Corporate Worship Services to begin this Sunday (October 23)

Emmaus Road Reformed Church has a new home!  Our website can be found here: http://www.emmausrcus.org/. 
Our blog will now be regularly updated at: http://www.emmausrcus.org/category/blog/

We have also found a place to begin meeting for corporate worship services.  Lord willing, we will begin meeting for services this Sunday, October 23 at Eden Lake Elementary School.  Eden Lake is located at

12000 Anderson Lakes Parkway in Eden Prairie, Minnesota (not far from the intersection of 494 and 169).  We will have Sunday School for all ages from 9:15 to 10:15 AM.  Corporate worship will begin at 10:30 AM. 

If you live in the Twin Cities, come and join us on Sunday, October 23!  Come and hear the Word preached as we look at Luke 24:13-35 with a sermon on The Emmaus Road.  Join us as we joyfully sing the historic psalms and hymns of the Christian faith together.  Enjoy fellowship with your brothers and sisters in Christ united by the precious promises of the gospel.  Rejoice in our rich communion with the Triune God! 

What is the New Heaven and New Earth?

In his vision, John sees a new heaven and a new earth (Revelation 21:1).  This calls to mind the opening words of Genesis 1, where we read that “God created the heavens and the earth.”  D.A. Carson says “the opening of the Bible connects with the closing of the Bible.  But now this new heaven and new earth is untainted by any of the residue of the sin of Genesis 3.  It is a new heaven and earth.”

Revelation 21-22 is the climax of the whole Bible.  We ought to read these chapters, like the rest of the book of Revelation, with the Old Testament (not the New York Times) in our other hand.  Revelation 21-22 is not telling us to be on the lookout for certain world events that will signal the second coming of Christ, but rather these chapters contain rich symbolism with Old Testament roots.  Many of the symbolic elements in Revelation 21-22 are suggestive of Eden before the fall.

Revelation 21:3-4 and 22:3 describes the new heaven and new earth as a place where there are no tears, no pain, no mourning, no curse, and no death.  In this life, the church is made up of sinners like you and me.  We have been justified and we are being sanctified, but we are not yet perfected or glorified.  But one day we will be in the presence of the Lamb of God in glory and splendor for all eternity.  There will be no more impurity or possibility of sin (Revelation 21:27).  We will love and worship God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength without any hint of idolatry.  We will love our neighbor as ourself without greed, hate, betrayal, selfishness, or jealousy.  The new heaven and the new earth is the consummated union between Christ and his people, and it has been secured for us through the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of the Lord Jesus.

Revelation 21-22 fosters hope and anticipation.  This is important to note as we go through deep waters of trials and sufferings in this present evil age.  Christian hope is anchored in the past, in what Christ has done in keeping the law, fulfilling all righteousness, bearing the curse, and rising again victorious over sin, death, hell, and the devil.  Our hope as believers is grounded in the plan of the Triune God from before the beginning of time.  Christian hope also projects into the future, prompting God’s people in every generation to meld their voices together and cry “Amen.  Come quickly, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20).

If you are interested in talking more about “the new heaven and new earth,” you are invited to come and join us for our next Bible study, which takes place tomorrow night (Wednesday, September 28) from 6:30 to 8 PM.  We meet at 9257 Amsden Way in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. 

Does Hell Exist?

This has been an especially burning question since the recent publication of Rob Bell’s book Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.  Listen to how D.A. Carson answers this question:

Doubtless many think that hell, if it exists, is for really bad people, like the guards at Auschwitz, perhaps.  What this overlooks is that the guards at Auschwitz were just “ordinary” people from a sophisticated and highly educated culture.  A number of photographs have come to light showing these guards, including prominent leaders such as Rudolf Hoess and the infamous Josef Mengele (who performed cruel medical experiments on camp inmates) at Solahutte, a retreat center for SS personal located a mere 30 kilometers from Auschwitz.  These photographs disclose merry times—eating berries, mugging for the camera, lighting a Christmas tree.  One is thus introduced to the “banality of evil”: one of the most revolting elements of the evil was the sheer thoughtlessness of it all. 

Yet although this is an evil of a high order, from a biblical perspective the ugliest evil, the highest order of evil, is the erection of idols, the failure to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength.  We may console ourselves with self-deceptive comfort that our culture would never act like that of Nazi Germany, but a little self-knowledge enables us to imagine descending to similar levels, while reflection on the biblical themes shows that these levels are merely symptoms of a far deeper corruption that, in its idolatrous independence, has happily and mockingly ignored the God who is there and thereby attracted his wrath.  Indeed, the heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately wicked (Jeremiah 17:9). 

