Today, as I visited The Gospel Coalition site, I noted that they are featuring a newly released book, with the very simple title, Atonement, edited by Gabriel N E Fluhrer.  However, the simplicity of such should not be confused with the profundity of theological-to-praxological reality of this cornerstone doctrine of the Christian faith!

Here are some details about this title…

The doctrine of atonement is under debate. Evangelical publishing houses are releasing books that purport to change our understanding of this central Christian doctrine; church leaders are asking for the emphasis to change away from Christ as sin-bearer to Christ as exemplar of God’s love (as if they need to be mutually exclusive?). What have some of the churches’ best-known theologians and pastors to say on the matter? Published in conjunction with the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, this is a collecting of outstanding presentations on the Atonement from recent PCRT meetings, together they make a strong case for the Reformed view of Atonement, but this book doesn’t just discuss points of theology; it also shows the implications of that theology and how to communicate it – brilliant!

On the P & R site, where these details have been sourced, you can find a PDF of the Table of Contents, and also a PDF of a sample chapter.  This chapter happens to be the first chapter, by J. I. Packer, titled, The Necessity of the Atonement, and has much God-honouring Gold-for-your-Soul contained therein!

The following is how a powerful and potent Packer description of the definition of Sin and it’s effects…

I start by reminding you of what the Bible says about the nature of sin. We use the word with a merely social meaning. We use it to signify certain types of behavior acted out by one human being against another. This is a bad start because we are secularizing a theological word whose meaning in Scripture is always conceived and defined in terms of a wrong relationship to God. God is the reference point for defining sin, not other humans. The Scripture goes further and tells us how God sees sin. It’s God’s view of sin that is given in the Bible and that we must adopt.

John Owen, the great Puritan of whom I spoke earlier, in his monumental work on sin, wrote a paragraph in which he summarizes God’s view of sin. Read with care the words that Owen used to describe how the creature acts towards his Creator: disgrace, fraud, blasphemy, enmity, hatred, contempt, rebellion and injury, poison, stench, dung, vomit, polluted blood, plague, pestilence, abominable, and detestable. Sin is essentially the resolve — the mad, utterly blameworthy, but nonetheless, utterly firm resolve — to play God and fight the real God. Sinners resolve to treat themselves as the center of the universe and so they keep God at bay on the outer circumference of their lives — or so they think. They won’t allow the Creator to rule over them as he wills to do. If they appeal to God at all, they ask God to act according to their will and for their convenience like a servant who gets them out of trouble and bestows on them good gifts. They never serve him from the heart and only resent the claim to dominion that he makes. This is why people like Luther, Calvin, and Owen say, roundly and without question, that sin wills the fundamental abolition of God. Sin wills that God should not be there. Sin plays God, sin fights God, and sin wishes that God didn’t exist at all.

It should be easy to see that this attitude produces a monstrous guilt. This is a horror in God’s world, and the Bible treats sin as horrible. One of the ways in which sin is presented to us in Scripture (and the references are too great for the space allowed) is as uncleanness. In English, we have a four-letter word for this: dirt. You probably cannot help recoiling at something dirty. Think of your reaction if you were asked to sleep on obviously dirty sheets or to eat your lunch off obviously dirty plates.  Similarly, God cannot help recoiling from that attitude in man that expresses itself in fighting him, defying him, and willing him out of existence. You cannot wonder that he hates the abominations which sin produces. God is holy. Sin is uncleanness in his eyes and he hates it.

One does not need to wonder why the Gospel is indeed GOOD NEWS!

You can read the whole chapter by heading to this page… HERE… and following the link!

It’s Been Special

I am Jonny King