Show Them No Mercy: The Conquering of Canaan

"When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than you, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them." ~ Dt. 7:1-2 (Emphasis added)

In a few previous posts about the imprecatory psalms, I have written about some of the troubling statements in Scripture. A few weeks ago I wrote a short article for a Bible study I lead. We are studying Judges and studying Judges requires talking about the conquering of the land of Canaan, which is another troubling part of biblical history. Below is what I wrote:

What about the "holy war"? How does "show them no mercy" (Dt. 7:2) square with Jesus' teaching? The main problem here is that we do not have a high enough view of God's holiness. As Christians, we have encountered the grace of God in Jesus, which allows us to enter into God’s holy presence with boldness (He. 10:19-25), because of the promise that we are being remade after the pattern of that same holiness. But, in that grace, we may sometimes forget what that holiness looks like to someone who is not so covered. God is a consuming fire (He. 12:29), a purifying power that cannot abide the unholy to remain in His presence without destroying it. God, however, is also a gracious God who does not desire the complete destruction of the works of His hands, who holds back the consuming fire like a dam holds back a flood. The Conquest of Canaan is best understood as a profound and temporary in-breaking of God’s holiness into an unholy world for a specific redemptive purpose.

In creation, God created the world and humans holy. We fell from that holiness and therefore incurred the wrath of God. God's holiness consumes unholiness just as light consumes darkness. Only God can stay the consumption for a time. God, in His grace, has temporarily suspended His full wrath until the Day of final judgment, otherwise Adam and Eve would have been consumed and sent to hell on the spot. Common grace, God's forbearance of final judgment, became a part of the world in which we live.

This has bearing on the Conquest. The ethics of the Conquest are ultimately those of a completely holy and good God calling the rebellious people, the illegal aliens on His property into account. And, since the Fall affects all of us as equally as it affected the Canaanites, the implication is that we all deserve, always and everywhere, what they got then and there in Canaan from the Israelite armies. In light of this reality, we must admit that the shear fact that the Conquest was confined to only one very geographically limited area at only one point in human history is a sign of God’s mercy.

What? A sign of mercy? Yes; one of its purposes is for us to see what must be the inevitable result of our current standing with God as a race. The ethics of the Conquest can be seen as a type of what are called "intrusion ethics" (a term coined by Meredith Kline)—a temporary intrusion into history of the ethics of the final judgment, i.e. that moment when God finally brings the created order to account so that He can restore it to its original state of holiness. That is to say, the Conquest reveals in history, however briefly, what the end of history will look like when God returns in glory to reclaim in total His land, the eschatological (end-times) Promised Land. This is what is called Old Testament typology/study of "types." A type is an Old Testament event or person pointing to an eschatological/end-times reality (we are in the end times and have been since Pentecost, cf. Acts 2:14-24). Just as the OT Promised Land (a type) ultimately points to the eschatological reality of the new heavens and the new earth, the Conquest (another type) points to the eschatological judgment where God ultimately punishes evil (2 Pt. 3:10), the punishment He stayed at the Fall, and creates the new heavens and the new earth. One purpose of seeing such a thing in history is, therefore, to bring us to repentance, so that we might be spared that fate when the Day arrives. Not only will have God given humanity the whole of their history of time to turn back to Him, He will have also made it abundantly clear by the Conquest what is to come. But, still many "stiffen their necks" against Him.

All of this has profound ramifications for how we square the goodness of God, as we have encountered it in Jesus, with the severity of God, as we see it in the Conquest. In many respects, they are two sides of the same coin. They both show the extreme lengths to which God must go in order to get humanity's attention. The sad history of Jesus' rejection before His own people only reinforces the point that humankind's fallen hearts are so hardened that we cannot respond to God, even when He comes in meekness. Such a sorry state of affairs, such a clear example of our rebellion, makes the extreme ethics of the Conquest seem all the more justified. Further, it illustrates with vivid clarity how, in not getting always and everywhere what the Canaanites got then and there, humanity as a whole has seen merciful forbearance (common grace) on God’s part.

