Showing results for "Death" in Commentaries

Lament is how we bring our sorrow to God - but it is a neglected dimension of the Christian life for many Christians today. We need to recover the practice of honest spiritual struggle that gives us permission to vocalize our pain and wrestle with our sorrow. Lament avoids trite answers and quick solutions, progressively moving us toward deeper worship and trust.

James Denney was a Scottish New Testament scholar, pastor, and theologian (1856 - 1917). The author was convinced that the death of Christ was not given the proper importance in the common Christian mind, measured against its centrality in the New Testament. The purpose of the evangelical and theological work The Death of Christ is thus to explain the place held by the death of Christ in the scriptures, and the interpretation put upon it by the apostolic writers.

Daniel’s prayer and seventy-week prophecy in Daniel 9 is unique and epic. With Israel being in exile nearly seven decades, Daniel was eager for the nation’s physical and spiritual restoration. However, the Lord revealed that His plans for Israel would reach into the distant future, encompassing a period of seventy weeks. In this remarkable revelation, God outlined a precise chronology when Christ would come and die to achieve redemption, and when the Antichrist would rise and reign but ultimately be destroyed.

Although most people acknowledge that Jesus was a first-century Jew, interpreters of the Gospels often present him as opposed to Jewish law and customs—especially when considering his numerous encounters with the ritually impure. Matthew Thiessen corrects this popular misconception by placing Jesus within the Judaism of his day. Thiessen demonstrates that the Gospel writers depict Jesus opposing ritual impurity itself, not the Jewish ritual purity system or the Jewish law.

The American church avoids lament. But lament is a missing, essential component of Christian faith. Lament recognizes struggles and suffering, that the world is not as it ought to be. Lament challenges the status quo and cries out for justice against existing injustices. Soong-Chan Rah's prophetic exposition of the book of Lamentations provides a biblical and theological lens for examining the church's relationship with a suffering world. It critiques our success-centered triumphalism and calls us to repent of our hubris. And it opens up new ways to encounter the other.