Tag Archives: challenging questions

Simply Jesus: Why did Jesus have to die?

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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 →

What are 6 essentials of the faith on which you would never bend?

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Tim Kimberley the Executive Director at Credo House has a great series called Elder Questions over at the Parchment and Pen blog. In a recent post he posed the question (or rather he was posed the question)

list 6 core convictions concerning which you (as elder) will never give in, nor even bend on, as you lead the church and reference at least 3 scriptures [in] support [of] each one.

I think this is a great question to wrestle with. Here are my six.

1. God created all things seen and unseen
In keeping with the intent of this question, I am not necessarily addressing how long it took or even how long ago that occurred (although these are important). Here the central conviction is that God exists outside of His creation, outside of space and time, and is the First Cause of all that exists. This is probably the most central claim of the Scriptures and the one that can be seen in creation itself. Continue reading →

Simply Jesus: Where Space, Time, and Matter collide

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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 →