1. Catherine F. Vos, The Child’s Story Bible, first published 1934 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1972).

A Pioneer Biblical Theologian

Geerhardus Vos’s work at Princeton represents a unique and paradigm-shifting contribution to evangelical scholarship. While he was brought to Princeton to counter critical developments in Biblical Theology, which he did admirably, his enduring reputation stems from pioneering efforts to forge a genuinely evangelical and Reformed Biblical Theology derived from Scripture itself within a dogmatics-dominated institution. His emphasis on Scripture’s divinely revealed, inerrant character, combined with a sophisticated understanding of revelation’s progressive historical and organic nature, provided a robust alternative to rationalistic biblical criticism.

Against the biblical critics, Vos successfully demonstrated that historical consciousness governed by Christian faith properly serves orthodox rather than critical views of Scripture. Although his influence initially seemed restricted to Princeton colleagues, Vos’s creative and original work began to garner appreciation when his Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments became more accessible in 1948, a year before his death, first published by Eerdmans and later by other publishers.^[2] Other publications enhanced Vos’s influence, such as The Teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews (Eerdmans, 1956, reissued by P&R, 1975), The Kingdom of God and the Church (P&R, 1972), The Pauline Eschatology (Baker, 1979), and Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation: The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos (P&R, 1980). These and many more publications established Vos as a pivotal figure in evangelical biblical scholarship, influencing many seminarians throughout the second half of the twentieth century and since. In what follows, I will introduce the four distinctive features of biblical theology along with Vos’s four major insights into the discipline.

2. Wipf & Stock published a reprint in 2003, and the Banner of Truth Trust published it in 2014.

The Task of Biblical Theology Consists of Four Distinctive Features

(1) God’s revelation entails historical progression. God’s inscribed revelation is not abstract propositional knowledge, but a growing truth that unfolds in the history of God’s redemptive deeds. God’s progressive revelation encompasses both the objective level (redemptive acts toward humanity, such as incarnation, atonement, and resurrection) and the subjective level (individual redemptive acts, including regeneration, conversion, and sanctification). God progressively unfolds his revelation through his redeeming deeds within covenantal relationships and authorizes his holy prophets to record them in the biblical narrative for the instruction of his covenant people.

(2) History itself incarnates God’s revelation. The process of God’s revelation is not merely connected with history but becomes “incarnate in history.”^[3] Thus, God’s revelatory acts in history are inherently consequential. This is true because Scripture places God’s revelation acts adjacent to his revelation words, where God’s redemptive and revelatory acts coincide. This means “the facts of history themselves acquire a revealing significance” in epoch-making acts such as the redemptive exodus of God’s covenant people from Egypt or the most prominent of all, Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, burial, and resurrection.^[4]

These are undeniable historical events, which God enacted primarily with reference to himself to satisfy his justice and reveal his character. Therefore, history itself, not only Scripture, embodies God’s revelation.^[5] God thoroughly imbued these redeeming events with his signature, marking them as critical historical epochs that continue to shape the course of history long after the events took place.^[6] Though God indelibly imprinted his redeeming actions with revelatory import as part of history, unfolding in a clear and purposeful sequence, God does not leave them to “speak for themselves.”^[7] Instead, God accompanies his revelatory deeds with “verbal communication of truth.”^[8] God’s words always accompany his acts in this usual order: (1) predictive word, followed by (2) act, then (3) interpretive word.^[9]

(3) The historic process of supernatural revelation is organic in nature. Vos’s use of “organic” shows continuity with Reformed theology, particularly with Warfield’s concept of divine inspiration, but Vos expands its range.^[10] The progression of revelation is not uniform but organic and epochal, like the growth of a tree from seed to maturity, which depends on seasonal factors. Thus, when God’s redemptive acts proceed slowly and sparingly, his revelatory Word follows the same pace. Likewise, when God’s “great epoch-making redemptive acts accumulate,” God’s revelatory Word through his prophets correspondingly accelerates and increases in volume.^[11] God’s Word revelation is no mere announcement of his epoch-making redemptive acts, for “God has not given us His own interpretation of the great realities of redemption in the form of a chronicle, but in the form of the historical organism of the inspired Scriptures.”^[12]

