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Exegetical Theology: Utilizing God’s Blessing, Part 2—The Blessing in the New Testament.
“How are you today?” The response is usually, “I’m good,” whether that person is doing well or not. But former MLC President Mark Zarling always responded with, “I’m blessed,” regardless of how his day must have been going as he put up with us collegiates. He reminded us that we live in the unassailable reality of God’s blessing.
It is tempting to label as blessings only the things we want: a promotion, the birth of a child, or a great deal on a car. Indeed we are blessed to receive such things! But Jesus adds, “blessed are the poor… those who mourn… the persecuted… for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 5:3-10). In fact, in contrast to the Old Testament, the New Testament speaks of God’s blessing almost exclusively in spiritual terms and as something that exists regardless of physical circumstances.
Μακάριος is the adjective for “blessed” in Matthew 5 (mirroring LXX translations for אַשְׁרֵי), but εὐλογ-root words occur more often in the New Testament (mirroring LXX translations for בָּרַךְ): “Those who have faith are blessed (εὐλογοῦνται)” (Gal 3:9), for we are “blessed (εὐλογητός) in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ” (Eph 1:3). God’s spiritual blessings are the constant possession of all who believe in Christ. How awesome! Yet how quickly we forget it.
Last summer I didn’t feel blessed. A troubled individual whom I was counseling unexpectedly threatened to restrain me and force me to watch as he tortured and murdered my family in front of me. In working with the police, the threat seemed credible enough to send my family away at 4am the next morning to Wisconsin. I will never forget embracing my two young boys in the darkness as they got in the car—all with tears in my eyes, trying to mask an evil they did not know about—before placing my hand on each of their heads and whispering, “God bless you and keep you.”
My mind returned to that moment often during the weeks we were separated. Even when I felt I couldn’t protect my own flesh and blood, I was slowly reassured by the fact that they went with God’s blessing. Through weak hands and a trembling blessing I spoke, their heavenly Father could do all for them that their earthly father could not. Although I felt helpless, they were helped. I needed to know that, and they needed it even though they didn’t know it.
God will do the same for you, your family, and all you serve. Utilize his blessing especially when people are hurting because of sin and when they have no other answers. Perhaps we most forget to use it then, but even then, we still have all of God’s favor in Christ. Speak God’s blessing upon people when they need it most.
In our final article next month, we will consider another unexpected area Scripture encourages us to utilize God’s blessing: among the heterodox and unbelievers.
Rev. Nate Walther serves as pastor at Grace in Minot, ND
Systematic Theology: Eternally Valuable
Hector was the son of King Priam of Troy and one of the greatest Trojan heroes during the Trojan War. His life, however, ended tragically. Achilles killed him, attached his dead body to his chariot by the feet, and then dragged it around the walls of Troy.
In Book 2 of The Aeneid, the ghost of Hector appears to Aeneas and warns him to escape from Troy. Hector’s appearance in that dream has always intrigued me. Aeneas describes what he saw in this way: “[Hector] looked as he did when he had been dragged behind the chariot, black with dust and caked with blood, his feet swollen where they had been pierced for the leather thongs.”[1]
I can’t help but be struck by how different that vision of the eternal fate of our physical bodies is from what Scripture describes. Look at Luke’s account of the risen Jesus’s appearance to his disciples on Easter evening (Luke 24:36-43). Jesus’s body didn’t look as it did when it was taken down from the cross. There was no matted blood, no disfigurement, no degradation, and it certainly was no ghost. Instead, Jesus stood before them in the same real, physical body that he had had before he died—only now it was glorified. Yes, he still had his wounds in his hands, feet, and side, as Thomas eventually could testify (John 20:24-29). But those wounds remained as glorious witnesses to the saving work that Jesus had accomplished.
Then there’s the apostle Paul’s description of what we can expect for our own bodies in eternity. Paul wrote to the Christians in Philippi, “But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body” (Phil 3:20-21, NIV). And to the Christians in Corinth he wrote, “Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality” (1 Cor 15:51-53, NIV).
All of this again emphasizes just how valuable our physical bodies are. Our physical bodies are so eternally valuable that our Savior retained his when he rose from the dead. They are so eternally valuable that God promises to glorify them so that we can live with them with him forever. We may not understand exactly how this will happen any more than Job did, but the hope he expressed is ours as well: “After my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!” (Job 19:26–27, NIV)
Rev. Steven Lange serves as pastor at Hope in Louisville, KY
[1][1] The Aeneid, translated by David West (Penguin, 2003), 33.
Rev. Steven Lange serves as pastor at Hope in Louisville, KY
Historical Theology: The Council of Nicaea
There are two extremes to avoid when it comes to the idea of doctrinal development.
The first (and more spiritually dangerous) extreme assumes that the church originally had no standard doctrine and then, through a series of arguments and power plays, the church developed doctrines. Many critical approaches to church history read the christological debates of the patristic period like this—assuming that the belief in Jesus’s full divinity was not present in the original Christian movement but was an opinion that arose later and eventually managed to push out all rival understandings of Jesus.