If we assume, as all Christians ought, that God is the sole creator of all that is, seen and unseen, it is not a leap to give to Him the authority to decide when that created order has gone right and when it has gone wrong (Ro. 9). When we truly grapple with the magnitude of our rebellion against God’s infinite, eternal, and unchangeable holiness, we must concede that we have dug the proverbial hole underneath us. In that light, the intrusion of God’s holiness into our thoroughly unholy world makes events like the Conquest a sad inevitability. The further problem arises that even our own sense of "goodness" has been undermined by our rebellion. Seeing through the broken lens of our sinfulness, it is often difficult to see how what seems to be the severity of God towards humanity is in fact consistent with His eternal goodness. In both respects, our current condition impairs us from easily understanding the Conquest. However, when we have laid the foundations of intrusion ethics and God’s great holiness, a clearer picture of the Conquest as a type of final judgment, and other parts of the Bible, emerges. 

Perhaps a typological chart would be helpful when thinking about OT types and end-times realities:

Old Testament Type	Eschatological Reality
The Exodus	Christ’s redemption
The wilderness wandering	This present life
The Promised Land	The new heavens and the new earth
The conquest of the Land	The Final Judgment
King David	King Jesus
Solomon’s kingdom	Jesus’ rule in the new heavens and the new earth

Hope this helps you wrestle with the ethics of the Conquest of Canaan. May be it something that allows you to see God's majesty for clearly, for His glory and your good. 

By His Grace,

Taylor

Book Review: "Is There a Meaning in This Text?"

"Neither standing nor understanding, however, is the final word in interpretation. The final word belongs to following. The church should be that community of humbly confident interpreter-believers whose consciences, seared and sealed by the Spirit, are captive to the Word, and whose commentaries and communities seek progressively to embody the meaning and significance of the text. Readers who work and pray over the text, who interpret freely and responsibly, and who follow its itineraries of meaning, will be progressively transformed into the image of him who is the ultimate object of the biblical witness." ~ Kevin Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text?: The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge

For many centuries, really since the founding of human language, there has been the assumption by the majority of humanity that a written text has a distinct authorial intent and that the reader, using the right interpretive methods, can access it. Today, that conviction is no longer a given. Prominent postmodern literary and hermeneutic theory believes the exact opposite, i.e. meaning is relative to the encounter of the reader and the text. There is no meaning that is independent of our attempts to interpret anything—the text only reflects the reality of the reader. Nietzsche once said, "Ultimately, man finds in things nothing but what he himself has imported into them." For postmodern philosophers this axiom not only holds true for written texts but for the world itself. Everything is a text, yet there is no inherent meaning in any text. Postmodernism, tersely stated, is "incredulity towards meaning."

The Christian reader can easily see where this philosophy takes Biblical interpretation. Under these assumptions, Scripture has no inherent meaning, therefore meaning is not dependent on what God said but what the reader brings to the text. How can Christianity possibly function in this philosophical environment? Is there a meaning in the text, the Bible? As one can see by the title, that is the big question that Vanhoozer sets out to answer. Vanhoozer says, "the project for the present work: to articulate and defend the possibility, in the vale of the shadow of Derrida, that readers can legitimately and responsibly attain literary knowledge of the Bible."

I have written a review of this formidable, philosophical work. The review itself was difficult to write (at least within a reasonable page limit) because of the breadth of argument, the extent of Vanhoozer's cultural knowledge, and density of the material. However, I think I did an adequate job of reflecting his core arguments faithfully, but it is not going to be one of those reviews that replaces reading the book. Hopefully it will encourage you to read Vanhoozer's work. You can read the full review here but below is my conclusion to give you a taste:

In conclusion, the two flaws mentioned above pale in comparison to the usefulness of this book as a whole for the case for Biblical meaning and interpretation, and we are overall very impressed with this book. It is not for the faint of heart, however. While readable, it is philosophically heavy and complex. It, of course, has to be given the subject matter of the book. We would not recommend this for the average Joe in the Church. We do think that pastors, theologians, and seminary students need to read this book. The cultural landscape that we preach and teach in is thoroughly entrenched in many of the presuppositions and ideals of Postmodernism that Vanhoozer describes. We need to learn to interact with those presuppositions, expose them to our people in understandable ways, and offer them a strong alternative so they can go to their Scriptures with humility, conviction, and confidence. In a postmodern world, our people need to be able to trust that "All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work."