The organic quality of God’s revelation explains the multiformity of Scripture. Rather than variation and diversity undermining absoluteness and infallibility, organic nature establishes it since God shapes both the instrument and the product. Infallibility does not require “dull uniformity,” nor does progression exclude absolute perfection at all stages. This organic quality must guide the biblical theologian’s work, as the History of Special Revelation poses tension between maintaining the perfection of revealed truth at all stages while demonstrating gradual development in fullness and clarity.^[13]

This tension finds resolution not in hypothesizing correctives to time-conditioned factors, but in “assuming that the advance in revelation resembles the organic process, through which out of the perfect germ the perfect plant and flower and fruit are successively produced.”^[14] Vos summarizes Biblical Theology as “nothing else than the exhibition of the organic progress of supernatural revelation in its historic continuity and multiformity.”^[15]

(4) God makes himself known through a progressive sequence of covenants that climax in Christ Jesus, who established the New Covenant, revealing his character, words, and deeds within the context of a sinfully fallen human history. Everything God has revealed about himself through his covenants has been given in response to the real spiritual needs of his people as those needs arose throughout history.^[16] Simply stated, Vos insists that the objective of Biblical Theology is to instruct God’s people, leading them to worship God who makes himself known covenantally to us.

16. Vos, Biblical Theology, 8–9. Vos decisively distances his definition and practice of Biblical Theology from its rationalistic roots. The ‘rationalist’ strand of biblical theology was clearly laid out by Johann P. Gabler more than a century earlier in his inaugural address, “On the Proper Distinction between Biblical Theology and Dogmatic Theology,” at the University of Altdorf on March 31, 1787. This can be found in Old Testament Theology: Flowering and Future, ed. and trans. Ben C. Ollenburger (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004), 497–506.

Thus, it follows that God suffused his revelatory acts—events, persons, institutions, and places—with self-disclosure, imprinting all his redemptive deeds to function as earthly shadows that foreshadow things to come along two axes: spatial and temporal.^[17] Spatially, they are earthly shadows revealing heavenly realities for the immediate recipients of God’s revelation, for example, the Tabernacle, constructed in keeping with the pattern revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai (Exod. 25:40). Temporally, the earthly copies that reveal heavenly realities foreshadow the revelation of heavenly realities that come with the promised Messiah in the latter days (cf. Heb. 8:5).

I use “spatial” and “temporal” to correlate with what Vos calls “symbol” and “type.”^[18] Throughout the Old Testament, God assigned symbolic functions to events, persons, institutions, and places that spatially shadowed heavenly realities on earth. Concerning persons, God’s Son, who is the image of God, formed Adam to resemble himself, bearing his image (Gen. 1:26; Col. 1:15; Heb. 1:3). Likewise, Melchizedek, a king and priest, is presented with no ancestry, an earthly resemblance of God’s Son (Gen. 14:17–20; Heb. 7:3).^[19] In the same way, the portable wilderness tabernacle, later replaced by the stationary temple, with all its symbolic trappings, priests, and rituals, portrayed heavenly realities to the Israelites. The tabernacle’s function was not only a symbolic shadow spatially representing God’s presence in the earthly atonement, but it was also temporally prospective, operating as a foreshadowing type, prophetically anticipating the heavenly reality yet to come down to earth with the Coming One, the promised Messiah.^[20] Thus, the temporary earthly things God infused with religious symbolism of heavenly truths for the faith of his ancient people, he invested with typological, foreshadowing, and prophetic roles concerning the heavenly realities yet to come in the latter days with his Son. Thus, no type could ever function “independently of its being first a symbol,” and earthly shadow of heavenly realities cast down to earth for the people to whom it was first given.^[21] The Apostle Paul assures us that God’s Son cast the Old Testament types as earthly shadows to foreshadow all that would arrive with the Coming One. The body that cast those shadows was Christ Jesus (Col. 2:16–17).^[22]

Vos’s Four Major Insights Concerning Biblical Theology

Vos’s insights concerning Biblical Theology are numerous and influential. The following four insights should significantly prompt Evangelicals to recognize that the work of the biblical theologian is to replicate as accurately as possible God’s progressive revelation of himself in harmony with his redemptive deeds, as portrayed for us in the Bible’s storyline from Genesis to Revelation.

