Tough on sin and tough on the causes of sin

Why, asks J I Packer in his breath-taking chapter, 'The Heart of the Gospel', does Jesus fear death when Christians have died peacefully and without fear? It can't have been the physical pain of the cross that made the difference because Christians have faced equally painful deaths and faced them with courage, not fear. The difference is that Jesus died under the wrath of God and the Christians died free from the wrath of God.
'On the cross, God judged our sins in the person of his Son, and Jesus endured the retributive come-back of our wrong-doing. Look at the cross, therefore, and you see what form God's judicial reaction to human sin will finally take. What form is that? In a word, withdrawal and deprivation of good. On the cross Jesus lost all the good that he had before: all sense of his Father's presence and love, all sense of physical, mental and spiritual well-being, all enjoyment of God and of created things, all ease and solace of friendship, were taken from him, and in their place was nothing but loneliness, pain, a killing sense of human malice and callousness, and a horror of great spiritual darkness.' (Knowing God, pp219f).

All of this explains my own morning Bible reading; Matthew 18:1-10. Here, Jesus gives the sternest possible warnings about sin and those who cause it. The eternal consequences of sin (whether I commit it myself or cause others to do so) are horrific - exactly what Jesus underwent on the cross - and must be avoided at all costs. The cost of a hand or an eye is a price worth paying to avoid the eternal fire.
But sin is not so much this or that naughty thing that I do (or cause others to do) but a refusal to come to Jesus in childlike humility, accepting that he died for my sin. 'Jesus said, 'I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like a little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.' The disciples wanted greatness, honour, status. The child was happy just being a child, coming to Jesus when invited.
Which am I? Which are you?

Joy, delight & contentment

'What were we made for? To know God.
What aim should we set ourselves in life? To know God...
What is the best thing in life, bringing more joy, delight, and contentment, than anything else? Knowledge of God...
Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life's problems fall into place of their own accord. The world today is full of sufferers from the wasting disease which Albert Camus focused as Absurdism ('life is a bad joke')...
What makes life worth while is having a big enough objective, something which catches our imagination and lays hold of our allegiance; and this the Christian has, in a way that no other person has. For what higher, more esalted, and more compelling goal can there be than to know God?'
J I Packer, Knowing God, pp36f.

Punctuation!

Tyndale House Biblical Studies Library in Cambridge is a place of great scholarship. But it's no ivory tower. Yes, there are 'research fellows' and loads of PhD students, but the work has tremendous value. As the world seeks to undermine the reliability of the Bible, these bears of big brains are demonstrating that it is good history, that it hangs together as a coherent whole, and that we can trust the transmission of the text down the ages.
I went up there today and met with Dirk Jonkind (Research Fellow) to sort out my own little project. He was really enthusiastic that I should look at the punctuation marks in P66 (a 2nd Century manuscript of John's Gospel). We've no idea what I might find because no-one has really done this research before; the various dots and double dots been noticed and noted before, but not examined for significance or meaning. Dirk would like to publish the finished work - could it be the next Amazon best-seller?!

Retreat!

I'm just back from a week at St Cuthman's retreat house in Sussex. No tv (hooray!), no radio (but I sneaked in my portable DAB), no wifi, so no emails (hooray!) and no updates to the blog. But I doubt anyone's reading it anyway...

St Cuthman's is a beautiful, comfortable and peculiar place. Beautiful house & setting. Comfortable bedrooms and lounges. A peculiar mix of people, not quite knowing whether or how much to say to one another, in case the other is on a silent retreat.

As I suspected it didn't take long to strike gold in Packer's 'Knowing God'. In the introduction, he outlines two unhelpful modern trends in Christians. I'll just give you the first, which seems particularly apt: 'Christian minds have been conformed to the modern spirit: the spirit, that is, that spawns great thoughts of man and leaves room only for small thoughts of God... No-one can wholly blame them, for churchmen [i.e. church leaders] who look at God, so to speak, through the wrong end of the telescope, so reducing him to pigmy [sic] proportions, cannot help to end up as more than pigmy Christians...'
So I'll do my best not to be a 'pigmy' Christian, and use this sabbatical to enlarge my vision of the majestic Trinity.

Talking of the Trinity, in Jesus' prayer recorded in John 17, we're reminded that the church should reflect the union and love of the Three-in-One. I was thinking about this as I sat in the silent dining room, reading as I ate my supper, along with seven others doing the same. For me, the attraction of a silent meal was the avoidance of the polite small-talk of the non-silent dining room. But that was selfish. I was shutting myself off from other members of the body of Christ – refusing to love them by showing an interest in them. So I changed my dining habits!

What to read?

So what have I piled up to read over the next few weeks?
First and foremost must be the Bible: reading the NT in Greek really slows me down and helps me to see things I'd otherwise miss. In the OT, it'll be Genesis 12-50. I really haven't got to grips with how to preach those long narratives...
Second, I want to read the pastoral advice in Andrew Cornes' book, 'Divorce & Remarriage'. This is always going to be a pastorally important issue in the church, and I want to handle it as sensitively and biblically as possible.
Third, while I don't imagine for one second that reading a book on prayer will instantly turn me into a great prayer warrior, I want to finish Packer & Nystrom's book, 'Prayer'.
Talking of Packer, it's several years since I read 'Knowing God'. I remember so clearly when and where I read it for the first time (the back garden of 112 Stephen's Road!), and I remember how it warmed my heart and stimulated my brain - if that happens again, I'll surely be all the more godly for it.
I'll post the gems here over the next few weeks.

Did Jesus really rise?

Check out this video, starring Peter Head & Peter Williams from Tyndale house.

Why "Re-inking the pen"?

The prospect of a 3-month sabbatical is actually quite scary.
On the first day of a friend's sabbatical, I asked his wife how he was, 'Stressed', she said, 'about trying to relax.' I know how he could feel like that. St Peter's has been very gracious in granting me the time, but sometimes I feel a certain weight of expectation - that I'll come back 10 years younger, with boundless energy, improved preaching, great ideas and so on.
So what am I hoping to do?
Well, first of all, have a go at writing a blog. I've no pretensions about my ability to write anything that anyone will ever read, but perhaps one or two folk at church might like to see what I'm up to. Perhaps!
But why call it, 'Re-inking the pen'? Well, I suppose 'Hitting the wrong key' would be the modern equivalent. We're used to spotting when smoeone's made a mistake by hitting the wrong key. But I'm interested in what mistakes were made by the very earliest scribes in the world's most influential manuscripts.
You see, one of my more geeky interests is New Testament textual criticism, and in particular, scribal habits. That is, trying to discover how scribes copied the earliest papyrus manuscripts of the NT: Were they reliable copyists? When and why did they make mistakes? Did they change the text to suit their own ideas? Etc.
My claim to fame is to have discovered that scribes tended to make mistakes when they re-inked their pens. Not a great claim, you might think, but my tutor, Peter Head, did write it up and it was published in New Testament Studies.
Now I'm hoping to take this a bit further and help with the Tyndale House Text and Canon Project, "This is a project encouraging research and education in areas such as the way in which scribes copied the Bible, the origin and history of apocryphal gospels, the reasons for having four Gospels in the New Testament, and many other related questions."
So a major part of my sabbatical will be looking at the use of punctuation in the 2nd & 3rd century NT manuscripts.
And the rest of the time? Helping a charity look at its governance procedures; reading; improving my NT Greek; praying and reflecting on 15 years of church ministry.