Simply Good News by N.T. Wright (Brief Book Review)

Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good by N.T. Wright
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wright starts off by defining the word gospel (good news) as how it would mean to first century people. For many today the gospel is good advice (believe this and you’ll go to heaven when you die) rather than good news. But, the gospel really is news, and that’s how we should present it.

The good news is that Jesus has become king and He is now restoring the world. He’s not going to whisk us all away to heaven and destroy the world. Jesus started this restoration at the cross and will complete it at the last day. N.T. Wright uses an example of a Roman emperor defeating his enemy and taking power. The news of this would be good to all who support this emperor, and they would be happy to hear that he was now in charge. But first, the emperor would have to consolidate his power before taking his throne. So, the good news of his coming to power would include both something that had happened (the defeat of his enemy) and something that would happen (his coming full rule).

We today are living in that between time. Jesus defeated sin and death at the cross, and now His enemies are being put under His feet, and He will one day come and complete the work He has begun of building His kingdom on earth.

Wright also discusses misunderstood concepts people have today about God (and His anger), sin, hell, eschatology, atonement, creation, covenant, rationalism, and romanticism.

I highly recommend this one.

An excerpt…

Most people who regard the statement that Jesus died in your place as the center of the gospel place this truth, this beautiful fragment, into a larger story that goes like this. There is a God, and this God is angry with humans because of their sin. This God has the right, the duty, and the desire to punish us all. If we did but know it, we are all heading for an eternal torment in hell. But this angry God has decided to vent his fury on someone else instead — someone who happens to be completely innocent. Indeed, it is his very own son! His wrath is therefore quenched, and we no longer face that terrible destiny. All we have to do is believe this story and we will be safe. That is the reconstructed scene offered in many churches, sermons, and books. It is not completely wrong. But as it stands, it is deeply misleading. It distorts the very thing it is trying to frame. It takes the truth that Jesus died in your place and puts it in the wrong context. It does indeed make some sense there. But this is not the same sense that it would make if you put it the right context. This, in anyone’s account, is near the heart of what the early Christians meant by the good news. Since it is also, clearly, near the heart of what many Christians today understand by the good news, it is important that we sort this out.
~Page 68 or Location 976 (Kindle)

* You can take an online course on this book taught by N.T. Wright for (I think) $29USD.
Click here for that.

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Bible Theology Basics

Here are some excellent articles by James Jordan regarding the basics of bible theology. This is not systematic theology. This is looking at the bible and letting it teach us directly what it is saying. Although the word ‘basic’ is used, you might be surprised at what you’ll learn from reading these articles.

There are eight articles to be read in succession. Here are the links…

Biblical Theology Basics #1

Biblical Theology Basics #2

Biblical Theology Basics #3

Biblical Theology Basics #4

Biblical Theology Basics #5

Biblical Theology Basics #6

Biblical Theology Basics #7

Biblical Theology Basics #8

The Vindication of Jesus Christ ~ Brief Book Review

This is the best book I could recommend on Revelation. It is short and simple, but it may be confusing to anyone who is unfamiliar with eschatology and Jordan’s point of view on it.

Basically, Jordan teaches that Revelation describes events that happened in the first century, between AD 30 and AD 70. The climactic judgement/visitation of Jesus on the Jews happened in AD 70 with the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem which was also the end of the old world creation. We are now living in the new creation.

Jordan focuses on the symbols of Revelation and how they all come from the Old Testament. For example, 666 comes straight out of the book of 1 Kings.

Jordan also points out how the old creation was governed by angels, while the new is governed by the Church.

Jordan gave a series of lectures on Revelation which consists of 204 lectures and a 300+ page notebook. It can be found here.

The book can be found here.

Don’t Put the Symbol Before the Horse

In Genesis, the creation account talks about the passage of days before the sun was created. There was a light time and a dark time: a full day.

Now, when God did create the sun, He did not then spin the earth, wait to see how long it took to spin once, and then decide to make a day 24 hours long. God determined that a day would be 24 hours long before He made the first day. The sun and the rotation of the earth were set to conform to what God had already determined. We need to be sure we don’t get that backward.

It is the same with biblical symbolism. Biblical symbols are not like Forest Gump’s box of chocolates. Forest wanted to describe life, so he chose an object close at hand and used it. The object he chose was not created to be a symbol for life, but it was able to be used as such with some imagination. Biblical symbols, however, are specifically created to represent something else that already exists.

