Author: jetbrane

I am a Pastor of a small Church in Mid-Michigan who delights in my family, my congregation and my calling. I am postmillennial in my eschatology. Paedo-Calvinist Covenantal in my Christianity Reformed in my Soteriology Presuppositional in my apologetics Familialist in my family theology Agrarian in my regional community social order belief Christianity creates culture and so Christendom in my national social order belief Mythic-Poetic / Grammatical Historical in my Hermeneutic Pre-modern, Medieval, & Feudal before Enlightenment, modernity, & postmodern Reconstructionist / Theonomic in my Worldview One part paleo-conservative / one part micro Libertarian in my politics Systematic and Biblical theology need one another but Systematics has pride of place Some of my favorite authors, Augustine, Turretin, Calvin, Tolkien, Chesterton, Nock, Tozer, Dabney, Bavinck, Wodehouse, Rushdoony, Bahnsen, Schaeffer, C. Van Til, H. Van Til, G. H. Clark, C. Dawson, H. Berman, R. Nash, C. G. Singer, R. Kipling, G. North, J. Edwards, S. Foote, F. Hayek, O. Guiness, J. Witte, M. Rothbard, Clyde Wilson, Mencken, Lasch, Postman, Gatto, T. Boston, Thomas Brooks, Terry Brooks, C. Hodge, J. Calhoun, Llyod-Jones, T. Sowell, A. McClaren, M. Muggeridge, C. F. H. Henry, F. Swarz, M. Henry, G. Marten, P. Schaff, T. S. Elliott, K. Van Hoozer, K. Gentry, etc. My passion is to write in such a way that the Lord Christ might be pleased. It is my hope that people will be challenged to reconsider what are considered the givens of the current culture. Your biggest help to me dear reader will be to often remind me that God is Sovereign and that all that is, is because it pleases him.

Supernova Gospel

“(The Apostle Paul) saw that it was paradoxically through the narrowing down of his redemptive acts to unique singularity of one single man — the Messiah, Jesus, that God opened the way to a universal offering of the grace of the gospel to all the nations.”

Christopher J. H. Wright
Knowing Jesus Through The Old Testament — pp. 52-53

Try to imagine the Gospel as dense matter getting smaller and smaller, and yet at the same time increasingly concentrated, with the passing of redemptive history. Jesus arrives on the scene and with the confluence of redemptive events that characterize his life completed, the dense matter Gospel explodes, and goes super nova, having a re-creating effect wherever the impact of the explosion is felt. This is the book of Acts chronicling the initial fulfillment of the OT prophet’s foretelling of the streaming in of the nations to serve the Lord (cmp. Acts 15:15-17).

The Church, for the Glory of God, impelled by the Spirit, preaching up Christ crucified, is still to be God’s supernova re-creating institution. The Church should still have the expectation that God will use it as the agency whereby the nations and their cultures know and experience redemption. The church is not waiting for some cataclysmic end for the cataclysmic end, with its promise of a new heavens and a new earth, has already come in the death, resurrection, ascension and Pentecost of Christ. The old Judaic order has passed and God’s new Kingdom order has come. In order for that present new Kingdom to progressively come as a reflection of its definitive arrival we must be adorning the Gospel w/ beautiful community life, proclaiming the crown rights of King Jesus, and commanding all men everywhere to repent. Because of the Supernova Gospel we have been given a Kingdom that can not be shaken. This Kingdom is destined to make the places of this current world that are arid and hostile deserts (The lands of the Son’s of Allah, The land of the Jews, The lands of the humanist) which are the last outposts of the falls resistance into beautiful and flourishing gardens of the Lord.

However before any of this happens the church has to awaken to what it is as members of the age to come, and what the seed of the serpent is as it holds membership in this present wicked age. Until we understand this eschatological antithesis we will forever be putting up garden wallpaper on the desert spots and deluding ourselves that it has been changed by the supernova Gospel.

