Category Archives: Blogging Through a Book

Simply Jesus: Our Hero and King is Alive

Posted on by
Reply

WrightThis post is part of the series  blogging through Simply Jesus.

In the last chapter the question was: Why did the Messiah have to die? In this chapter, Wright wrestles with the meaning of the Resurrection, Ascension, and Second Coming.

Wright sees all of these events as essential to God’s great restoration project in which He is ‘putting the world right‘.

The power that has tyrannized the old creation has been broke, defeated, overthrown. God’s kingdom is now launched, and launched in power and glory, on earth as in heaven.

In this chapter, Wright is challenging those Christians who look forward to going to heaven as a new place without focusing on living fully for Christ now.

To have this kind of view, Wright contends, is to miss out on what God is doing. Continue reading →

Simply Jesus: Why did Jesus have to die?

Posted on by
Reply

It has been awhile since I posted on my readings through Simply Jesus. Part of that has been the fact that life has been full of other activities. And part of that is because in this chapter Wright addresses an incredibly important question (which I wanted to take time to explore).

Why did the Messiah have to die?

Wright spends much of chapter 13 exploring how God surprised everyone in combining the roles of Messiah, servant, and returning God into the same person – Jesus.

This combination was a small step exegetically, but a giant leap theologically … Nobody, so far as we know, had dreamed of combining these ideas in this way before.

…

Jesus’s vocation to be Israel’s Messiah and his vocation to suffer and die belong intimately together.

Wright then explains that the reason Jesus had to die was to defeat the true enemy – Continue reading →

Simply Jesus: Where Space, Time, and Matter collide

Posted on by
Reply

The star cluster Pismis 24 Stephen Hawking in his book – A Brief History of Time describes the quest to understand the universe we live in:

And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in. … if we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God.

Throughout the book Hawking describes general relativity, quantum mechanics, and string theory, trying to help those of us who are not uber-physicists get a handle on how the universe works.

But Wright reminds us that the way space, time, and matter are viewed and studied today are very different than how first century Jewish people would have understood them and how they fit within them. Their worldview would center on their covenant relationship with God. Continue reading →