Tag: book

On My Doorstep: The Temple & the Church’s Mission by G.K. Beale

~ Bob Hayton

I was pleased to find a book on my doorstep last week.   Adrianna Wright from InterVarsity Press was kind enough to send me a backlisted title: The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God (New Studies in Biblical Theology) by G.K. Beale.

I’ve been wanting this book for some time now.   A few years back, I  took a course in Biblical Theology from The Bethlehem Institute.   We  used IVP’s New Dictionary of Biblical Theology and Graeme Goldsworthy’s intro to Biblical Theology, According to Plan (IVP), as texts (both are phenomenal books by the way).   My instructor also highly recommended this book.   Then, when I read Beale’s recent book, The Erosion of Inerrancy (Crossway), a whole chapter was devoted to the theme of the cosmic temple idea.   That plus having recently finished John Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis One (IVP) made me very eager to get this book.

The Temple and the Church’s Mission traces the theme of “the dwelling place of God”.   Beale argues that Eden was a cosmic temple modeled after the heavenly abode of God.   All future temples were modeled after Eden, and Rev. 21-22’s “new heaven and new earth” are expressly a renewed Edenic temple-city which fills the whole earth.

From what I’ve read and heard of the book already, it promises to be an insightful and rich read.   I look forward to jumping into the book in the near future.

Quotes to Note 7: The Church Spiritually Fulfills OT Penal Execution Laws

~ Bob Hayton ~ 4 Comments

I’ve been enjoying the book Him We Proclaim: Preaching Christ from All the Scriptures by Dennis Johnson (P&R), lately. I hope to finish the book and have a review up by next week.

This morning I came across a section that I’ll share in a quote below. I had never thought of the connection between the penal execution laws in the OT legal code and the church’s responsibility to discipline and excommunicate its erring members. May this quote stir you up to thinking more about the marvelous unity of Scripture and the glorious privilege we have as members of Christ’s church.

… Leviticus 20:11 required that Israel put to death a man who had sexual relations with his father’s wife. The apostle Paul, addressing the same situation in 1 Corinthians 5:1-13, instructs the church to exercise ecclesiastical excommunication, not physical execution. This formal expulsion of the unrepentant sinner is a sobering and severe sanction, since it is “to deliver this man to Satan.” Yet, excommunication also envisions the possibility that God’s mercy will soften the offender’s hardened heart through the church’s discipline, to the end “that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord” (vs. 5). By closing his discussion with a citation from another text from the Mosaic law dealing with penalties for sexual sins (“Purge the evil person from among you,” Deut. 22:22, 24), Paul identifies the church as the fulfillment of Israel and the spiritual discipline by which the church protects its communal purity as the fulfillment of the penal sanctions by which Israel was to maintain its corporate holiness…. [Him We Proclaim, Dennis Johnson (P&R Publishing, 2007) pg. 281]

Are You Living the Cross Centered Life?

~ fundyreformed ~ 5 Comments

I recently read C.J. Mahaney’s classic book The Cross Centered Life. Let me recommend it wholeheartedly!

It has the ability to transform your life, and greatly reorient your thinking. It’s subtitle is “Keeping the Gospel the Main Thing“. Am I doing that, are you? The gospel is not only important for the lost, but it is the fuel which is to supply our energy for the Christian life.

Here is a great review of the small book (only 89 pages) by Tim Challies. I encourage you to get this and make it part of your life.

Gal. 6:14 “But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”