Trusting the God of Tomorrow

Last Thursday, I (Gary) was cruising through my day without much concern for the present nor the days to come. While at work in Denver, I got a call from my wife (who is 28 weeks pregnant) telling me that she was being taken to the hospital because she was in pre-term labor, and my world quickly changed. Three and a half days later, I am here sitting in a hospital on a Transformer-like chair/bed, looking at my sleeping-beauty of a wife who is, by God's grace, still pregnant with our little boy. The doctors are using all of their knowledge and resources to keep our little one inside his mommy's belly, and by God's grace, it is working. "By God's grace." What does that even mean? Well, it means more to me now than it did four days ago. God's sovereign grace was our only hope today, and it is our only hope for tomorrow. What will tomorrow bring? I'm not sure... hopefully the same as today, hopefully the baby will stay put... but I can't be sure. So, as I go to sleep tonight, how do I prepare my heart for tomorrow--a day when I will return to work near Denver while my sweet wife-with-child stays in a hospital bed in Fort Collins? Well, whatever happens tomorrow, I can be sure of this: that God's grace will be there to meet us as it has been for the past three days, and that, by God's grace, we will persevere. So, as far as I know, the only hope I have for truly peaceful rest tonight is by trusting in the God of all grace, who is the God of tomorrow.


Please pray for us, and especially for my wife (who will be in the hospital for at least a few more weeks or until our baby comes), that we would trust in this gracious, wise and sovereign God.

The Big Picture

The big picture of redemptive history is one of our passions here at Planter's Post. We want to continually grow in our understanding of the grand story of God's work, identify and embrace our role in it, and hopefully help others put some pieces together as well.

For me (Jeremey), I can hardly overestimate the impact that men like Jonathan Edwards, John Piper, Graham Goldsworthy, and Greg Beale have had on me in this regard. Additionally, one of the most helpful teachers I have listened to is a man named Lee Irons, who is working towards his PhD at Fuller Theological Seminary. If you have the time, you may want to consider his series on the Kingdom of God called, "The Unfolding Mystery" (found here), which is highly influenced by the teachings of another personal hero of sorts, Meredith Kline.

We hope to post more on the topic of the Bible's big picture soon.

The Arguing God

Have you ever noticed that the biblical authors argue a lot? I'm not talking about Paul's throwdown with Barnabas (Acts 15:36-41). I mean the authors reason with the reader. When we pick up the Bible and start to read, the Holy Spirit does not bypass the brain and simply inject the knowledge of God into our being. Rather, he opens our eyes to see the beauty of Christ, who is revealed through the text of divinely inspired human writings. The wonder of it is that God almighty reveals himself through human language. Sometimes (especially in the epistles) we must follow the human writer's logic in order to understand what God has said in his word (e.g. just note all the logical transitions in Eph 1 - "just as" [v. 4], "unto the praise" [v. 6], "with a view to" [v. 10], "to the end that" [v. 12], "for this reason" [v. 14], "so that" [v. 17, 18], etc)...which is simply to say that when we read the Bible, we need to be good listeners and pay attention when others are speaking (i.e. writing).

In my opinion, there's no better tool for this exercise than Daniel Fuller's method known as Arcing. Take a look at www.biblearc.com and give it a try.

A Child's Heart, But a Grown Up's Head

OK, I can't resist. I have yet another great quote about the importance of thinking hard for the Christian...and yet again it has come my way via Nick Nowalk. I'll give this topic a rest for a while after this, but this one is simply too good to pass up.

"He wants a child's heart, but a grown up’s head. He wants us to be simple, single-minded, affectionate, and teachable, as good children are; but He also wants every bit of intelligence we have to be alert at its job, and in first-class fighting trim…God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you, you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all. But, fortunately, it works the other way round. Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world” (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, pp. 77-78).

Can You Trust Your Bible?

I'm alarmed by the large number of television-taught people who are under the impression that the Scriptures have undergone significant distortion through centuries of interpretive translations at the hands of power-hungry church leaders. What most people don't realize is that a large number of dusty old manuscripts written in the 2nd to 4th centuries (100-400 A.D.!) are still in existence today, and that our English Bibles are translated directly from these source languages and documents. Despite what you may have heard, the process through which you received your English Bible is nothing like a 2000-year long game of "telephone." Our access to what was actually written is far more attainable than you may think. The time lapse between the autograph (the original composition) and the copies that we have discovered is, in some cases, similar to the distance between us and Lincoln's Gettysburg address. Does anybody really doubt that we have Lincoln's actual words?

A new contribution to this important field of study is Larry Hurtado's The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins. Professor Jim Hamilton's review concludes that, "This fascinating book should command the attention of all who are interested in questions of how the New Testament came into being, when the documents began to be recognized as Scripture, and what can and cannot be maintained on the basis of the actual manuscript evidence."

Read the entire review here:

HT: Justin Taylor