Book Review: This Momentary Marriage (Piper)

In Ephesians 5:32, Paul calls marriage a “profound mystery.” We may have heard it said before: earthly marriage is a picture of the Gospel; Christ being wedded to His Bride, the Church. That is what this book is about. The temporary being a shadow, pointing to the reality that is permanent. John Piper writes that “there has never been a generation whose general view of marriage is high enough” and with the constant pressure places on marriage in the U.S.–as we’ve seen over the years, as well as with all the debate over same-sex marriage–having a right understanding of marriage is more critical than ever.

Marriage is constantly under pressure in our society:

• Who says that marriage should only be between one man and one woman?
• Why should any two consenting adults be denied marriage if they’re in love?
• Isn’t being in love essentially what marriage is all about?
• Who says marriage ought to be “till death do us part”? If love is gone why stay married?

Even within the church:

• What does the Bible mean that the husband is the head of the wife?
• What does submission look like? Are there times we should not submit?
• Do single people just miss out on the mystery of marriage?
• What is God’s design in sex? What role does it play in the “mystery”?
• What does the Bible really teach about divorce and remarriage?

This is what This Momentary Marriage is about. It seeks to display how marriage on this earth is separated only by death, but that it is meant as a profound symbol of the everlasting covenant between Christ and the Church. That marriage points to the Gospel, and points to profound, ultimate joy.

I cannot wait to experience this joy, in both respects, and I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone wanting to know what the Bible says about marriage, how it points to Jesus, and the joy available to us in the Gospel.

Some content adapted from DesiringGod.org; used with permission.
A complimentary copy of this book was provided for review purposes by Crossway Publishing. I was not required to post a positive review and the views expressed in this review are my own.

The Greatest Salvation Imaginable

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah…” ~ Jeremiah 31:31

God is just and holy and separated from sinners like us. This is our main problem at Christmas and every other season. How shall we get right with a just and holy God?

Nevertheless, God is merciful and has promised in Jeremiah 31 (five hundred years before Christ) that someday he would do something new. He would replace shadows with the Reality of the Messiah. And he would powerfully move into our lives and write His will on our hearts so that we are not constrained from outside but are willing from inside to love Him and trust him and follow Him.

That would be the greatest salvation imaginable–if God should offer us the greatest Reality in the universe to enjoy and then move in us to see to it that we could enjoy it with the greatest freedom and joy possible. That would be a Christmas gift worth singing about.That is, in fact, what he promised. But there was a huge obstacle. Our sin. Our separation from God because of our unrighteousness.

How shall a holy and just God treat us sinners with so much kindness as to give us the greatest Reality in the universe (his Son) to enjoy with the greatest joy possible?

The answer is that God put our sins on His Son, and judged them there, so that He could put them out of His mind, and deal with us mercifully and remain just and holy at the same time. Hebrews 9:28 says, “Christ was offered once to beat the sins of many.”

Christ bore our sins in His own body when He died. He took our judgment. He canceled our guilt. And that means the sins are gone. They do not remain in God’s mind as a basis for condemnation. In that sense, he “forgets” them. They are consumed in the death of Christ.

Which means that God is now free, in His justice, to lavish us with the new covenant. He gives us Christ, the greatest Reality in the universe, for our enjoyment. And He writes His own will–His own heart–on our hearts so that we can love Christ and trust Christ and follow Christ from the inside out, with freedom and joy.

Excerpted from John Piper’s Advent Devotional “Good News of Great Joy”

Christianity and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

The text to follow is borrowed from a good friend of mine, Elizabeth Parawan. As of late I’ve had many run-ins with tying together the content of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave with the lives and struggles of Christians, so I trudged through some old conversations to compile this post. I pray that this will provide a unique insight on our lives as christians, our call to share the Gospel, and the Truth that Jesus enlightens our hearts and cures our blindness to see the significant realities around us (See John 1:6-13 & John 9).

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In Plato’s Cave Theory, there are men and women who are born in chains inside a cave (go figure!).  From adolescence into adulthood, their entire lives are spent in captivity, and their heads are placed into a metal vice that prevents them from looking anywhere but forward, facing a giant cave wall.  While no one knows exactly who is around them, they are aware of each others’ presence.  What they are not aware of is that they are enslaved; since they have no concept or understanding of what “freedom” is, they do not know that they are not free.

Behind them are guards that hold figures of the world (i.e. a wooden cutout of a house, horse, etc.) against a fire and the shadows of these figures are cast onto the cave wall which the prisoners are facing.  That’s how they interpret and understand the world and their “reality”; through shadows.

One day, one of the prisoners is miraculously freed.  He stumbles out of the cave and into the real world, seeing true light (the sun) for the first time and all of that which its glow falls upon.  At that point, he has two options: run away into the world and finally live his life, or return to the cave to warn the others of their enslavement.  He surprisingly chooses the latter and runs back into the cave to warn his fellow prisoners.  He tells them that they are not “free” and that they are slaves inside a cave.  To his shock, many of them become quite angry with him, and violently threaten to kill him if he does not stop with his “lunatic ravings”.  The rest are too afraid to even take the risk of believing that there is more to their lives than what they have known inside the cave.

Here’s the twist: the man who was free was already free; he just had to believe he was.  They have the power to free themselves from their prison, yet they choose not to.

See, many Christians choose to live their lives this way; we know we’ve been set free in Christ yet we choose to live like we’re still imprisoned in darkness!  We’re content with false light (the fire) and are too willing to believe that shadows have substance.  Because we’re truly afraid of what the light will reveal.  The true light (the sun) revealed to the man who ran from the cave the state of his imprisonment; it showed him how blind he was.  And now that he had Truth, he was faced with the responsibility of what to do with it: share it or suppress it.  In the same way, we’re given that same choice.

Again, the text above is the interpretation/contribution of my good friend Elizabeth Parawan and not my own.