Thoughts and Notes
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War and peace
Deuteronomy 20 lays out laws concerning warfare, but this isn’t Sun Tzu. It doesn’t deal with strategies or techniques or troop organization. It begins with the priest addressing the people to fear not because God is with them. He is Immanuel. He is the Man of War that rides out and conquers the enemies of…
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Decreation, recreation, and covenant renewal
Genesis 6 sets up several patterns that show up repeatedly throughout scripture and throughout history. The first is a pattern of compromise. The line of Seth, through whom the covenant extended as a replacement for faithful Abel, began to compromise and take wives from among the descendants of unfaithful, murderous Cain. The line had become…
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Spiritual anorexics
Vander Zee on the frequency of receiving the supper, “If God feeds and confirms our faith in the sacrament, then we deprive ourselves of the fullness of his grace when we sit around the table only once in a while. We need every nourishment that God provides, and to miss the meal not only snubs…
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God does not make offers
Vander Zee efficiently lays out God’s effective working of the redemption of His creation. “Biblically speaking, God does not hand the treasures of salvation in Christ over to the church to distribute and control. Neither does God have his Son die and rise again only to offer a ‘deal’ to humankind. and then wait around…
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Defined by baptism
Vander Zee again, “Through baptism God redefines us, telling us who we are, and making us who we are.”
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Gospel sacraments
Vander Zee emphasizes that Baptism and the Lord’s Supper “are gospel sacraments. They are signs and seals of the salvation we have in Christ. If one believes, for example, that this salvation is mediated through the apostolic authority of the church, then sacraments become ways in which that grace is controlled and distributed by the…
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A sound Christian definition
Vander Zee again, quoting author Frank Gavin, “A sound Christian definition of sacrament proceeds from the characteristically Jewish premise that the material world is not evil, but good – since God made it and saw that it was good.”
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World view
In his book, Christ, Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper, Leonard Vander Zee establishes the Old Testament world view as one “founded on the assertion that this world is God’s creation. The Old Testament begins in Genesis 1 with a great hymn of praise to the Creator. As each succeeding stanza of the hymn unfolds the…
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In all things preeminent
In Colossians 1, Paul overflows in his description of the power and position of Christ. He is the image of the invisible God He is the firstborn of all creation By Him all things were created He is before all things In Him, all things hold together He is the head of the body He…
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No one answered
Ahab, king of the northern kingdom of Israel, had married Jezebel, a Canaanite sorceress and daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians. Together, they sought to restore Canaanite Baal worship in the land of Israel. Ahab built a temple and an altar to Baal and Jezebel killed the prophets of Yahweh. This is a great…