Yes, hell does exist—even though many try to deny this fact.  A.W. Tozer was right when he said “the vague and tenuous hope that God is too kind to punish the ungodly has become a deadly opiate for the consciences of millions.”  Since the fall of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, the theme of judgment and curse runs throughout the Scriptures.  Jesus actually says more about hell than any other person in the Bible (Matthew 10:28). 

Hell is not a time to hang with your friends—there are no “friends” in hell.  Hell is also not separation from God; rather, hell is to be eternally tormented in the presence of the Holy angels and of the Lamb.  Imagine facing God in his wrath, without regard to his mercy—this is what hell is and why the torment is so great (Revelation 14:9, 11).  So, the testimony of God’s Word is that hell is eternity in the presence of the wrath and justice of God with weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 13:42; 2 Thessalonians 1:9; Revelation 19:11-16; 20:9-10). 

God is righteous, just, and holy.  We have all broken his law, and are deserving of his wrath and judgment for all eternity (Revelation 14:6-20).  The good news for God’s people is that Christ finished something on the cross; namely, he satisfied God’s justice and bore God’s wrath in our place (John 19:30).  On the cross, Christ didn’t just suffer suffocation and dehydration and blood loss.  While he hung on the tree on Golgotha, the sins of all his people were imputed to him and his righteousness is imputed to us (2 Corinthians 5:21). 

On the cross, Jesus was the ultimate obscenity.  He bore the curse of God’s law and became a horrific mass of depravity in the sight of the Father, suffering the wrath, judgment, and punishment of a holy God who is just and hates sin (Matthew 27:46; Galatians 3:13).  He was punished as a criminal under the justice of God for our crimes.  He drank that cup of the Father’s wrath for us so it wouldn’t come to our lips, and he was baptized into hell for us to be saved.  Carson writes: the measure of Jesus’ torment as the God-man is the measure of torment that we deserve and that he bore.  And if you see that and believe it, you will find it difficult to contemplate the cross for very long without tears.

Today is the day of salvation.  The Bible says that we are to flee from the coming wrath (Matthew 3:7) by trusting in Jesus, who saves us from the wrath to come (John 3:16-18, 36; 1 Thessalonians 1:10).  Carson says “granted that hell is real, terrifying, and eminently to be avoided, it would be unkind and uncharitable of me not to warn you, in exactly the same way that it would have been unkind and uncharitable of Jesus not to warn the people of his day.” 

If you are interested in talking more about the question of hell, you are invited to come and join us for our next Bible study, which takes place tomorrow night (Wednesday, September 14) from 6:30 to 8 PM.  We meet at 9257 Amsden Way in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.  

What is Your Only Comfort in Life and in Death?

How would you answer that question?  Check out this video at: http://youtu.be/BJ2-Bw0Rd54

The Battle Against Sin

Christianity is not a list of pre-packaged rules.  D.A. Carson explains that sometimes, Christian pastors get this wrong.  Perhaps we try to discern signs of decay in the culture, and if we are not careful we will begin to say, “Don’t do that.  Do this instead!”  This type of thinking gives the impression that we can fix things by imposing a fresh set of rules—so you can show how righteous, good, and disciplined you are if you adopt all of these rules in your life.

The fundamental Christian motivation is not adherence to more rules.  Rather, Ephesians 4:32 says, “forgive each other as God in Christ has forgiven you.”  God’s Spirit transforms us by bringing us back to the cross so that all of our morality is first and foremost a function of gratitude to God for what Christ has already done.  If you begin to see just how much you were forgiven by what Christ did on the cross, how on earth can you possibly nurture bitterness toward others?  Because we have received so much love from God through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus, how can we not also go forth and freely and impartially love others (Ephesians 5:1-2)?  The gospel justifies us and the gospel sanctifies us. 

And yet we are painfully aware of our continual battle with sin, for we are simultaneously justified yet sinful.  John Newton talked about this reality.  Newton, who lived from 1725 to 1807, was once a slave trader who estimated he transported twenty-thousand slaves across the Atlantic.  He said that in his nightmares he could still hear them scream.  At some point in his life he became a Christian and then a pastor.  Near the end of his earthly pilgrimage, Newton said:

“I am not what I ought to be—ah, how imperfect and deficient!  I am not what I wish to be—I abhor what is evil, and I would cleave to what is good!  I am not what I hope to be—soon, soon, shall I put off mortality, and with mortality all sin and imperfection.  Yet, though I am not what I ought to be, nor what I wish to be, nor what I hope to be, I can truly say, I am not what I once was; a slave to sin and Satan; and I can heartily join with the apostle, and acknowledge, “By the grace of God I am what I am.”

