David – Forging Ploughshares

The following is a guest-blog by Tyler Goss, converted from a sermon he preached at Berea Mennonite Church in Atlanta, GA, June 24, 2018.

I have a hard time understanding what complete trust in God looks like. I mean—I trust that God cares about me…I trust that God pours out unconditional love for me…but, what about when it comes to a big situation that seems out of my control, like a car accident or a robbery? What about the risk of nuclear war in my lifetime…? I don’t know what completely trusting God looks like. Why do some die, and some escape death? Why do some suffer and others live extravagantly? In a war, both sides may trust in God to see them through the fight…but it’s a battlefront, people will die, loved ones will not return home. Does my trust in God lead to my safety? Or, looking at trust from another angle, if I trust in God, what is it that I am to trust God with? My future, my finances, my health, my plans? What does it mean to trust in God? Continue reading “Trust in God: Lessons in Being Small from David and Goliath”

Between Calvin’s notion of double predestination and the idea of a fully developed human agency freely choosing (either heaven or hell), is the biblical picture of humans emerging in their fullness only in and through the work of Christ. Michelangelo’s sculpture, Awakening Slave, in which a human form appears to be emerging from stone, illustrates the biblical picture of this slowly emerging humanity. The slave is missing his head and the stone itself seems to have imprisoned the man. The dust (adamah), like the stone from whence the slave emerges, is both the substance and that which constrains Adam (humankind) – the tendency or pull is one of return to dust. Just as the sculpture is incomplete, Adam is declared incomplete apart from Eve yet, Eve is the foreshadowing of an emerging new humanity (the Church). The completion of man by the creation of woman, means creation is an open-ended process in which the whole inner basis of humankind (contained in the name Adam) is an ongoing realization. The Second Adam completes the emergence of the human capacity for image bearing but the dust constricts, in varying degrees, those passing from the first Adam to the Second. Paul pictures it both as an accomplished fact (“through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men” (Ro 5:18, NASB)) and an unfolding process (“through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous” (Ro 5:19)). Continue reading “Emergent Freedom Versus Hellish Sovereignty: With Michelangelo”