1. Biblical Theology Traces the Progress of Redemption, which is the “History of Special Revelation.”

20. Vos, Biblical Theology, 145. “When the Epistle [of Hebrews] speaks of shadowing this means shadowing down (from heaven to earth), not shadowing forward (from Old Testament to New Testament).” What came with God’s promised Messiah “is not merely a reproduction of the Heavenly Reality, but its actual substance, the Reality itself come down from heaven, the aute eikon or very image.” Thus, the tabernacle was “not a shadow projected or thrown forward (into the future), but a shadow cast down from heaven to earth. . . . The true [sanctuary in heaven] is the real archetypal representation. . . . The Old Testament things, therefore, were a parable; that is, they were things called a parable in relation to the reality of the things of the New Testament” (Vos, The Teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 58–59).

Vos’s definition of “Biblical Theology” as the “History of Special Revelation” obligates us to follow his lead to do the same by acknowledging Scripture’s organic progression of God’s redemptive and revelatory acts as the focus and definition of the discipline, which is not an end in itself but terminates upon God in all our acts of worship, whether privately or corporately. Biblical theologians need to abandon the notion that we bring a redemptive-historical hermeneutic to the text of Scripture. Instead, the biblical text compels every biblical theologian and every Christian to acknowledge that Scripture is God’s special revelation, given redemptively and historically, with God’s word clarifying his deeds.

2. Because God’s revelation correlates with his redemptive acts, from beginning to end, God’s saving deeds and revelatory words are eschatologically oriented to the new heavens and earth.

21. Vos, Biblical Theology, 145. Vos states, “This is the fundamental rule to be observed in ascertaining what elements in the Old Testament are typical, and wherein the things corresponding to them as antitypes consist. Only after having discovered what a thing symbolizes, can we legitimately proceed to put the question what it typifies, for the latter can never be aught else than the former lifted to a higher plane. The bond that holds type and antitype together must be a bond of vital continuity in the progress of redemption” (145–46).

From Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21, Scripture confronts every Christian, without exception, with its redemptive-historical revelation, compelling us to trace and represent accurately the historical progression of Scripture’s storyline of God’s redeeming acts. Scripture constrains us to do this from the absolute beginning of God’s created order with its numerous types and foreshadows that climax with the arrival of Christ Jesus, whose advent as an incarnate infant presages a second advent when, as conquering King, he defeats and destroys every evil enemy, bringing redemption to its culmination, the consummation of all things in Christ Jesus (Col. 1:15–20).

3. The Already-but-Not-Yet Nature of God’s Redemptive Acts and Revelation—God’s Kingdom.

22. See Vos, Biblical Theology, 147, where Vos expresses the essence of Colossians 2:17, “The types are shadows of a body which is Christ. If the body called Christ was an organism, then also the shadows of it, that came before, must have borne the same character.”

Vos did not use the now-familiar shorthand expression, “already but not yet,” to capture the New Testament’s presentation of the present and future aspects of God’s coming kingdom. Nevertheless, he surely laid the exegetical and theological groundwork for the concept, especially in The Kingdom of God and the Church (1903) and The Pauline Eschatology (1930). Vos expressed this concept more in terms of the “present and future aspects of the Kingdom,” or the “overlap of the ages.” It was George E. Ladd (1911–1982) who popularized Vos’s eschatological insights and coined the phrase “already and not yet” to describe the Bible’s tension of inaugurated eschatology, which he learned from Vos. Thus, the coined expression captures the concept of prophecy fulfilled without consummation in The Presence of the Future: The Eschatology of Biblical Realism (1974).^[23]

23. Also see Thomas R. Schreiner, “The World Turned Upside Down: George Ladd on the Kingdom,” Christ Over All, Nov. 11, 2024.

4. Biblical Types are Prophetic Prefigurations as Features of God’s Redemptive-Historical Revelation.

Admittedly, it is with difficulty that one grasps Vos’s understanding of earthly shadows of heavenly things God infused with both a symbolic function for God’s ancient people and a typological foreshadowing of the future arrival of those heavenly realities at the end of the ages (1 Cor. 10:11). Careful reading of his presentation would guard contemporary biblical scholars from falling into four regularly observed common errors.