Jesus & The Church

“Israel existed at all only because of God’s desire to redeem people from every nation. But in his sovereign freedom he chose to do so by this particular and historical means. The tension between the universal goal and the particular means is found throughout the Bible and cannot be reduced to either pole alone….Now when we consider Jesus in light of this, the vitally important fact is that the NT presents him to us as the Messiah, Jesus the Christ. And the Messiah ‘was’ Israel. That is, the Messiah was Israel representatively and personified. The Messiah was the completion of all that Israel had been put in the world for — i.e. God’s self-revelation and his work of human redemption. For this reason, Jesus shares the uniqueness of Israel. What God had been doing through no other nation he now completed through no other person than the Messiah Jesus. The paradox is that precisely through the narrowing down of his redemptive work to the unique particularity of the single man, Jesus, God opened the way to the universalizing of his redemptive grace to all nations. Israel was unique because God had a universal goal though them. Jesus embodied that uniqueness and achieved that universal goal. As the Messiah of Israel he could be the savior of the world. Or as Paul reflected, going further back, Jesus became a second Adam, the head of a new humanity (Rmns. 4-5, Gl. 3)”

Christopher J. H. Wright
Knowing Jesus Through The Old Testament

Put a hour glass on its side. From the left broad end to the middle point where the sand pours though you have the Old Testament with it particularizing motion serving the universal end of making God’s glory known to the nations. As OT redemptive history unfolds the motion becomes, like the hourglass increasingly particular. At the broad end we find the Nation of Israel but eventually that is narrowed down to the tribe of Judah and eventually that is narrowed down to the household of David and that is finally narrowed down to the Messiah Jesus. In Jesus we find the culmination of what it was supposed to mean for Israel to be a Kingdom of Priests unto God.

With the Death of Jesus, the particularizing motion of Scripture ceases and we start reading the NT accounts moving from the narrow to the broad end of the right side of the hour glass. Jesus has accomplished OT Israel’s task and now the nations become to come in. On the day of Pentecost the Spirit falls on representatives of all the household nations. In the book of Acts the broadening of the Gospel is seen in the march of the Gospel from Judea to Samaria to the uttermost ends of the earth. In the book of Acts we see the Spirit fall on the Jews, the God-fearers, and the Gentile Ephesians. What is being communicated here is that now the Church is to be to the nations, under the power of the Spirit, and w/ the commission of Jesus what the Jews were to be the nations in the OT.

The goal in all of this was and is the re-creation work of God whereby, by the power of the Gospel the World repents much the same way that the Assyrians repented under the Gospel ministry of Jonah. If Christ is a faithful recapitulation of what faithless Israel was supposed to be, then following the head and body metaphor, the Church is to likewise be a faithful recapitulation of what faithless Israel was to be. The Church is now the Kingdom of Priests representing the nations to God and her task is to reveal God’s work of re-creation in her midst in a world that still suffers and pursues the Fall’s attempt at de-creation. Just as the first Adam, in submission to his dominion mandate, was to push the garden boundaries so that the garden of the Lord covered all the earth, so the Church has been commissioned again with a dominion mandate (Mt. 28) to bring God’s re-creative Gospel news with the expectation that the glory of the knowledge of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the ocean.

Christianity & Military Enlistment

http://www.covenantnews.com/selbrede090201.htm

If Dr. Selbrede is correct then one serious implication of his article is that it would be counter productive to the interest of King Christ for Christians to go into the military in order to support a Empire-State that is seeking to advance what amounts to a Christ-hating Christian destroying agenda.

Look, there was a story recently where American military chaplains were destroying bibles in Afghanistan so as not to offend our Afghan “hosts.”

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/05/bibles-destroye.html

Why would any Christian think it is acceptable to support a military and government by their involvement in supporting a policy that forbids witnessing for Jesus and burns Bibles that were printed in the language and local dialect of the Afghan people?

The State is the current closest approximation to the Anti-Christ. When Christians do anything to support the state on the scale that enlistment into the Military reflects, they are at the same time not supporting the Kingdom of God.

Scripture commands that Kings are to kiss the son but we American Christians lend our support to a state that refuses to Kiss the Son by turning a blind eye to our sons (and daughters) enlisting into the military.

I don’t get it, and I don’t get why such reasoning is that difficult to understand OR agree with.

The Word Is Getting Out

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2009/07/28/glenn_beck_obama_is_a_racist.html

I’ve been saying what Beck says on the FOX network for quite some time. The only mistake that Beck makes is not by being precise enough. Obama, is a man, who hates white people but the hatred for white people is first and foremost pointed toward those white people who are not conditioned by cultural Marxism. Obama will surround himself with White people who are cultural Marxists for the simple reason that he could not be elected or rule this country w/o them. Try to imagine the current White people who surround and support Obama as the same type of Jews who served on the Judenrat (Jewish Councils) or who served as Jewish enforcers during the Nazi occupation. All because the Nazi’s used Jews to control and destroy Jews didn’t mean that the Nazi’s loved Jews. And just because Obama uses White people to control and destroy White people doesn’t mean that Obama isn’t racist.

