Weekly Sampler Platter: Friday, July 4 2014

Here's a sampling of some of the things I've been reading and reviewing this week.  The hope is that these bite-sized sections of books, articles, blog posts, etc will stand on their own and be beneficial in-and-of-themselves.  But I also hope that some of you will like these excerpts enough that they pull you into the larger work from which they've been taken.

Let's start sampling: 

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Robert L. Saucy in Minding the Heart: The Way of Spiritual Transformation (Kregel, 2013), p. 173:
"Biblical meditation that makes the transformative power of the Scripture active in our lives is...more than an intellectual understanding of its truth.  There must be a dwelling on that truth - thinking, talking, singing about it - until it is known personally with the whole heart including our affections."

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J.I. Packer in Knowing God (InterVarsity Press, 1973), pp. 106-07:
"…the truth is that God in his wisdom, to make and keep us humble and to teach us to walk by faith, has hidden from us almost everything [note that Packer says almost everything, and not everything] we should like to know about the providential purposes which he is working out in the churches and in our own lives….We can be sure that the God who made this marvelously complex world order, and who compassed the great redemption from sin and Satan, knows what he is doing, and 'doeth all things well,' even if for the moment he hides his hand.  We can trust and rejoice in him, even when we cannot discern his path."

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Jeremy R. Treat in The Crucified King: Atonement and Kingdom in Biblical and Systematic Theology (Zondervan, 2014), p. 142:
"According to Eduard Schweizer, 'It would be an astonishing miracle indeed if Jesus were to come down from the cross, but this would prove only that he was a superman - not that he was Messiah and King of Israel.'  Jesus reigns not by coming down from the cross to save himself, but by staying on the cross to save others.  He reigns by saving, and the greatest act of salvation is on the cross.  Jesus' messianic mission was to bring the kingdom, and to the extent that he did so on the cross, one can truly say that Jesus reigns by serving."