• Wrongly claiming that biblical types were not prophetic, leading to the error of insisting that types are discerned only retrospectively.
• Mistakenly locating the discussion of biblical types in hermeneutics rather than in divine revelation, contributing to the error of speaking of typological interpretation or figural interpretation.
• Incorrectly ascribing to the Israelites of old our comparative ease of understanding Old Testament types from the vantage point of fulfillment. Such an error fails to apprehend the redemptive-historical progression of God’s unfolding revelation, which culminates in this: “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked” (Luke 12:48, NIV).
• Improperly falling into the opposite error of sustaining the Old Testament earthly shadow form of worship (requiring the keeping of food laws, circumcision, and holy days) by fixating on the symbolic, thus robbing Christ, the reality, of his due glory. This is the error the Preacher counters in Hebrews, and Paul exposes and condemns in his Letter to the Galatians.^[24]

24. Vos correctly states, “This the Romish Church does on a large scale. And in doing so, instead of lifting the substance of the types to a higher plane, it simply reproduces and repeats. This is destructive of the whole typical relation” (Biblical Theology, 148).

Conclusion

Among the numerous theological works I have read since I was a seminarian, the most scripturally instructive, spiritually transformative, and exegetically influential have been Vos’s biblical-theological insights, which fill the pages of each of his publications. It has not been Vos himself but Holy Scripture, which he expounds with the Spirit’s imbued grace of clarity, that has been incrementally reshaping my total world and life view in keeping with God’s redemptive-historical revelation. I pray that many more will take up and read the work of this faithful servant of Christ, and in doing so discover the extent of the immeasurable riches available in God’s Word.

During his European studies, Vos had significant contact with leading continental Reformed theologians, including Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck. Despite an attractive offer to become the first professor of Old Testament at the newly established Free University in Amsterdam under Kuyper’s leadership, Vos declined. Instead, he accepted a position at the Christian Reformed Church’s Theological School in Grand Rapids (now Calvin Theological Seminary), where he taught for five years, beginning in 1888.^[2]

The Move to Princeton

In 1892, Princeton Seminary established the Biblical Theology Chair. They did so in response to the discipline’s expanding significance and impact on biblical scholarship, especially among nineteenth-century liberal scholars, and not because of theological work already being done at the seminary. Two factors support this observation: (1) while A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield held their own conception of Biblical Theology as a discipline, it was neither developed nor prominently featured in their theological methods; and (2) the discipline of Biblical Theology, which originated in rationalism and was dominated by nineteenth-century liberals, was being imported to the United States specifically to provide “a more effective platform from which to disseminate Higher Criticism.”^[3] Indeed, just a year earlier in 1891, Union Seminary had created a Chair of Biblical Theology and hired the liberal Charles Briggs to fill it for this express purpose (Briggs would later go on trial for heresy). The Princetonians recognized the need to counteract this development of liberal biblical theologians by appointing Vos—educated in Germany, conversant with Higher Criticism and Biblical Theology, yet an ardent evangelical believer—to fill their own Chair.

Professor William Henry Green, Vos’s former Old Testament mentor, and B. B. Warfield were instrumental in bringing their former student to Princeton. Warfield recognized the need for a professor to teach Biblical Theology as a distinct discipline. He personally encouraged Vos to accept the invitation to Princeton after he had declined an earlier offer. The Charles Briggs heresy controversy at Union Seminary reached its climax at the 1893 Presbyterian General Assembly. As other seminaries went liberal, Princeton was quickly becoming the bastion for defending Reformed Orthodoxy in America, and so Green and Warfield were delighted that Vos joined the Princeton faculty. They believed that he could counter liberal trends in biblical scholarship with rigor, grounded in the authority and unity of Scripture’s organic unfolding of redemptive revelation. His appointment proved significant for establishing Biblical Theology as a discipline of study in the Reformed tradition, and he occupied the chair for thirty-nine years until his retirement in 1932.