Historical role reversal has been achieved. Just as in the ante-bellum South the house Negro was further up the Black social pecking order in the White Man’s world so in 2009 America the White man who is a cultural Marxist is further up the White social pecking order in the cultural Marxist world.

Another way of saying this is that white Democrats, being cultural Marxists, have become the new race pimps. They pretend to be taking care of their people but what really is going on is that they are sacrificing their people so that they can have place and position in the coming cultural marxist new world order. Just as Black race pimps sell themselves as men who are taking care of their people but in the end were selling out their people in order to have personal influence and position in the White man’s world so with a new cultural Marxist world order we have new white race pimps who are positioning themselves to have personal influence and position in the coming cultural Marxist new world order.

Glenn Beck is correct that the cultural Marxist, Black liberation influenced Obama does not like white people but Beck better get these nuances down or else he is going to get his head handed to him by our politically correct cultural gatekeepers.

Exodus 19:5-6

“Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all the nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a Kingdom of Priests and a holy nation.”

Exodus 19:5-6

1.) It is interesting here that 19:5 with its reference to “keeping my covenant” we find a reference not to the Mosaic covenant, which has not yet been cut, but rather it is a reference to the Abrahamic covenant. The Abrahamic covenant, as we know, was a royal covenant (treaty), which means that it was established unilaterally and monopleurically by God. The Abrahamic covenant was established at God’s own sovereign initiative as a covenant with an unconditional promise and yet this unconditional promise covenant is spoken of in Exodus 19:5 as requiring God’s people to “Keep His covenant.” This inclines one to believe that that this monopleurically established Abrahamic covenant was dipleurically administered. This is to say that while God sovereignly and graciously did initiate the Abrhamic covenant, He did so in such a way that there was an expectation of a proper human response to this gracious covenant promise. This is seen in Genesis 17 where God calls Abraham to “walk before Him and be blameless.” God’s graciously built upon the Abrahamic covenant by introducing the sacrificial system in the Mosaic covenant. This sacrificial system continued to remind God’s people that the covenant was completely gracious as sins committed within the context of and against the covenant were forgiven and covered upon God’s own provision of sacrifice, propitiation, and expiation. However, no faithful Hebrew would have ever argued that the grace of God’s royal grant covenant, where God does all the saving, was a license to sin against God’s gracious covenantal requirements to “keep the covenant.” Neither would have any faithful Hebrew argued that His desire to “keep the covenant” triggered the faithfulness of God to Him. Rather, he understood that it was God’s faithfulness to Him that triggered his desire to keep covenant.

All of this is to say that the salvation that is graciously and unilaterally given by God in the context of the covenant of grace is a salvation that still has the expectation of a “proper human response.” God does all the saving in Christ. There is no improving God’s gracious salvation. Yet, the effect of grace is always to prompt in God’s people a desire and a beginning to “keep covenant and obey God fully. (cmp. Heidelberg Catechism Q. 114)

2.) Note how God reminds Israel that He owns all the earth and then goes on to specify that covenant keeping Israel will be unto Him a treasured possession — a Kingdom of Priests and a Holy nation.

I wonder if there is a principle we can extrapolate here? Clearly God insists that the whole earth is His. There was not place that a Hebrew could go to escape God’s ownership and presence and yet despite this ownership of God over everything, so that everything is separate unto God, covenant keeping Israel would be the apple of God’s eye. Similarly today the earth is Gods but the Church is a royal Priesthood and a Holy nation (I Peter. 2:9-10) However, all because the Church is a royal Priesthood and a Holy nation that does not mean the rest of the earth should not be decorated with that Holiness. The whole earth is still Gods and since the whole earth remains Gods shouldn’t it be the responsibility of those who are part of God’s royal Priesthood and Holy nation to bring the authority and glory of God to bear upon the whole earth that remains His?

I ask this in particular to those who seem to fear that if everything is Holy then nothing will be holy. I ask this in particular to those who seem to think that if Holiness gets beyond the boundaries of the Church, reaching into what they call the “common sphere” then there is a real danger that Holiness will be reduced since it will have been made to define everything.

What if, instead of dividing things up into a Holy and common nomenclature we divided it up into a Holy and Holy of Holies language? What if we understood that all the earth should reveal God’s holiness but understood that could only happen as long as the fount out of which holiness gushes (the church) is understood as the life source of Holiness? If the earth remains the Lord’s and the Lord remains Holy, shouldn’t the earth reflect some of that shekinah glory? Why should the earth, owned by God, remain common if it were to be occupied by a Holy people serving a Holy God?