by Joel V Webb | Mar 29, 2024 | Uncategorized
Good Friday…a seemingly paradoxical kind of day. One that
represents suffering, pain and death. For us as humans,
disillusionment, fear, betrayal and cowardice. What can be good about
this day?
Of course having the
knowledge of the end of the matter, that answer seems easy. But put
yourselves in the shoes of someone who really didn’t or couldn’t
of known what was happening. This day, when Jesus was brutalized,
beaten and crucified seemed like a complete and utter defeat. All
hopes being dashed and destroyed in but a few hours.
This day, Good
Friday had been preceded by thousands of years of broken human
history of pain, suffering, injustice and sin as humanity did what it
does best; trying to make our own way instead of following God’s.
What we see on this day was the answer to all of that. The story is
an amazing one. How God chose a special people to reveal Himself to
the world be living differently. But even that was not enough because
they often failed and became captive to the very things they were
supposed to show others there was a different way.
The many sacrifices
that allowed temporary fellowship between God and man were now
complete. The promised One who would crush the serpent’s head
accomplished His mission.
If you don’t know
the story, check it out. See what lengths that God has gone to
reconnect with His beloved creation.
While we do have the
joy of resurrection ahead, that does not mean now on this Friday we
can’t lament and acknowledge the pain we all feel and suffer. And
yet, in that pain there is the torn veil. At the moment of Christ’s
death, the symbol of separation was broken to now show the way is
open, and we can now go boldly before our King, friend and Savior!
On this Good Friday,
let us all be thankful for the greatest gift of love that any of us
can and ever will receive. Salvation and forgiveness of sins that
comes from Jesus on the cross.
by Joel V Webb | Mar 24, 2024 | Uncategorized
Death and taxes.
It’s a quippey pretty well known phrase for the reality an inevabilitu of both things. Right now tax season in the USA is coming up in a few weeks. And we just entered Holy Week, as we prepare the remember in solemnity the death of Christ on the cross, and then celebrate His resurrection.
Death is a reality. One that will come to each and every one of us. The last week I’ve considered the reality of this, not just because of Easter. But also because someone who was a friend died, passing from this life to be with the Lord.
Do we consider death?
At times my mind has been captured in the wondering thought of what death actually is. It’s something that whole our culture tries to deny we think about it, but I think many suffer in thinking about it in silence. We try to put out the inevitable reality that death comes for us all.
In my mind this became evident during the pandemic. Many in our culture mentally and emotionally broke at the stark confrontation that death is a reality. We have taken Death, and that it happens and shoved it in a back room, trying to sanitize and forget it so we can go on living our lives.
Thankfully, I don’t think about Death a lot normally. But I think we all should have a healthy understanding of it. Not to live in fear or apprehension, but to actually live life as it was intended…
Knowing that there is more than the here and now.
While for much of human history we have either idealized Death as a way to be remembered, or taken it as something to totally fear.
What Christ does is He gives us ultimate hope and victory in the face of it. Our final enemy is actually defeated. It’s sting has been taken, and it’s finality has been revered for those who trust and giver their entire allegiance to Christ and love their lives for Him.
This is not for the sake of moping around saying, “I’m gonna die, just waiting around while I plan my funeral”, or joyfully going into every deathly situation stupidly. What it means for us, because of the gospel that we can look death right in the face, know that we are in the hands of the King, creator, savior of the entire universe with the ultimate hope and promise that even after we die, it will be reversed in resurrection and we will indeed live again
So as we move into this Easter season, remember and consider the cross. The brutal reality of what it meant, and the impending death that Jesus was aware of from the beginning of His ministry. Remember that death comes for us all…but it doesn’t end there
The cross changes everything. There is resurrection life in Christ
by Joel V Webb | Mar 20, 2024 | Uncategorized
Has it ever happened to you, in the middle of a conversation
someone jumps in at exactly the wrong moment, and without the context of the
last few minutes, hears a line that on its own sounds really bad? I could be
talking with someone about their computer not working and say “did you try
unplugging it and giving it a kick?”, but at that moment a person joins the
conversation, and not knowing things I’m talking about a person and is horrified. This example
is a bit silly, and probably unrealistic, but it illustrates the point. Context
is key in understanding not just what someone is saying, but why as well.
