Matthew Wright > Recent Status Updates

To think of Godish coming kingdom in this 2-stage way. Knowing what time it was would be crucial for how they would’ve been live. In fact, though the question of the Lord’s “ Royal appearing” might seem to be quite unrelated to the earlier. Questions of sex and money, they are all of a piece. If you are already living in the new world, they are new ways of behaving.

Sex and money are important, but they are not to be worshiped. Sexual priority, and financial generosity, or to be built into the Christian DNA from the start.

Money was part of Christian. Discipleship from the start. Paul had agreed with the “pillars” in Jerusalem, that he would go on “ remembering the poor”; that was one of the signs of the new community that would carry forward as an identifying Mark for centuries to come.

Unbridled, crazy, and inflamed lust is a sign that one does not know God. Sexual holiness isn’t just a “rule,” in arbitrary commandment. It is part of what it means to turn from idols and serve the true and living God. It is part of being a genuine, image-bearing human being.

When the Romans closed in on Jerusalem in the last months of the war, crucifying so many Jews that they ran out of timber for crosses, Josephus records sorrowfully that more Jews were in fact killed by other Jews than by the Romans themselves.

Any "power" that they have comes not from their own quasi-divinity, but from the fact that humans, worshipping them, have given to the malevolent forces that use their name as a cloak the authority that God always intended humans themselves to exercise.

the powers that have gripped the pagan world and the fake "gods" that these "powers" have used to deceive the nations have been overthrown. Zeus, Hermes, and the rest have been shown up as shams. They simply do not exist.

it is time to turn away from all this playacting and experience the power and love of the God who puts all the gods to shame.

People often think of "miracles" as the "invasion" of the natural order by a force from outside. That wasn't how the early Christians saw it. For them, dramatic and otherwise inexplicable healings were seen as evidence of new creation, of the Creator himself at work in a fresh way.

those who worshipped idols became enslaved to them, trapped in a downward spiral of dehumanization.

They were aimed at the establishment of a new kind of kingdom on earth as in heaven.

Paul's "missionary" journeys were not simply aimed at telling people about Jesus in order to generate inner personal transformation and a new sense of ultimate hope,