Scholarly Contributions While at Princeton Seminary

Vos demonstrated remarkable scholarly breadth, contributing over a hundred penetrating book reviews to The Presbyterian and Reformed Review and The Princeton Theological Review from 1890 to 1919. His multilingual skills served him well in critically reviewing resources written in English, German, and Dutch. While he was developing his magisterial grasp of the redemptive-historical nature of God’s revelation in Scripture, Vos’s book reviews provide a helpful context for understanding how he perceived his work and what critical issues captured his attention. Perhaps because he was more at home working in the Old Testament, he vigorously opposed Old Testament Form Criticism but did not apply his perceptive ability to critiquing Form Criticism pertaining to New Testament studies. He also did not address the rising dialectical theology of Karl Barth. For reasons unexplained, Vos ceased contributing his insightful reviews in 1919. Sadly, Vos’s work was generally neglected by his contemporaries, possibly due to his somewhat ponderous writing style. More than this, his numerous withering critiques of modern criticism prompted liberal contemporaries to dismiss his contributions.

Formative Influences from Fellow Dutchmen

Neither his exposure to Princeton traditions nor his Dutch contacts with Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck adequately explain Vos’s deep interest in the discipline of Biblical Theology. Vos was thoroughly conversant with both Bavinck and Kuyper, for he translated several of their works. Though it seems apparent that Bavinck and Kuyper influenced Vos’s apologetic method, Richard Gaffin rightly suggests,

Vos’s work in biblical theology is largely without direct antecedents and indicates the originality with which he wrestled with the matter of biblical interpretation in the Reformed tradition. It should also be emphasized, however, that he had a strong sense of his own place in that tradition and the thoroughly Reformed character of his work.^[4]

Doing Biblical Theology at Princeton

When Vos arrived at Princeton Seminary in 1894 to occupy the Chair of Biblical Theology, he entered a discipline already characterized by four destructive features: (1) rationalistic opposition to supernaturalism, (2) the adoption of historical-critical methods, (3) radical literary criticism, and (4) the abandonment of orthodox views on biblical inspiration. The field had been decisively influenced by Johann P. Gabler’s 1787 inaugural lecture at the University of Altdorf, which, sadly, established biblical theology as a purely historical discipline independent from dogmatic theology.^[5] Against this backdrop, Vos undertook the monumental task of forging a truly evangelical Biblical Theology, maintaining the highest view of Scripture. Vos was not naive about the destructive forces. He demonstrated a comprehensive knowledge of rationalism’s influence and was perceptive in recognizing the emerging impact of evolutionary philosophy within Biblical Theology.

At the close of his initial academic year as a professor at Princeton, Vos delivered his inaugural address at the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton: “The Idea of Biblical Theology as a Science and as a Theological Discipline.”^[6] The final portion of his address proposes the crucial points to emphasize in the development of Biblical Theology within the curriculum at Princeton Seminary. His first three deserve emphasis: (1) The objective character of God’s revelation means the object of Biblical Theology is not the thoughts and reflections of humans, “but the oracles of God.” (2) The historical nature of the truth is not contrary to its revealed character but always subordinate to it, because God employed the historical setting for the express purpose of revealing “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”^[7] (3) Biblical Theology must establish itself firmly “upon the truthfulness of the Scriptures as a whole.”^[8] Both the record of God’s redeeming deeds and the interpretive word of those acts by prophets and apostles must be accepted as the informing and infallible source of Biblical Theology. Vos carefully observed this agenda throughout his tenure at Princeton, as evidenced in his published Biblical Theology, which represents his lecture notes and lifelong fulfillment of his inaugural vision.^[9]

What is Biblical Theology?

One of the clearest ways to define Biblical Theology is to distinguish it from Systematic Theology, a distinction that Vos made early in his career at Princeton. Prior to assuming the chair at Princeton, Vos had, in fact, been a systematic theologian, and he continued to value the contribution of systematics in his life and work.^[10] Vos argued that Biblical Theology considers “both the form and contents of revelation . . . as parts and products of a divine work,” whereas in Systematic Theology “these same contents of revelation appear, but not under the aspect of the stages of a divine work” but “as the material for a human work of classifying and systematizing according to logical principles.”^[11]

In other words, the difference between Biblical Theology and Systematic Theology is largely one of structure. Systematics organizes the teaching of Scripture according to logical principles, so that the church can rightly understand all that Scripture teaches on a particular subject (e.g., Christology or gender and sexuality). To ask, “What does the bible teach about x?” is to ask the question of Systematic Theology. Biblical Theology, by contrast, focuses on the progressive unfolding of God’s revelation. Scripture is a narrative unity, and God has revealed himself not simply by unveiling a set of logical principles, but over time as he unfolds his great plan of salvation in history. Biblical Theology is thus the discipline most sensitive to the progressive unfolding of God’s revelation of himself in Scripture.