If you are interested in talking more about “the battle against sin,” you are invited to come and join us for our next Bible study, which takes place tonight (Wednesday, August 24) from 6:30 to 8 PM.  We meet at 9257 Amsden Way in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. 

The God Who Declares the Guilty Just

D.A. Carson writes: At a certain level, the title above almost seems perverse.  The following is how we would prefer that things work:

Members of the jury, I am not asking for mercy or pardon.  I want justice.  I am demanding full acquittal.  Yes, I committed the murder of which I am accused.  But I am not guilty.  Members of the jury, you must consider all my good deeds—not merely as mitigating circumstances but as reason for exonerating me.  The goodness of my other deeds outweighs the crime I committed.  My good deeds require a “not guilty” verdict.  If justice is to be done, you must find me innocent.

We grin as we read the paragraph above because the argument is so ridiculous.  Yet suddenly we see that an approach to God that depends finally on our balancing of good deeds and bad deeds must be no less ridiculous.  For this is the lamest of all forms of self-justification—yet this is the case we want to make before God.  This argument is not a plea for leniency; rather, it is a bold assertion of innocence.  It assumes that guilt is cancelled by good deeds.  God must acquit us and declare us “not guilty” because we have done enough compensating good things.  This is self-justification.  And it is no more believable before the bar of God’s justice than it would be in a contemporary court.

So how should we think that God looks at things, this God who is himself spectacularly holy and who does not see our good deeds as things that are weighed in a balance against bad deeds but sees even this futile effort at self-justification as one more example of our moral defiance against him?  What is the Bible’s solution?  God does not pretend that good deeds make up for bad deeds.  Rather, he has found a way to declare the guilty just—and retain his integrity while doing it.  Instead of self-justification, he finds a way to justify us.

Do you want to know where God’s justice is most powerfully demonstrated?  On the cross.  Do you want to know where God’s love is most powerfully demonstrated?  On the cross.  There Jesus, the God-man, bore hell itself, and God did this both to be just and to be the one who declares just those who have faith in him.  God views the Christian through the lens of Jesus, who absorbed the white-hot wrath of God that we deserve.  Your sin is now viewed as his, and he has paid for it.  And his righteousness, which he earned by perfectly obeying God's law, is now viewed as yours (2 Corinthians 5:21).  God looks at you and declares you to be just, not because you are just (you are guilty, as Romans 1:18-3:20 says) but because he has set forth his Son to be the propitiation (wrath-appeasing sacrifice) for your sins (Romans 3:21-31).

If you are interested in talking more about “the cross of Jesus,” you are invited to come and join us for our next Bible study, which takes place tomorrow night (Wednesday, August 10) from 6:30 to 8 PM.  We meet at 9257 Amsden Way in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. 

What is the significance of Jesus’ resurrection?

D.A. Carson writes: “In the Bible, a handful of people were brought back from the dead before Jesus.  One of the most notable was Lazarus, brought back from the dead by Jesus himself (John 11).  Yet Paul insists that Jesus is the firstfruits of the resurrection of Christ’s people at the end of the age (1 Corinthians 15:20).  What makes his resurrection so special, especially if he is not, sequentially, the first?  Apart from the question of who this Jesus is who has been resurrected—none less than the incarnate Son of God, who by his death atoned for the sins of all his people—the New Testament texts insist that his resurrection is unique.

True, Lazarus was brought back to life in bodily form after spending even more time in the grave than Jesus did.  But his body remained an ordinary body; presumably Lazarus died again.  By contrast, after his resurrection Jesus is said to possess a “spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:44).  Jesus’ post-death body has some sort of continuity with his pre-death body (the marks of the wounds are still there); it is certainly a genuine body in the sense that Jesus could be touched and handled, and he could eat with his disciples.  Yet it was more than a body as you and I know it.  Jesus continues to be a human being forever, a resurrected spirit-body human being—and our resurrection bodies at the end will resemble his.” 

The destiny of the Christian is not the immaterial existence of a disembodied ghost; rather, our ultimate destiny is resurrection existence with glorified bodies (2 Corinthians 5:1-10) in the new heaven and the new earth.  Only Jesus has undergone this transformation to resurrection existence.  He is the firstfruits of it, the one who has secured it for us.

If you are interested in talking more about “the resurrection,” you are invited to come and join us for our next Bible study, which takes place tomorrow night (Wednesday, July 27) from 6:30 to 8 PM.  We meet at 9257 Amsden Way in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.