Sermons, Articles, and Other Things

Matthew highlights four consequences in connection to the cross after the Saviour had died. Each of them was unexpected. The curtain is destroyed (Matthew 27:51)   The first detail that Matthew mentions is that the curtain that separated the holy place from the most holy place in the temple was torn in two. One assumes that priests would have been serving at that time in the temple and this would have startled them. We cannot know if they saw into the most holy place, but if they did, they would have seen its furniture and other features. The obvious deduction from the way that the curtain was torn is that it was a supernatural act. If it had been a human act, it would have been torn from the bottom up. Yet since it was torn from the top down, we can assume correctly that the Lord did the rending. He wanted people to know that sinners could now come into his heavenly presence because of the stoning work of Jesus. Of course, the earthly most holy place could not depic...

Paul reveals his spiritual priorities in these verses, and in so doing reveals to us what it means to be Christ-centred. All of us have ambitions or goals and if we want to attain them we have to work out how to do so. Paul’s ambition is to know Christ and he says that it will involve two strategies: one is the power of Christ’s resurrection and the other is the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings. Again, with regard to our goals, we usually have a reason for them; Paul’s reason for knowing Christ is so that he ‘may attain to the resurrection of the dead’. Often if we were to ask an onlooker for his opinion of Christianity, he will reply that it seems to be a series of regulations and may refer to the Ten Commandments or to the Sermon on the Mount. Or he may say that it seems to be a set of rituals and he may mention prayer, baptism, the Lord’s Supper and so on. Obviously, in a sense his observations are accurate, yet they still omit the most crucial aspect of true Christianity whic...