Methodological Presuppositions

Vos began his work by mapping two realms of revelation. He built on two presuppositions: (1) that God has revealed himself in nature. Natural revelation occurs through the “inner sense of man through the religious consciousness and the moral conscience” and through God’s external works in nature^[12] and (2) that human knowledge of God is grounded in humans being made in God’s image. The Bible “never assumes, even in regard to the heathen, that man must be taught the existence of God.”^[13]

However, sin’s entrance disrupted natural revelation in two ways, both needing the Creator’s redemptive correction: (1) natural revelation’s structure became distressed, and (2) human religious and moral sense became dull and impaired, subjecting knowledge of God to “error and distortion.”^[14] Therefore, on its own, the natural mind cannot access the substance of revelation in the redemptive realm. Only supernatural redemption restores to the sinful human “the normalcy and efficiency of his cognition of God in the sphere of nature.”^[15]

Supernatural Revelation as Foundational

For Vos, the biblical theologian’s work was inextricably bound to the supernaturally revealed inerrant Word of God. He preferred designating his discipline “History of Special Revelation” instead of “Biblical Theology,” but conceded the difficulty of altering the established terminology.^[16] The starting point for Biblical Theology “consists in the approbation of that supernatural process by which God has made Himself the object of our knowledge.”^[17]

Vos regarded his task to be eminently spiritual, requiring dependence and believing receptivity, since Scripture represents the deposit of God’s objective self-revelation as Redeemer. The human mind, enabled by new birth and divine illumination, can apprehend this deposit of truth, “which is but the reflection in the regenerate consciousness of an objective world of divine acts and words.”^[18]

Main Features and Tasks of Biblical Theology

Vos conceived of the “History of Special Revelation,” (his preferred designation for Biblical Theology) as consisting of two parts: (1) God as self-revealer, and (2) God as the author of Scripture. The formation of Scripture (God’s words) functions as a means to an end—the disclosure of God’s acts. Biblical Theology’s specific character lies in pondering both the form and the content of revelation from the perspective of God’s revealing activity. It “deals with revelation in the active sense, as an act of God,” seeking to understand, trace, and describe this act within human finite observation.^[19]

Vos made it clear that Biblical Theology is concerned with “the process of the self-revelation of God deposited in the Bible,” dealing with revelation “as a divine activity, not as the finished product of that activity.”^[20]

As a seminarian, I initially became acquainted with Geerhardus Vos through reading the works of Herman Ridderbos and Richard Gaffin.^[21] As I did so, however, I came to realize that many who cherish the works of this trio of scholars had yielded to a subtle and specious shift, contrary to how Vos and Ridderbos, in particular, communicate the task of the discipline of Biblical Theology. Though Vos conceded acceptance of the designation, “Biblical Theology,” he reasonably contended that “History of Special Revelation” is a preferable title because it clearly and precisely expresses the task of the discipline.^[22] Thus, he explained, “Biblical Theology, rightly defined, is nothing else than the exhibition of the organic progress of supernatural revelation in its historic continuity and multiformity.”^[23] Observe Vos’s critical distinction. He distinguishes God’s revelation—“the organic progress of supernatural revelation in its historic continuity and multiformity”—from our human exposition of God’s revelation, calling the latter “exhibition.” God’s written Word concerning his revelatory deeds and words entails a progressively unfolding drama that Bible readers must track. Herman Ridderbos reinforces this:

[W]e should attempt to discover the redemptive-historical categories that enable us to discern clearly the nature, the content, and then the inscripturated form of the New Testament, as well as the nature of its authority. And we must learn to do all this in the light of the New Testament itself and according to its own standards.^[24]

Thus, our doing of Biblical Theology must strive to trace and represent accurately the historical progression of the biblical storyline of redemption from foreshadowing promise to substantial fulfillment in Messiah Jesus (cf. Col. 2:17). The discipline’s task and procedural method seek to trace and portray as closely as possible the contours and features of the divine progression of revelation. Given this and Vos’s preferred designation for the discipline (History of Special Revelation), a corrective caution is pertinent.