By His Grace,
Taylor

The Scriptures, A Prayer

"All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work." ~ 2 Timothy 3:16-17

In some previous posts I have mentioned that I am taking a class on worship and our professor, Dr. Derek Thomas, has encouraged us to write out prayers on various subjects so that we can think about how we would lead a congregation in prayer before a sermon. This is not so that we would memorize prayers but so that we would engage in the practice of "studied prayers" and be prepared to pray well before a congregation.

Below is one I wrote about Scripture. I hope you find it helpful, perhaps something you can pray through, and perhaps a blessing to your soul.

God almighty, the heavens declare Your glory and the sky above proclaims Your handiwork. Your invisible attributes, namely, Your eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that You have made. From the light of Your creation man can see Your goodness, wisdom, and power. So men are without excuse before You. From Your creation we know You exist, You are holy, and we are not. Yet, these things are not enough to give us the knowledge of Your will which we need to know of Your salvation. How unsearchable are Your judgments and how inscrutable Your ways! They are so transcendent, so high above us that we have no hope of knowing them through what we can perceive in Your glorious creation. But, in Your wisdom and goodness, You chose not to leave us in the dark. With all Your greatness and with all Your power, You bent down low, condescended to our level, and spoke to us in order that we might know You and Your salvation.

Father, we confess that we have let Your Word to us become something mundane, something unremarkable. We have it in our hands and can read it every day, so we often forget how astounding it is that You spoke to Your created beings. Father, return that marvelous truth to our hearts. Help us to be astonished that in Your infinite transcendence You bent down low to speak to us. Help us remember we would have been completely lost without You reaching out to us because Your judgments are unsearchable and Your ways are inscrutable. Remind us that in Your glory You bent down low and taught us what we are to believe concerning You and what duty You require of us.

Long ago You spoke to Israel by Your prophets, and if that were not incredible enough, then You came and spoke to us by Your Son, Jesus. Not only did You speak to us but You came to us. The Word that was with You in the beginning, the Word that is God, through which all things were made, this Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Through Jesus we have seen Your glory, glory as of the Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. Through the prophets of old, through Your Son Jesus, and through His disciples, we have Your whole counsel containing everything necessary to know Your glory, the way of salvation, and for faith and life. Thank You, sovereign Lord, for sending Your Word through the prophets and apostles but chiefly through Your Son.

Mighty God, You did not stop there. You did not simply declare Your Word through the prophets, Jesus, and His disciples. For the preserving and propagating of Your truth, You sent Your Holy Spirit to inspire men to write down Your Word inerrantly and infallibly. Furthermore, Your Spirit guided the Church to combine and preserve Your Word in writing so that it might be multiplied, translated, and published, and so we might be able to read it today with the confidence that it is breathed out by You and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that Your people may be complete, equipped for every good work. Thank You, sovereign Lord, for sending Your Spirit to inspire and preserve Your written Word for all generations.

Father, we praise You that we do not have to worship You as the unknown God. We praise You because in Scripture we can read about Your work in history, Your immanence in the Church, and the way of salvation You brought about for Your elect. We praise You because You did not leave us in the darkness but You brought the light of Your Word to us. We ask, Father, that You make these truths sweet to our hearts. Remind us that it is Your Word, not the words of men. Help us not to take Your Word for granted. Help us to acknowledge its paramount authority in our lives and to turn to it always. Help us to commit it to memory; to talk of it when we sit in our house, and when we walk by the way, and when we lie down, and when we rise. Help our churches to faithfully preach Your Word; to be ready in season and out of season; to reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and faithfulness to Your Word.

In the name of Jesus Christ, the Word of God that was with You in the beginning, we pray these things. Amen.

By His Grace,
Taylor

The Holy Spirit, A Prayer

"We believe in... the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spake by the prophets." ~ The Nicene Creed (First Council of Constantinople version, 381 AD)

In some previous posts I have mentioned that I am taking a class on worship and our professor, Dr. Derek Thomas, has encouraged us to write out prayers on various subjects so that we can think about how we would lead a congregation in prayer before a sermon. This is not so that we would memorize prayers but so that we would engage in the practice of "studied prayers" and be prepared to pray well before a congregation.

Below is one I wrote on the Holy Spirit. I hope you find it helpful, perhaps something you can pray through, and perhaps a blessing to your soul. (If you want some more theological writing on the Spirit, I suggest you check out this post.)

