is true glory. The service, the suffering, is noble. It is where Jesus is ultimately revealed to be God.

THAT is the point that Mark, in his Gospel, is trying to make: that you can only TRULY understand Jesus; and TRULY see him for who he is; by the cross. That is why Marks paints such a streamlined path to the cross: because he wants us to be pointed to it so clearly that nothing else stands in the way.

And it is only through the cross that we know him.

-Aj Neugebauer LCMS pastor

The Gospel of Mark is quick, and brief. It is like Mark is writing a Gospel where the house is burning down, so he doesn’t have time to be polite or poetic or anything but blunt and to the point in speaking of this Christ; Jesus, from Nazareth.

Only, there is a certain beauty to this. There is a certain poetry. For forever, people saw Mark as sort of an abridged version of Matthew or Luke. Like this was the cliff notes of the Gospels, since so much of its contents are included in Matthew and Luke anyways.

But more recent, and very clear, scholarship has shown that that isn’t the case at all. The Gospel of Mark isn’t just short to be short. It’s not “the abridged Gospel of Matthew”. If there is another way to describe it, I’d say it’s like this.

The Gospel of Mark is focused.

It cares about one thing, and one thing only. It cares about who Jesus is, and what his Kingdom is all about.

-Aj Neugebauer LCMS pastor

I love the Gospel of Mark. It’s so frank and fast. Do you know what Mark’s favorite word to use is? “Immediately.” Everything happens “immediately” after everything else. “Immediately Jesus was whisked into the wilderness by the Spirit; immediately he called them and they left what they were doing and followed; immediately the leprosy left the man.”

It is also most likely, (and we can say maybe almost CERTAINLY,) the earliest of the Gospel’s. In addition, it is also the shortest. There are many things that Mark doesn’t even record for us. For example: do you want to know what Gospel you’ll never hear from on Christmas or Christmas Eve? Mark. You wanna know why? No annunciation, no genealogy, no donkey, no manger, no shepherds, no angels, no wise men, no gold, frankincense and myrrh. There isn’t even any sort of “in the beginning was the Word and the Word was God and the Word was WITH God,” introduction like there is in the Gospel of John.

Nope. Instead we start with Jesus’ ministry. Right away. John the Baptist says “Here comes Jesus!” and then, there he is, getting baptized and, “immediately”, of course, being taken by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan in the wilderness for forty days.

-Aj Neugebauer LCMS pastor

First, just a word about what I want to be clear that I am NOT saying. It is very true that there are Christians who speak as though the Bible’s composition, and even further, its preservation, occurred by something that is almost “magic”. While this is a very common belief among American Evangelical churches, it should not be the straw man that academia seeks to pick apart, if it wishes to pick apart the process used by the Council of Nicea.

While it is true that we believe that the Holy Spirit has “inspired” the writings of the Scriptures, this teaching is not synonymous with this “magical” and “mistake free” view held by many fundamentalist American denominations. While I will not take the time here to get into what an actual orthodox theology of Biblical inspiration is, (in fact, I am sure you will find it as a relief that my argument has almost nothing to do with the “inspiration” of the Bible whatsoever,) still, I will take a moment to say that it very greatly differs from the fundamentalist view.

Simply: it is not the historical Christian faith to believe that God “faxed down” the writings of the Scriptures into the heads of the authors who wrote them. That is, instead, more like the beliefs of Islam and the Qur’an, (as Muslims hold to the belief that Mohammed received the words of the Qur’an from Allah “as water flowing through a pipe”.) That varying (and differing!) manuscripts were and are used to compile the texts of the New Testament is something that the Christians of Nicea, the Christians of antiquity, the Christians of the Reformation and all other Christians throughout the ages have not only known and acknowledged, but it is also something, (it should be noted,) that did not seem to bother them at all, and that certainly did not take away from the validity of their faith. So too were they aware of the process of the Council of Nicea, and so too did it not cause them to leave Christianity.

-Aj Neugebauer LCMS pastor

As WE are Christians, and so WE role with Jesus, so we do not dismiss what he says, nor do we scoff at things that HE HIMSELF thought carried weight. Instead, we return to our question, the lines and boundaries clearly drawn: “What do the SCRIPTURES; and what does JESUS say; about a theology that says ‘everyone is saved’.”

To be continued in the Sunday Devotion…

-Aj Neugebauer LCMS pastor

So where do we turn? Lord, to whom shall we go? Well, YOU have the words of eternal life. And there are contained… where?

Yes. HERE. You see, as we are Christians, what is ultimately authoritative is Jesus Christ. HE is the one who dictates what is truth and what is not. And HIS Word is what gives THIS testimony its validity. And so our epistomolgy; and “how we know what we know” as it pertains to God and his plan of salvation, is that we seek answers in the Word of God; and in his proclamations by the power of the Holy Spirit.

-Aj Neugebauer LCMS pastor

NOW GET OUT THERE. Shine the light! Pass the salt! You have been given this gift; but do not keep it for yourself. For if you do not do it, who will?

“If you do not do it, who will?”

You know, it’s funny. Our translation of the first verse of our lesson says “If salt has lost it’s taste, how will its saltiness be restored?” And that’s a common translation. But the second “it” in that verse is ambiguous. In other words, it could refer to the salt that has lost its saltiness, OR it could refer to something else… it could also refer to THE EARTH.

Now why is THAT significant? Because I think that THAT interpretation is more in line with what Jesus’ main point here actually is. You see, in THAT way of translating the text, what Jesus is actually saying is: “If the people of the world that I have made THE SALT are not salty, then where will the world get its salt from? If YOU who are SALT do not salt the earth, how will the earth’s saltiness be restored!”

-Aj Neugebauer LCMS pastor

You see, THAT’S why there’s more to humility than this. It’s because the journey of humility can go THROUGH guilt, and shame, and despair; but it doesn’t end there.

This is the FIRST step of humility: an acknowledgement that we are not good enough on our own. An acknowledgement that we were “Weekend at Bernie’s” DEAD when God sought us out.

But humility does not end there, because humility’s goal is the love of Christ. The journey of humility ends at the cross.

-Aj Neugebauer LCMS pastor

Because you do NOT have a God who works for the destruction of people! You have a God who desires only to forgive, and to save! And YOU are not the one who chooses GOD; God chooses you, and so you have the CERTAINTY that God will be with you, even in times of personal weakness! You are not relying on your own decision; but on God’s LOVE. As fickle as we are, what a wonderful promise there is in THAT!

Look at the promise of predestination! Think of it this way: if something is predestined to happen, what does that mean? IT MEANS IT’S GOING TO HAPPEN! Do you see? Do you see how since God has selected you before he even made the world than your salvation is a certainty? Do you see how HIS selection of YOU means that it is HIM who saves you, and not YOU who has to rely on your own strength? It is so STRANGE when we hear “predestination” and grimace at it! How strange that so many in our culture DEMAND a role! But that’s just so silly.

-Aj Neugebauer LCMS pastor