An example is marriage. When God wanted to describe the relationship between Christ and the Church, He did not say, “The relationship between Christ and the Church is like marriage,” in a ‘Forest Gump box of chocolates’ kind of way. No, God created marriage because the concept of the relationship between Christ and the Church already existed, and marriage is an image of that pre-existing reality. This is the first reason why Christians oppose gay marriage. Jesus isn’t marrying another Jesus, therefore men don’t marry men — the created symbol has to follow what it’s imaging of the Creator.

When a man is opposed to the idea of a woman being a pastor, it is not because he is a male chauvinist. Rather, it is because he believes that gender matters. Gender is symbolic; not in a ‘box of chocolates’ kind of way, but in a ‘something pre-exists about God and this is an image of that’ kind of way. A man standing before his congregation is a symbol of Christ standing before His bride. A man protecting his church is a symbol of Christ protecting His wife. A woman can not do that; not because she isn’t smart enough, or talented enough, but because she doesn’t fit the symbol. The ‘Beauty and the Beast’ story would quickly lose its appeal if the beauty decided to switch roles with the beast — the symbols wouldn’t match.

Bread and wine exist because they image pre-existing things about God. Baptism, circumcision, the temple, birds, trees, clouds, stars, and even people themselves are symbols following after something which was real before any of them ever existed. Biblical symbols are directly connected to that which they image. Gump’s box of chocolates is not.

Symbols matter. They are not interchangeable. God sets them in place, and we benefit when we follow them and use them as He intended.

Power Religion (aka 666)

In Deuteronomy 17 God gave instructions to the Israelites about their future king. God said that the king must never multiply horses for himself, not multiply wives for himself, and not multiply gold for himself.

To not multiply wives and gold means God did not want the heart of the king to be drawn away from God.

To not multiply horses means that God never intended Israel to be a conquering empire. They were to be a nation of priests to the Gentile nations. The surrounding Gentile nations were to protect Israel. God’s people always had a “Gentile sponsor” — someone to support and protect them. For Abraham it was Melchizedek, for Joseph’s family (the Hebrews) it was Egypt, for Moses and the people (now called Israel) it was Jethro, For David and Solomon it was Hiram of Tyre, and for the post-exile Jews it was Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome (the four beasts of Daniel 7 called up out of the Gentile sea to protect God’s people). Each time a beast went bad, God replaced it.

The Roman beast protected God’s people (now called Christians) all throughout the book of Acts. It was only the apostate Jews who wanted to destroy the Church, and the Romans always protected the Church. But after the events of Acts, the Roman beast went bad and turned on the Church — so God killed it.

The first century apostate Jews worshipped the religion of power. They wanted their Messiah to come with a sword and establish a Jewish empire. Jesus offered a religion of righteousness and self-sacrifice, but the apostate Jews rebelled against that and said, “We have no king but Caesar!” The Jewish leadership caused the people to worship the Roman beast — power religion.

We read about this in Revelation 13. The Land Beast (the Herods and the High Priesthood — two horns) caused all the people on the land (Israel) to worship the Sea Beast (the power of the Roman empire). The Land Beast caused all the people to put the mark of the Sea Beast on their foreheads — 666. That’s in direct contrast to the mark of God put on the foreheads of the faithful Jews in Revelation 7. No one could buy or sell without the mark. Buying and selling refers to worship, which is why Jesus says, “I counsel you to buy from Me gold…” (Revelation 3:18).

Solomon, at the peak of his career, did exactly as God intended for Israel. He built the temple and people from the surrounding nations came to Israel to see the glory of God and to learn from the kingdom of priests. But, Solomon went bad and began to worship power religion. We can read of his downfall in 1 Kings.

In 1 Kings chapters 10 & 11 we read that Solomon multiplied for himself horses, wives, and gold — exactly what he was not supposed to do as king. And we know he became a harsh king because when his son, Rehoboam, took power, the people asked for a more lenient rule (1 Kings 12).

When we read about Solomon multiplying gold (1 Kings 10:14), the bible says that he had 666 talents of gold coming to him each year. There’s more to that number than just this, but anyone “with understanding” reading the book of Revelation in the first century would have seen that the number 666 directly tied the Jewish worship of power religion to the fall of Solomon and his worship of power religion.

There is no need to go outside the bible to understand the number 666 or any of the other symbols in Revelation. 666 does not refer to Barak Obama, George W Bush, three W’s, or any of that stuff. It can all be understood by looking back into the Old Testament.

*This explanation of 666 is derived from James B Jordan’s teaching on the book of Revelation, which you can buy here.