My apologies to those of you who have missed my postings on here. While I could offer up the excuse of much going on, that is all it would be: an excuse. However, I want to pick this back up, and over the coming days and weeks, I will be doing a series of posts on something that is often seen as very Lutheran: the distinction of God's Law and the good news of God's Gospel.
Before I begin, though, I should probably start off with an explanation of what these two things really are. Defining terms is a vitally important thing, especially as our language tends to rub the rough edges off of the meanings of words. When we say a word, there is a reason that there are different words that say roughly the same thing. In our day and age, much of those distinctions seem to be lost from time to time.
So, to start off, what is God's Law? Well, there are various ways of answering that question, and I won't pretend to be the final authority on it. Some would see it as everything that God says in such places as the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses. Often in the Scriptures, that is what is spoken of when God's Law is mentioned. However, looking through those five books, we see different types of law. Some are moral, some are ceremonial, and some deal with the life of God's people, the Israelites, in how they were to interact as a society. Three different applications, yet one word, law, used to represent them all.
For my purposes here, we will be using the word Law to mean the way that God designed His people to live, and thus, find that represented best in the moral law, which God spoke and expanded upon in the Ten Commandments. So, while God may mention in the Old Testament that the eating of shellfish and pigs are not according to His law, those are more for His people of that time. They are not moral law. What we see in the commandments, and the different ways that God expands upon that, are what the focus of the word "law" is, as I will be using it.
Likewise, the Gospel, in its truest translation, is the good news. It is the announcement of God's gracious interactions toward His people, especially in Jesus' work of His perfect life, His sacrificial and substitutionary death, and His victorious rising to new life, and now giving that new life to us through the announcement of His good news to the people of the world. Like the word law, you can find other elements than this at work in the whole of the Bible, but for our purposes, this paragraph explains how I will be using the word.
There you have it. The Law and the Gospel. Last point for today. The things I will be writing about over the next few weeks will be drawn from a book entitled "Law and Gospel", taken from lectures given by the first president of my particular church body well over a century and half ago, a man by the name of C. F. W. Walther. I will take time to examine the various theses that he lectured on, hoping that these strike you in profound ways as we consider God's good news to us in Jesus.
Before I begin, though, I should probably start off with an explanation of what these two things really are. Defining terms is a vitally important thing, especially as our language tends to rub the rough edges off of the meanings of words. When we say a word, there is a reason that there are different words that say roughly the same thing. In our day and age, much of those distinctions seem to be lost from time to time.
So, to start off, what is God's Law? Well, there are various ways of answering that question, and I won't pretend to be the final authority on it. Some would see it as everything that God says in such places as the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses. Often in the Scriptures, that is what is spoken of when God's Law is mentioned. However, looking through those five books, we see different types of law. Some are moral, some are ceremonial, and some deal with the life of God's people, the Israelites, in how they were to interact as a society. Three different applications, yet one word, law, used to represent them all.
For my purposes here, we will be using the word Law to mean the way that God designed His people to live, and thus, find that represented best in the moral law, which God spoke and expanded upon in the Ten Commandments. So, while God may mention in the Old Testament that the eating of shellfish and pigs are not according to His law, those are more for His people of that time. They are not moral law. What we see in the commandments, and the different ways that God expands upon that, are what the focus of the word "law" is, as I will be using it.
Likewise, the Gospel, in its truest translation, is the good news. It is the announcement of God's gracious interactions toward His people, especially in Jesus' work of His perfect life, His sacrificial and substitutionary death, and His victorious rising to new life, and now giving that new life to us through the announcement of His good news to the people of the world. Like the word law, you can find other elements than this at work in the whole of the Bible, but for our purposes, this paragraph explains how I will be using the word.
There you have it. The Law and the Gospel. Last point for today. The things I will be writing about over the next few weeks will be drawn from a book entitled "Law and Gospel", taken from lectures given by the first president of my particular church body well over a century and half ago, a man by the name of C. F. W. Walther. I will take time to examine the various theses that he lectured on, hoping that these strike you in profound ways as we consider God's good news to us in Jesus.
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