Parker > Recent Status Updates

"God looks on us and our works and sees both as better than we deserve."

"If, in order to sound pious and humble, we insist that our good works are actually nothing of the sort, we end up making too little of the Spirit's work in our lives and muting dozens of biblical texts."

"Why is it automatically prideful to recognize evidence of your spiritual new birth?"

I heard DeYoung present (really preach) the central idea of this book at a breakfast hosted by Crossway at an ETS conference in San Antonio. He made me cry, which was not nice of him.

"And what God spake on the entrance of sin, by the way of contempt and reproach, 'Behold, the man is become like one of us!' upbraiding him with what he had foolishly designed; on the accomplishment of the work of His grace, He says in love and infinite goodness, 'Man is become like one of us,' in the perfect restoration of our image in Him."

"An imaginary Christ will effect nothing in the minds of men but imaginary grace."

"When men could not obtain any experience in their minds of the spiritual mysteries of the gospel, nor be sensible of any spiritual change or advantage by them, they substituted some outward duties and observances in their stead." (Owen had the Roman church in mind, but it applies just as well to the mainline [and some evangelicals].)

Now I've got the rest of the year to get through Revelation!

Owen makes an intriguing assertion here that anthropopathisms in the OT are not merely accommodations to our creaturely minds (I think of Calvin's "lisping nurse" analogy) but implicit indications of the Incarnation yet to come. In his own words, Owen says it would be "absurd" for Scripture to represent God as having human emotions unless it were to indicate that he'd one day take up a nature that had them literally.

"They who do not endeavor to behold the glory of Christ in this world... shall never behold Him in glory hereafter to their satisfaction; nor do they desire so to do, only they suppose it a part of that relief which they would have when they are gone out of this world. For what should beget such a desire in them? Nothing can do it but some view of it here by faith, which they despise or totally neglect."

Imagining a past in which Moody would reprint a book by John Owen is difficult, and yet I'm somehow expected to believe it's true.