A Dangerous Distortion of Vos’s Approach

Without realizing it, many who welcome Vos’s impact on their understanding of Scripture have displaced Biblical Theology from its proper domain of “redemptive-historical revelation” to an improper realm of “redemptive-historical hermeneutics.” Vos insists that “Biblical Theology” must be understood as the “History of Special Revelation,” properly describing the “redemptive-historical” nature of God’s revealing his redemptive deeds and words. However, it is common to hear Vos’s contemporary students use a misnomer, “redemptive-historical hermeneutics.”^[25] We must avoid this sloppiness. “Redemptive-historical” is an adjectival phrase that describes God’s giving of revelation (Scripture), not our interpretation of revelation (hermeneutics). We must avoid transposing the descriptive phrase, “redemptive-historical,” concerning God’s revelation, into a prescriptive phrase concerning our interpretation of Scripture.

Why be concerned with this unwitting replacement of “redemptive-historical revelation” with “redemptive-historical hermeneutics,” also called a “Christocentric hermeneutic”? When pastors, biblical scholars, theologians, and students shift Vos’s adjectival expression, “redemptive-historical,” from describing God’s word to their interpretation of Scripture, without realizing it, they ascribe to their interpretation of Scripture an authority that properly belongs only to the giving of God’s revelation, God’s revealed Word.^[26] This invalid shift is consequential because it confuses and ignites interpretive disputes that lead to a theological standoff, especially with those who counter by insisting that Scripture requires their Dispensational “literal-grammatical-historical hermeneutic” to unpack its meaning.^[27] In other words, if “redemptive historical” is a way that we approach the text (rather than a characteristic of the text itself), then it has no more right to claim legitimacy than any other kind of hermeneutic—whether grammatical-historical or historical-critical or even allegorical.

To speak of “redemptive-historical hermeneutics” is a species akin to another improper expression, “typological interpretation” or “figural reading.” Just as “redemptive-historical” properly describes the progressively unfolding Scriptures, not our hermeneutic, so we properly ascribe “typological” or “figural” to the nature of God’s revelation, not to our interpretation of biblical types and figures.^[28]

Conclusion

Geerhardus Vos is a giant in church history, a man rightly honored as the founder of evangelical Biblical Theology. He taught us that when we read the Bible, we need to acknowledge and account for its “redemptive-historical nature.” Therefore, we should always read the Bible with a sensitivity to the historical progression of God’s redemption through the several sequential biblical covenants and be prepared to be corrected by the Scriptures. Thus, we correctly affirm that the Scriptures entail the progressive unfolding of God’s “redemptive-historical revelation” concerning the Messiah. So, if we interpret the Scriptures properly, we trace the “redemptive-historical” contours of the storyline like a cartographer sketches a map. As no cartographer attributes to a map what belongs only to the sketched landmass, we must never assign to our representation of the unfolding mystery of God’s redemptive-historical revelation, which is always subject to adjustment, what belongs only to Scripture and not our interpretation of it. In so doing, we do what was most important to Vos: we rightly honor God as the author of Scripture and the one who reveals himself, and we receive that revelation with belief and dependence. In this way, we not only receive Scripture in all its narrative glory, but we receive God Himself—the one who, by his wondrous grace, has revealed himself to us in his word.

1. Danny E. Olinger, “Geerhardus Vos: Education in America and Europe, 1881-1888.” ↑

2. During his tenure at what would later be renamed Calvin Theological Seminary (1888–1893), Vos taught systematic theology. During this period, he wrote his recently translated Reformed Dogmatics, vols. 1–5, trans. and ed. Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012–14). ↑

3. Jack B. Rogers and Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 358–59. ↑

4. Richard Gaffin, ed., Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation: The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos, (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1980), xii–xiii. ↑

5. Johann Philipp Gabler, “An Oration on the Proper Distinction Between Biblical and Dogmatic Theology and the Specific Objectives of Each” (1787), in Old Testament Theology: Flowering and Future, ed. and trans. Ben C. Ollenburger (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004), 497–506. ↑