Often times when we read 1 Timothy 2:11-15, we walk away
with the conclusion that Paul is saying women can’t preach in church, and then
infer from that women can’t be pastors. Seems like a simple reading of the
text, right? But what about why Paul is writing these specific words to
Timothy?
I will be summarizing several thoughts from Marg Mowczko,
who wrote a fascinating post about the connection to Gnostic literature and
this passage. (I will also link the full post at the bottom of this one).
We know that Gnosticism was one of the primary heresies that
was plaguing the early church. Gnosticism comes from the Greek work gnosis
meaning knowledge. Within this heresy it was believed that a person could received
secret knowledge from God that superseded the teachings of Jesus. This was
often used to promote either strict asceticism, or be the foundation for living
immorally. What is fascinating is that some of the gnostic literature has been
recovered, and reveals that one of the key components was perverted teachings
when it comes to the story of Adam & Eve. Often in these gnostic
narratives, Eve was elevated as the first, and often as the teacher, and
superior to Adam (specific quotations from these writings are found in the
linked blog post from Marg).
So what is the connection?
Textual evidence (1 Tim. 1:3–7; 2:5, 15; 4:1–4, 7; 6:20) and
writings from Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Eusebius suggest that one of the primary
issues faced by Timothy in the city of Ephesus was dealing with Gnosticism. As
we know Paul’s letters were usually written in response to problems facing
these churches of the recipients, it is very likely that Paul is addressing elements
of gnostic teachings in this letter. This would address why Paul writes specifically
about women teaching, and why he lays out the Biblical account of Adam & Eve
as a means of correcting the error being taught by the Gnostic.
What do we do with this?
We know that Paul was writing in context, addressing
specific issues in the church. The problem was not that women as a whole were
teaching. It seems that because of wrong gnostic teaching, women felt superior and
justified in supplanting men in ministry on the whole. Because of other
evidence in Paul’s writings, and the affirmation of women in position of
teaching in home churches, the writings specifically in 2 Timorthy, and in
other areas like 1 Corinthians are addressing issues of order and false
teaching, rather than a general ban on women in ministry.
Again, I hope you will check out Marg’s post specifically on
this topic as she covers it much more in depth.
https://margmowczko.com/adam-and-eve-in-gnostic-literature/
by Joel V Webb | Mar 19, 2024 | Uncategorized
I think this is a phrase we usually hear about “keeping the
gospel central”. But what does it actually mean? It becomes more complicated
because our modern world offers a plethora of frameworks and methods of dissecting
and understanding the world around us.
The two that we seem to see the most of is fundamentalism
and progressivism. While they initially seemed opposite of one another, ironically,
they are the opposite sides of the same coin. Both ideologies seek to make the
answers for life a two-dimensional world where there is a canned answer for
everything. One side says “obey everything”, the other side says “tear down
everything”. I know that the reality is more nuanced, but that tends to be the
basics. Both want to uphold an unrealistic reality that fulfills the clinical
need for certainty and making everything black and white. The other aspect is
that fear is often the primary motivator to keep people in line. The
consequence is either being “damned to hell, or missing God’s best”, and on the
other side is being cancelled, or called something like a racist, colonizer or
the plethora of other progressive slurs used to keep people in line.
What are we to do? Neither side really answers the need for
direction and an answer to the problems we face.
This is where the centrality of the cross comes in. The growing
divides that we see can only be answered and bridged through Christ and His
atoning work. This is not to say we can simply say “Jesus has it handled” as the
way to deal with problems. Being a follower of Christ means we do the work, and
walk the walk. What it does mean is “He canceled the record of
the charges against us and took it away by nailing it to the cross.”
(Col 2:14 NLT).
Now that we are new and alive in Christ,
the sin we were held to is now the past. Instead of being held in fear or not
qualifying, or not being inclusive enough, we are to love as Christ does for
us. How do we know we love Christ? By loving those who love us, and even more
importantly those who hate us. That is what the gospel does to transform us. It
enables us to love those we could never want to love, because Christ loved them
first.
This can get messy. But that’s kind of the
point. What loving others looks like will not always fit into the neat boxes of
fundamentalism, and it will still speak the truth of sin which is contrary to
progressivism. The way of Christ is the middle way that may seem complicated to
our human understanding. But what it does confounds our ways of thinking, and
through the Holy Spirit, passes the defenses we put up and can open even the
most hardened heart to their need for new life in Jesus.