Sovereign God, we want to exalt and praise You this morning for Your Holy Spirit. You are glorious and mysterious to us because You are three-in-one—one in essence yet three in persons with Your Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son. We cannot understand this mystery fully but we can praise You for it.

Spirit, though You don’t desire the spotlight and even turn it from Yourself to the Father and the Son, You are equal in glory and worthy of our praise. You bring the work of the Father and the Son to completion by continually acting in and on the world and we want to praise You for that today.

We praise You, Spirit, because in creation You hovered over the chaos—sustaining, guiding, and protecting all that was created. Because of You, beauty robed the world and life sprang forth. As the Psalmist says, when You hide Your face, creation is dismayed, but when You come forth, life is created and You renew the face of the ground. We ask, Spirit, that You bring order to our chaotic hearts and minds. Take away our unbelief, our doubts, our lusts, our unloving attitudes, our racists thoughts, our prideful arrogance, and our idolatrous worship of things that cannot satisfy. Reorder our hearts and minds towards Jesus. Don’t hide Your face but come forth and bring life to our hearts. Lift the cloud of unbelief and enlighten our minds in the knowledge of Christ. Focus our chaotic minds on whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable; if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, reorder our minds toward these things, Spirit, for the glory of the Godhead and our good.

We praise You, Spirit, because You inspired the prophets of the Old Testament period to write Your word and record for us, without error, the history of redemption. We praise You because You inspired the apostles and disciples of Christ to record, without error, His work in the gospels and its theological significance for a new covenant people in the rest of the New Testament. We praise You, Spirit, because for the past two thousand years You have been building, shaping, and guiding Christ’s Church, His Bride, for the glory of the Godhead and for our good. We praise You because even now You illuminate our hearts so that we might understand the written Word that You inspired long ago. Keep these words on our hearts. Help us to mediate on them day and night. Help us to teach them diligently to our children, and talk of them when we sit in our houses, when we walk down the street, when we lie down and when we rise up. Bind Your inspired Word to our hearts and minds, for the glory of the Godhead and our good.

Spirit, we praise You because You made it possible for us to receive salvation and be called children of God. By Your power and work, Jesus was conceived in the womb of Mary and became incarnate. You anointed Him for His ministry, qualified Him for His work of salvation, led Him through this life to the cross to be our sacrifice, and raised Him from the dead for our salvation. You, Spirit, applied this salvation to us—You regenerated our hearts, gave us the gift of faith, and united us to Christ for our justification, adoption, and sanctification. And, even now You continually work in us, both to will and to work for the glory of the Godhead and our good. Keep our eyes on Jesus, remind us of His sacrifice, and remind us of the intensity of the love that led Him to the cross. Open our hearts to the depths of truth in His words, “It is finished.” Take our thoughts and hearts away from our selfishness and point them towards the cross and all thing things it represents to us. Increase our faith in the knowledge of the atonement received, the propitiation of God’s wrath, the guilt destroyed, the debt paid, the sins forgiving, the death defeated, the righteous imputed, and heaven opened, all for God’s elect. Sanctify us with these truths so that we might die unto sin more and more and live unto righteousness more and more, for the glory of the Godhead and our good.

Thank You, Father, for sending Jesus. Thank You, Jesus, for sending Your Spirit. Thank You, Spirit, for continually sustaining, protecting, and guiding to completion the work of the Father and the Son. Sovereign God, we praise You for Your work as the three-in-one God and especially today for the work of the Holy Spirit. Help it bring our hearts to praise and never to leave our minds.

In the name of Jesus Christ and by the power of the Spirit, we pray these things. Amen.

