A Newsletter of weekly meditations on Biblical Theology and curated resources from The Carson Center

Read 2 Samuel 23, Ezekiel 30, Psalm 17, Galatians 3

Deuteronomy 21:22–23a, “And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God.”

Galatians 3:13, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’ …”

Popular wisdom says to “count your blessings.” That’s good advice. But along with determining the sum of our blessings, the Bible teaches us to determine their source. What’s the basis of your blessing?

In Galatians 3, Paul clarifies the means by which the church receives the blessing of justification. A justified person is one whom God has reckoned righteous and thereby incorporated into his family. Paul shows that in every age, God has reckoned his people righteous through their faith, not their works. Justification by grace alone through faith alone is no new-covenant novelty. The Torah itself teaches that anyone seeking to secure right standing with God by relying on works of the law remains in bondage to the law’s curse (Gal. 3:10).

Liberation from transgression’s curse is only found in Christ. Christ has redeemed believers from enslavement to the law’s curse by becoming a curse in our place, for our sake (Gal. 3:13; cf. 2 Cor. 5:21). This curse-bearing happened at the cross: “for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’” (citing Deut 21:23).

Paul quotes Deuteronomy 21:23 to clarify the penal-substitutionary basis of the church’s participation in the blessing of Abraham. To be hanged on wood in accordance with Deuteronomy 21:22–23 constitutes the epitome of shame in Old Testament law (cf. Num. 25:4; Josh. 8:29; 10:26–27). By temporarily suspending a criminal’s corpse, Israel is signifying God’s judgment against that capital offense and offender. Paul likely sees the manner of Jesus’s death as an unexpected fulfillment of Deuteronomy 21:23. The very instrument of the divine Messiah’s death illustrates that he becomes the object on whom the law’s curse falls. And every spiritual blessing in a believer’s life flows from Calvary’s fount.

So, by all means, count your blessings. And as you calculate their sum, don’t miscalculate their source. It’s not you. It’s Christ alone. – Mary Hannah

Reflect: Jesus willingly paid the price to redeem and bless the church. How does his costly redemption encourage you today? With whom might you share today the good news about the source of your blessing?

“Did the Father Really Forsake the Son?” by Thomas Brand

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The cry of dereliction is one of the deepest and most controversial verses in the Scriptures. What does it mean? And what happened to the Trinity at the cry? Christ’s forsakenness was not just poetic language, and so it raises profound challenges for our understanding of salvation and of who God is.

You’ve probably thought about these questions before.

The strange thing is that this cry of dereliction only appears three times in the Bible. Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34 mention it as the only saying of Christ they record from the cross, and it is a quote from Psalm 22:1. Otherwise, the cry is not explicitly mentioned anywhere else in the Bible.

At the cry of dereliction, the Son was truly forsaken by the Father—but only in his human nature, not in his divinity. This is the historic orthodox understanding of the cry, but to grasp what it means, we need to understand more about the Trinity, the incarnation, and the difference between person and nature.

UNDERSTAND WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE SON TO BE FORSAKEN

In this episode of The Everyday Pastor, How do pastors faithfully preach the gospel in every sermon without forcing Jesus into passages where he doesn’t belong?

Matt Smethurst and Ligon Duncan tackle one of the most important questions in pastoral ministry: How do you preach Christ from all of Scripture? They discuss preaching Jesus from the Old Testament, avoiding moralistic preaching, applying the gospel faithfully, and helping sermons move beyond information into transformation.

Duncan shares lessons learned from Mark Dever about making sure every sermon clearly proclaims Christ, while Smethurst explains why sermons that would still work if Jesus were “still in the grave” aren’t truly Christian sermons. They explore how pastors can preach the gospel naturally from Genesis to Revelation without flattening the Bible’s storyline.

Christians today take it for granted that God is our Father, but few people stop to think what this name really means. We know that Jesus taught his disciples to pray “Our Father” and that the Aramaic word Abba (“Father”) is one of the few that Jesus used and that it has remained untranslated in our New Testament. Nowadays, hardly anybody finds this strange and many people are surprised to discover that the Jews of Jesus’s day, and even his own disciples, were puzzled by his teaching. This is because the deeper meaning and the wider implications of the term “Father” are largely unknown today. So widespread and generally accepted has the name become that we no longer question it, and so we often fail to realize how important it is for our understanding of God. In this essay, Gerald Bray draws out the rich biblical portrait of what it means to call God, “Father.”

READ “GOD AS FATHER” by Gerald Bray

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