If the gospel that we preach does not make us
love like Jesus, then its not really the Gospel. Love and truth go hand in
hand, and if separated from one another is actually lost. Focusing only on truth
makes you abrasive, legalistic and frankly kind of a jerk. Only focusing on
love loses the salt of distinction we are to have, not really believing anything and leads us to not really
loving people because they would still be found in the sin Christ came to
forgive them from.
But it is at the cross that truth and love
and complete. And that is the tension that we as Christ’s followers have to
walk in. That can only be done through the help of the Holy Spirit. It is hard,
and I certainly don’t do it perfectly. But it is a journey worth taking to see
our broken and hurting world transformed by the truth of love that is found in
the centrality of the cross.
by Joel V Webb | Mar 11, 2024 | Uncategorized
Whenever I tell my wife that I love her, what usually
happens is she smiles, and says “I love you” back, something chuckling out of
the joy that came from that statement. The question is, what came first, the
statement or the reaction? From this
example we obviously know that it was the statement that produced the reaction.
If I were to confuse the order of things and just go after the reaction, that
would cause problems because it is the knowledge of my wife knowing that I love
her, more than any other human that produces it, not the reaction she gives
that produces the love from where the statement derived.
In many ways, the Gospel is the same thing. There are so
many expected outcomes when the gospel “good news” message is preached. But
what happens when we start to focus on making everything about the results of the
gospel, rather than the source of the results? The equation gets messed up
because without the source, the results become shallow, and even perverted.
An example of this is good works. This topic gets dealt with
throughout the New Testament, and was s driving force behind Martin Luther at
the beginning of the Reformation (so much so he didn’t like the book of James
being apart of the canon of Scirpture!). We know that no one can be saved by
good works. If that were the case than the gospel would not be good news! It
would be dead religion, seen so many other places in the world with people hopelessly
trying to do enough good to pay off their debt. We also know that when a person
has received the free gift of salvation, and the transformation into a new
creature that follows, it is good works that then come from that person (James
2). This is something that any Christian within the classical consensus can
agree on.
What we are now seeing is the proper equation of the gospel
becoming inverted in other areas of the faith, and it is potentially making the
impact of the gospel lessened as it is no the focus, but rather the results of
it are.
Scripture is replete with commands for those who follow Christ
are to do justice (Isa. 1:17, Mic. 6:8, Amos 5:24, Ps. 33:5, Luke 18:1-8, and
there are so many more). To be just, and to treat other image bearers all as
equal is a non-negotiable in the Church. I have come from a background that
doesn’t focus much on there here and now, mostly being concerned for the
here-after (for various eschatological reasons).
But what can also happen is a complete pendulum swing to the
other end of the spectrum where the focus of all our Christian lives becomes “justice”
(often defined in modern political terms). This is not all bad, history
demonstrates that almost all of the advances in human rights, and righting
major injustices have been spear-headed by followers of Christ. Though we do
have to be careful that the work of our lives does not move from preaching the
gospel, to preaching justice. Or, by conflating “doing justice” with preaching
the gospel.
Justice, true biblical justice that transforms the world
into the creation God intended it to be does not come about by pouring all of
our energy into the singular focus of justice. Rather, justice comes as a
natural outworking and product when the gospel is preached, and people are
discipled into followers of Jesus. This call and command is not calling us to
be apolitical (as has been the fault of some in the Church in the past), but to
rather be wholly informed in what we do by the gospel in every area we work.
If God has called us to focusing issues of justice (racial,
socio-economic etc…) than how we address those issue must be informed by the
gospel, rather than our gospel work informed by philosophies and worldviews
produced by the world seeking to side-step dealing with issues of sin.
This is a hard line to walk, its one that I am working on
myself as we speak. I am compelled by the experiences of those who have face
injustice to act from the love of Christ to see people transformed by the
gospel (and likewise the systems that are made up of people), and on the same
hand in the sure knowledge that it is only the gospel that addresses the issues
in a constructive and renewing way. That while not always easy, produces the
result of changing hearts through the power of the Holy Spirit, not trying to
coordinate political power to overthrow something.
As since the early Church, the Gospel will conquer the world
not through power, but through love.
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