By His Grace,
Taylor

Psalm 109 and Imprecation

"[W]hen persecution bursts upon the Church… where Christian pastors and their flocks have been subjected to torture, inhuman indignities and death, when the faith of God's people is severely tried by the enemies of the Lord, Christians instinctively have turned to these psalms. Some people may have considered the Imprecatory Psalms an offense in better days, but their relevancy has been brought home to them, when the forces of evil have persecuted and tortured them because of belief in God and faith in the Lordship of Jesus Christ." ~ Raymond F. Surburg

Several posts ago, I wrote a short review of a book called Crying for Justice: What the Psalms Teach Us About Mercy and Vengeance in an Age of Terrorism. It is about the imprecatory psalms and their usefulness for the Church. Recently, I wrote a paper for a class on Psalm 109, the "the 'imprecatory' psalm par excellence," as some have called it. In examining this psalm closely the reader will get a taste for the imprecatory psalms in general and how to handle them. In the paper I argue that Psalm 109 is a legitimate and righteous prayer of imprecation not only for David in his OT setting but for God’s people today in extreme circumstances of sustained injustice and oppression. If you are interested, you can read the paper here. I pray it is a blessing to you and helps you to understand the Psalms better, for God's glory and your good.

By His Grace,
Taylor

Providence, A Prayer

"God the great Creator of all things does uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least, by His most wise and holy providence, according to His infallible foreknowledge, and the free and immutable counsel of His own will, to the praise of the glory of His wisdom, power, justice, goodness, and mercy." The Westminster Confession of Faith V.1

In my last couple of posts I have mentioned that I am taking a class on worship and our professor, Dr. Derek Thomas, has encouraged us to write out prayers on various subjects so that we can think about how we would lead a congregation in prayer before a sermon. This is not so that we would memorize prayers but so that we would engage in the practice of "studied prayers" and be prepared to pray well before a congregation.

Below is one I wrote on God's providence. It is not a theological treatment of the subject that can in any way compare with the Westminster Confession's time-honored wisdom, but I hope you find it helpful, perhaps something you can pray through, and perhaps a blessing to your soul.

Father, we come before You today as men and women who cannot control our lives. We confess our weakness and inability to control anything in our lives. We can’t even control our own hearts and minds, much less the hearts and minds of others or the workings of Your creation. But, You, Father, have established Your thrown in the heavens and Your kingdom rules over all. You work all things according to the counsel of Your will, and we want praise You, this morning, for Your providence by which, in Your holiness, wisdom, and power, You preserve and govern all Your creatures, their actions, and this world in which we live.

We join Your people throughout time in this praise of You. Thousands of years ago the psalmist prayed a similar prayer and You have preserved it for us in Psalm 104. Like him, we preach to ourselves, “Bless the LORD, O my soul!” For Father, You truly are very great and sovereign. You make the clouds Your chariots; You ride on the wings of the wind, so our souls bless You and praise You. You set the foundations of the earth so that they may not be moved. From those foundations You give drink to every beast of the field, and You cause the grass to grow for the livestock and the plants for man to cultivate, so our souls bless You and praise You. You made the creatures of the earth, and these all look to You to give them their food in due season, so our souls bless You and praise You. We praise You, Father, because we are never in the grip of blind forces, fortunes, or fates. You plan, preserve, and govern all that happens, for Your glory and for our good.

Jesus reminded us to think about these creatures and Your providential provision for them. He said, “Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds!” Oh Father, how much more valuable are we than the birds and yet we confess that we doubt Your providence and Your provision. We may acknowledge with our mouths that You are the one who works all things together for the good of those who love You and are called according to Your purpose, but in our lives and hearts we often deny that truth. We confess that we worry about our money, our jobs, our rent, our mortgage, and our food. We confess that we often times lie awake at night preaching these promises to ourselves but our hearts just will not listen. Forgive us, Father, of our unbelief, our doubt, our little faith in Your mighty, sovereign control over everything in our lives. Two sparrows are sold for a penny and, as Jesus reminds us, not will fall to the ground apart from Your providence. Help our unbelief, Father. Remind us of Your glorious provision in our lives so that we might not doubt You when the darkness starts to close in. Work these promises of Your control down into every nook and cranny of our lives so that we might not doubt You.

Father, we thank You for these promises and Your providence in every aspect of our lives. We thank You that we don’t have to be anxious about anything but can bring everything to You in prayer knowing that You have it all under control. We thank You that when our lives seem out of control and we are powerless, You are not and You are working out Your providence even in those times. We thank You for Your most mighty work of providence in all of history: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus—Jesus who You delivered up as a sacrifice for us according to Your definite plan and foreknowledge and who You raised up, loosing the pangs of death. Father, how can we doubt Your glorious plan when we remember that even Jesus’ death and resurrection was part of Your providence?