The second extreme (admittedly, the less dangerous spiritually, but perhaps the one that we are more likely to fall into) is to forget that even if the doctrine of the church did not need to develop in time, the doctrinal formulas used by the church did. The teaching that Jesus is God has always been the teaching of the New Testament church—Jesus asserts as much himself, the apostles acclaim him as such after his resurrection, and the New Testament consistently presents him as such as well. But still, this does not mean that the earliest church had in place clear, precise, unambiguous formulas for how to simultaneously confess Christ’s full divinity, the distinction in persons between the Father and the Son, and the one-ness of God.
Once false teaching had made the clear teaching of Scripture unclear in the minds of many, an ecumenical council was going to be necessary to nail down a clear, precise, unambiguous formula.
The Council of Nicaea met in mid-325 at the call of Emperor Constantine, who had conferred legal and protected status on Christianity throughout the empire just twelve years earlier by his Edict of Milan. Historians like to debate the sincerity of Constantine’s Christian faith in light of some of the not-so-Christian things he did as emperor, but the most natural way to read the record is that Constantine was a sincere, yet very flawed, convert to the Christian faith. Accordingly, at the Council of Nicaea he is not the one taking the lead in the theological discussions or credal formulations, but he is concerned that the church be united around a single confession of Christ—both because he cared about his own Christian confession and because he knew that ecclesiastical unity would be politically advantageous.
Tradition holds that there were 318 bishops in attendance (a number perhaps borrowed from the number of fighting men in Abraham’s household); but based on the number of those who signed the council’s decisions, we can assume the number was likely in the 200s. Most came from the Eastern Greek-speaking region of the Roman Empire, with only a few from the Western Latin-speaking region of the Empire, and even fewer from the church that was beyond the eastern border of the Roman Empire.
The Council of Nicaea declared that the church would all celebrate Easter on the same Sunday (and without reliance on Jewish calculations for Passover). It (unsuccessfully) attempted to end the Melitian schism. (The Melitians had separated because they thought that the church had made repentance and readmittance too easy for those who had denied the faith during the Great Persecution of Emperor Diocletian.) It also issued twenty new canons (laws governing church life). But its most enduring legacy is its condemnation of Arianism and its formulation of the Nicene Creed, establishing homoousios, “of one being” as the church’s term for how the divinity of the Son relates to that of the Father.
For more on the Council of Nicaea, go to fourthcentury.com, Dr. Glen Thompson’s website about Fourth Century Christianity. Also, consider making use of NPH’s new four-part Bible study on The Council of Nicaea and its Creed.
Rev. Dr. Aaron Jensen serves as pastor of St. Peter’s in Monticello, MN.
Practical Theology: Congregational Merging as Broken Promises
For better or worse, several assumptions are safely ensconced within the mental concept of ‘church merging.’ Some of these are true; some of them maybe less so. For instance, it’s assumed that every church merger is based on a glaring need. ‘Surely we needed to do all this.’ That assumption may or may not be true. However, a companion assumption—that all church mergers are emotional—is true. Maybe not necessity-of-the-consequence level true, but as near to it as I can identify at the moment.
Frankly, any church merger can be reduced to one enormous request to your people: take the most precious part of yourselves (your relationship with Jesus) and physically, mentally, and emotionally relocate it somewhere else. This leads to excitement, anger, sadness—all expressed in either surprising outbursts of noise or deafening silences (the kind of uncomfortable silences that can be felt in the room, but the exact feelings behind them cannot always be defined). The inherently emotional nature of church mergers would suggest that church mergers must make decisions based on emotions.
This is something of a dilemma.
Because obviously church mergers must also be based on strategic decision-making. There are too many resources to account for, too many consciences easily scarred, and too many moving parts screaming for oil to just emote your way through. In truth, strategic decision making must win the lion’s share—but maybe it shouldn’t win everything. I want to give one example of this tension between emotional and strategic decision-making—an example where, in our situation, emotion won out.
From the start, we billed the Living Hope merger as a ticket to efficiency—both for the ministry as a whole and for the individual pastors. Why duplicate efforts? Why have four pastors doing the same tasks—wouldn’t it be better to let them specialize? Foolproof strategic reasoning.
Yet when we actually did merge and were putting together the weekend worship schedule, we had to keep in mind the non-Sunday-morning weekend services of the legacy congregations (the congregations being merged). Some were used to Saturday, some loved Monday night—neither had any interest in cross-pollinating. Now to be fair, four services over a weekend isn’t rare for a larger WELS church. However, given that Living Hope’s people desperately needed to meet each other and actually spend time with each other, dividing the weekend services into four cafeteria slots was not a strategically wise move.
But we did it anyway. God’s people in West Allis were sacrificing a lot, and at that point it was too soon for them to have gotten back much of anything in return—so far they may have felt like the merger was giving them disorientation in the present, spiced with platitudes for the future. We honestly felt they deserved at least a taste of regularity, and the legacy services gave them that. So even though one of our stated goals in merging was efficiency and to stop duplicating things, in this instance we knowingly prioritized something else instead. In doing so, it felt like the merger was going back on some of what it had promised, but I think it was wise to do so.
Conclusion: Gospel reasoning.
Rev. Josh Zarling serves as pastor at Living Hope in West Allis, WI