The Surprising God

David Torrance Pastor David W. Torrance, the younger brother of theologians Thomas F. and James B. Torrance teaches and preaches in accordance with the incarnational Trinitarian he learned from Karl Barth and that he shares with his brothers and their many students. For a You're Included interview with David,  click here . Following is the  statement of faith that was   posted   on David's website (now closed). Note how it emphasizes the finished work of Christ, and then speaks to our response as "heart-felt gratitude" by which we accept our salvation in Christ. As Christians we live by the faith of the Son of God. We are redeemed not by our faith but by Christ’s faith. We are called simply to look up and thank him. Our heart-felt gratitude is our acceptance of his salvation. No matter who we are, we are surrounded and embraced by God’s love. We live under the waterfall of his continuing forgiveness for all our sins, past, present and future. For God has...

[Updated 6/6/2020] In Romans 1:18, Paul declares that, "The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness." But how can a loving God be a God of wrath? The answer is that God's wrath, like all his attributes, is an expression of his being (essence), which is love (1 John 4:8). This post explains. (public domain via Wikimedia Commons) God, being in his essence love, loves us (God does what God is). And God finds the evil that hurts his beloved children to be intolerable, and so, in wrath, he judges that evil. What Paul is telling us in Romans is that God has already accomplished this judgment through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of his incarnate Son, Jesus Christ. In and through Jesus, God poured out his wrath on all sin, all evil. Through Jesus, God's wrath is ended - the enmity humanity created between itself and God through sin, is ended. Indeed, Go...

This post was contributed by worship leader Mike Hale. [Following is an excerpt from an article by Matt Royal. You can read Matt’s entire article Giving Thanks as a Christian ,  in the Nov. 8, 2010 issue of The Adopted Life .  The same issue includes an excellent article on Advent by Jonathan Stepp, titled The Womb of the Incarnation .] The act of thanksgiving centers us, stabilizes us, and reinforces the truth of our place of dependence in this universe. When we as Christians give thanks to our God, we are not just giving thanks to the source of all blessings. We are giving thanks to a God who knows us and who shares his life with us in a personal way. We give thanks to the one true God who is (and always has been) all about person-to-person relationships. We give thanks to a God who is not a simple individual, but a community. He is the Trinity—one God who is Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit. In our God the sharing of life and love has always been who he is, and out of ...

In The Forgotten Father , by Thomas A. Smail, the author suggests that with the particular placement of petition for pardon (“Forgive us our sins”) Jesus teaches his disciples that we are to make such petition only after we have already praised the Father, exposed ourselves to the call and grace of his kingdom, set ourselves within the generosity of his provision for us” that we can and must see the wrongness of our present response to him and have recourse to his cleansing and forgiveness (p. 166). [Valuable advice for pastors, worship planners and worship leaders, in designing and carrying out worship services.] To bypass the clear priorities of these earlier parts of the Lord’s prayer (Luke 11:1-4), and to immediately rush to request pardon can lead to a “guilt-ridden religion that is obsessed with its sins and unworthiness.” Smail also reminds the people of God of the social consequences of the gospel of forgiveness – that it is not merely an “individualistic inner transaction wit...

This post was contributed by worship leader Mike Hale. Continuing with our study of the Lord’s Prayer from The Forgotten Father , by Thomas Smail – After having taught his disciples to praise the Father in prayer (Luke 11), Jesus then invites them to pray “Your kingdom come.” We can pray to put ourselves at his disposal so that by his sovereign grace he may continue to “work his kingdom in us, among us and through us.” Smail reminds us, “With the coming of the kingdom we are dealing with the last things, but with the last things that have already overtaken us in the coming of Jesus…” 1. The kingdom has already come with the coming of Jesus—the last days have begun 2. It keeps on coming and make’s it’s presence known as the risen King lives and works among us by the Spirit 3. But like the anticipated return of the King, the final coming of the kingdom is still in the future. As noted in the post of 10.24.10 , there is a Jewish prayer similar to the one Jesus taught. However, ...

Jeremy Begbie A legal (forensic) view of the atonement leads to such unfortunate statements as, "when God looks at me, he sees only Jesus." The sentiment here is that God overlooks my sin by seeing, instead, the sinlessness of Jesus. We are, of course, full of gratitude that Jesus has borne away our sin through his substitutionary sacrifice. But the truth of the gospel is far greater than a mere legal transaction! God does not overlook us in order to see Jesus. Rather, through the continuing Incarnation of the Son of God, God includes us - he sees us, in union with his Son, as his dearly loved, forgiven, accepted and adopted children. He looks upon us with eyes of Fatherly love and joy. The atonement, as it actually is in the person of Jesus, does not negate our personal humanity. It is not "more of Christ, and less of us." Rather, in our union with God, in Jesus, it is MORE of us, re-born in Christ to be all we have been created to be. Non-Christians (a...