Welcome to Wounded Hill one of the official blogs of Barnabas Consulting Inc
This blog: Central
We use this term "central" to describe lot of things. We use it to refer to location, a core concept or the weightiest portion of a logical argument. In Pauline NT writings everything flows from the Cross of Jesus Christ. Therefore anyone who professes faith in the God of the bible would do well to track with his message. There is much written and said these days about grace. Grace is an empty term, a confusing idea, and not at all useful if detached from the centrality of the Cross of Christ.
Wounded Hill is an image I have adopted personally to focus my attention on the finished work of Jesus Christ. All my identity, all my hope is hung on what the Bible says took place the day Jesus of Nazareth died as a common criminal outside Jerusalem.
God's full, undiluted wrath against my sin fell on God the Father's own Son Jesus. In 35 years I have not yet begun to wrap either my heart or my head around this truth, this Central message. " I am crucified with Christ" Paul said of himself. When Jesus died I died. It's that simple. That "me" is gone.
The new "me" is forgiven, adopted, treated as friend and not foe any longer. I am a son of the Father, not an orphan, not a stranger but a one who has been given an audience with the Creator whenever I wish, whenever I need, when I am being "good" and when I am not. I am a servant deserving His wrath but instead He has made me an heir. Truthfully, I whine about trivial stuff all the time. What a waste! What misdirection and misuse of a perfectly good day, hour or minute. That is, in light of the value of Jesus' death, the beauty of it, the freedom that comes from it, the power of it everything else it trivial. As Paul makes it clear in his letter to the Ephesians what God is doing through the Church, His family is central- everything else is peripheral.
What God Almighty, Maker of Heaven and earth has done, is doing and will continue to do unabated forever is rooted in the Central truth, God the Son died for the sins of His enemies of whom I am chief.
So then, I am not getting better. No, that may be central to being a 'normal' American but not central to the life of someone who is defined by the death of God's Son and the life which He brings to anyone who has faith, not in their own goodness or religion or superstition or their own credentials but in the finished work of Jesus Christ. He died "once for all".
I used to strain at getting "better" until the NT made it clear that this straining was only going to keep me neurotic. "Therefore, having been justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom we have received and introduction into this grace in which we stand".
My Heavenly Father is still changing me. Most likely the key changes are not known to me consciously but they are real even so. He continues to make these changes based on what He was pleased to do through the death and resurrection of His Son Jesus.
In light of these things worship and praise has been the only fitting response that makes sense to me. He did for me what I cannot do for myself to make me suitable as a friend. Thank you God for being my Father. Thank you and praise You for not destroying me as you could have. Thank you for kindness undeserved.
At the center of Jesus' training of the disciples near the end of His public ministry Jesus repeated this theme; that the Son of Man must be rejected by the leaders of the Jewish community and then crucified.
Someone had to die. It should have been me or you or all of us. But it wasn't.
grateful,
w j powis ii
president Barnabas Consulting Inc.
