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The Gospel of John declares its purpose clearly--"these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name." Thus it fulfills a dual function, encouraging believers and providing them with evidences for proclaiming that Jesus is God's Messiah, the divine, incarnate Son of God. Christians today, as in the first century, ...
Few individual books of the Bible have changed the course of church history the way Paul's letter to the Romans has. Whether one thinks of Augustine's conversion in the fourth century, Luther's recovery of justification by faith in the sixteenth or Barth's challenge to recover theological exegesis of the Bible in the twentieth, Romans has been the catalyst to personal spiritual renewal and the ...
First-century Corinth and its challenges were not so different from our own. Upwardly mobile Christians facing radically diverse ethnic, religious, economic and social conditions. The church divided over issues of leadership and authority, sexual morality, gender and worship, marriage and divorce. Sound familiar? Yet as Alan Johnson highlights in this excellent commentary, in the midst of this ...
Though few church squabbles today come close to matching the intensity and seriousness of what Paul faced in the commercial and hedonistic hotbed of Corinth, his strategies and pastoral wisdom in confronting the problems there can still serve as a helpful model for us in responding to a culture marked by individualism and materialism. In Linda Belleville's careful study of 2 Corinthians, readers ...
"Wherever ethnic rivalries are destroying societies, the book of Galatians calls Christians to express the truth of the gospel in communities where there are no ethnic or social or gender divisions." With this strong admonition, Walter Hansen introduces his IVP New Testament Commentary on Galatians. Unlike many other commentaries, Hansen's volume highlights not only the individual dimensions of ...
In Galatians, the apostle Paul makes his most passionate and direct appeal for a gospel free of ethnic or ritual exclusion. Paul's gospel is that of salvation through Christ alone--in him there is "neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." By placing Paul's discussion firmly within its historical context, R. Alan Cole illuminates the potency and ...
The gospel of justification by faith alone was discovered afresh by the Reformers in the epistolary turrets of the New Testament: the letters to the Galatians and the Ephesians. At the epicenter of the exegetical revolution that rocked the Reformation era was Paul's letter to the Galatians. There Luther, Calvin, Bullinger and scores of others perceived the true gospel of Paul enlightening a situation ...
The mysterious presence of Jesus haunts the whole story of Acts. Jesus is announced as King and Lord, not as an increasingly distant memory but as a living and powerful reality, a person who can be known and loved, obeyed and followed, a person who continues to act within the real world. We call the book "The Acts of the Apostles," but we should think of it as "The Acts of Jesus (II)." These studies ...
Number of Studies: 24
"More than any other book of the Bible, Ephesians displays the great purpose and plan of God for the church," Walter Liefeld writes. "It provides a perspective that is unique: God's--and the believer's--view from the 'heavenly realms.'" For those who long to delve into the mind and purposes of God, few books are more helpful than Paul's letter to the Ephesians. Here the apostle paints in broad ...
Nothing cripples a church's effectiveness like internal strife. In Philippi, Paul addressed a congregation whose private struggles were compounded by opposition and suffering from without. Paul's strategy was to write them a letter of friendship and moral exhortation, reminding them of their "partnership in the gospel," their mutual suffering for the cause of Christ, and their need to "stand firm ...