Remind us of this glorious truth when we begin to doubt. Remind us of Your promises when our hearts fail us. Help us to preach Your providence and sovereign control to ourselves so that we might never be anxious but have Your peace that transcends all understanding.

In the name of Jesus, our providential sacrifice, amen. 

By His Grace,

Taylor

The Atonement, A Prayer

"The atonement is the crucial doctrine of the faith. Unless we are right here it matters little, or so it seems to me, what we are like elsewhere." ~ Leon Morris, The Cross in the New Testament (pg. 5)

In my last post I mentioned that in a class on worship that I am taking, our professor, Dr. Derek Thomas, has encouraged us to write out prayers on various subjects so that we can think about how we would lead a congregation in prayer before a sermon. This is not so that we would memorize prayers but so that we would engage in the practice of "studied prayers" and be prepared to pray well before a congregation.

Below is one I wrote on the atonement. It is not going to compare to Leon Morris' treatment of the atonement in the above mentioned book, but I hope you find it helpful, perhaps something you can pray through, and perhaps a blessing to your soul.

Father, we come before You to worship You as men and women in need of Your grace and mercy. We were born in iniquity and in sin we were conceived. Not a day goes by that don’t sin against You in thought, word, and deed. It is Your law that we daily break, not ours or the government’s; against You and You only have we sinned. Where can we flee from Your presence? Can we hide our sin from You? Can the darkness hide us? No, for even the darkness is not dark to You; to You the night is as bright as day. We confess our sinfulness to You because we can never flee from it or You. We can never avert Your wrath. We can never make amends for our guilt before You.

Fortunately, Father, because of Your wisdom and love, we don’t have to. We, who are in Christ, who have confessed with our mouths that Jesus Christ is Lord and believed in our hearts that You raised Him from the dead, don’t have to atone for our sins because You sent Jesus to do that for us. We praise You Father because in Your most wise, holy, unchangeable, just, and loving will, You found the only way to satisfy the demands of Your justice against sinners and to pour out Your grace upon Your people. You couldn’t leave sin unpunished and we could never bear the punishment. We praise and adore You because in this way You loved the world—You gave Your only begotten Son, that whoever would believe in Him and His atoning work would not perish, but have eternal life with You in glory. We honor and worship You because You chose to justify Your elect as a gift, and You put forward Jesus as a propitiation—a sacrifice to satisfy Your wrath—to be received by faith. We extol, exalt, and thank You, because You showed Your righteousness, Your wisdom, Your justice, and Your love, so that You might be both just and the justifier of those who have faith in Jesus.

Jesus, we would be remiss if we did not praise and honor You for submitting Yourself to the will of our God and Father and giving Yourself for our sins, so that You might deliver us out of this present evil world. We praise You for, though You were in the form of God, You did not consider that equality You have with God something to be grasped. We praise You because You stooped to our level, emptied Yourself, and humbled Yourself by becoming obedient to God the Father even to the point of death on a cross. We praise and honor You because You offered Yourself, for all time, as a single sacrifice to atone for our sins and then You sat down at the right hand of God the Father. We extol, exalt, and thank You because You are our great High Priest and atoning sacrifice so that we may have confidence to enter into the holy places, confidence to draw near to God (something the Old Testaments saints could only dream of doing), and confidence to hold fast the confession of our hope because You are faithful to fulfill all You promised.

Spirit, though You turn the spotlight from Yourself onto Christ, we cannot end this prayer without praising and thanking You for applying Christ’s atoning sacrifice to us. We praise and thank You, for You, You replaced our heart of stone with one of flesh, You worked faith in us, and You united us to Christ so that might enjoy the benefits of His atoning work.

Father, we ask that You keep these truths before us so that we might bask in Your grace always. Remind us through Your Word, Your Spirit, and Your Church how intensely we are loved by You. Give us an ever-increasing view of our sinfulness and an ever-increasing view of Your holiness, so that Your grace in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ might also be ever-increasing in our hearts and our minds. Help us to remind each other daily of Your just and justifying love for us. Help us to preach the gospel to ourselves and to each other so that we might encourage and stir one another up to love and good works, all the more as we see the Day drawing near.

We pray all these things in the name of our atoning sacrifice and high priest, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

By His Grace,

Taylor