Booksnip (7)

In Packer's Knowing God, the chapter on propitiation is called "The Heart of the Gospel." Hmmm. If that's the case, if propitiation really is "the heart of the gospel," then it seems we're missing the heart quite often and sometimes quite spectaularly in the contemporary church.

My program for myself of late has been to re-connect with this old school evangelicalism. I'm looking for the gold, the real value, the deep things beneath the chaff of the contemporary. In my experience, preachers tend to talk a lot about God's ability to take care of us, to see to our circumstances. Ah, yes, "circumstances." God will help you through them. God is greater than them. Are you dealing with money issues, relationship issues, these issues, those issues? Give 'em to God. He's good, strong, and loving. He'll take care of you. That's the adumbrated contemporary gospel. And you know what? It's not the gospel of the New Testament. Here's what Packer had to say about it way back in 1971. His words are even more relevant now than then:

We have all heard the gospel presented as God's triumphant answer to human problems--problems of man's relations with himself and his fellows and his environment. Well, there is no doubt that the gospel does bring us solutions to these problems, but it does so by first solving a deeper problem--the deepest of all human problems, the problem of man's relations with his Maker; and unless we make it plain that the solution to these former problems depend on the settling of this latter one, we are misrepresenting the message and becoming false witnesses to God--for a half-truth presented as if it were the whole truth becomes something of a falsehood by that very fact. No reading of the New Testament can miss the fact that it knows all about our human problems--fear, moral cowardice, illness of body and mind, loneliness, insecurity, hopelessness, , despair, cruelty, abuse of power, and the rest--but equally no reader of the New Testament can miss the fact that it resolves all these problems, one way or another, into the fundamental problem of sin againt God. By sin the New Testament means, not social error or failure in the first instance, but rebellion against, definace of, retreat from, and consequent guilt before, God the Creator; and sin, says the New Testament, is the basic evil from which we need deliverance, and from which Christ died to save us. All that has gone wrong in human life between man and man is ultimately due to sin, and our present state of being in the wrong with our selves and our fellows cannot be cured as long as we remain in the wrong with God.