6. Geerhardus Vos, “The Idea of Biblical Theology as a Science and as a Theological Discipline,” in Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation, ed. Richard Gaffin, 3–24. ↑

7. Vos, “The Idea of Biblical Theology,” 19. ↑

8. Vos, “The Idea of Biblical Theology,” 20. ↑

9. Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948). ↑

10. See Geerhardus Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, vols. 1–5, trans. And ed. By Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012–14). ↑

11. Hermann Ridderbos, Redemptive History, 7. ↑

12. Vos, Biblical Theology, 19. Compare the recently translated Geerhardus Vos, Natural Theology, trans. Albert Gootjes (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2022). ↑

13. Vos, Biblical Theology, 19. ↑

14. Vos, Biblical Theology, 20. ↑

15. Vos, Biblical Theology, 22. ↑

16. Vos, Biblical Theology, v, 14. ↑

17. Vos, “The Idea of Biblical Theology,” 5. ↑

18. Vos, Biblical Theology, 10. His assessment of all Biblical Theology done apart from belief is highly negative: “It was formerly considered a merit to have stressed the importance of tracing the truth historically, but when this was done with a lack of fundamental piety it lost the right of calling itself theology. The rationalistic brand of biblical Theology, at the same time that it stresses the historical, declares its product religiously worthless” (Biblical Theology, 10, emphasis added). ↑

19. Vos, Biblical Theology, 7. ↑

20. Vos, Biblical Theology, 5. ↑

21. Like me, many pastors and seminarians have become familiar by reading these two men, along with George Ladd. For more on George Ladd’s writings and their relation to Geerhardus Vos’s pioneering work in Biblical Theology, see Thomas R. Schreiner, “The World Turned Upside Down: George Ladd on the Kingdom,” Christ Over All, Nov. 11, 2024. ↑

22. Vos, Biblical Theology, 14. ↑

23. Vos, “The Idea of Biblical Theology,” 15. ↑

24. Herman N. Ridderbos, Redemptive History and the New Testament Scriptures, trans. H. De Jongste, rev. Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., 2^nd revised ed., (Phillipsburg, NJ: 1963), 50. ↑

25. “Westminster Redemptive-Historical Hermeneutics,” video by Westminster Theological Seminary. The video advertisement reads: “Scripture’s the history of God’s unfolding redemption. This means that the heartbeat of every passage, Old or New Testament, is Christ crucified and raised. At Westminster, God is the authority on how we interpret his Word. We call this redemptive historical hermeneutics.” ↑

26. For a fuller discussion of this confusion, see Ardel Caneday, “Scripture’s ‘Redemptive-Historical Character’ and Biblical Interpretation (Part 3),” All Things Christian (September 25, 2023). ↑

27. See, for example, Abner Chou, “A Hermeneutical Evaluation of the Christocentric Hermeneutic,” The Master’s Seminary Journal 27.2 (Fall 2016): 113–39. Advocates frequently substitute “Christocentric hermeneutic” for “redemptive-historical hermeneutic.” ↑

28. Regarding the mistake of treating typology as a species of hermeneutics rather than as a species of God’s revelation, see Ardel Caneday, “Biblical Types: Revelation Concealed in Plain Sight to be Disclosed—’These Things Occurred Typologically to Them and Were Written Down for Our Admonition,’” God’s Glory Revealed in Christ: Essays on Biblical Theology in Honor of Thomas R. Schreiner, eds. Denny Burk, James M. Hamilton, Jr., Brian J. Vickers (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic), 135–55; and Ardel Caneday, “Revealed Forward: Figural Revelation of the Messiah’s Suffering and Glory in Israel’s Scripture according to Luke 24:13–35,” SBJT 26.3 (2022): 30–48. My many publications in which I address biblical types have been significantly influenced by Vos, whose brilliant formulations I have endeavored to express with greater simplicity and clarity. See Vos, Biblical Theology, 144–48; and Vos, The Teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956; Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing Company, 1976), 49–87. ↑

The Development of John’s Gospel

An Absolute Beginning

Compared to the other gospels, the beginning of John is most like Mark in that neither has a narrative of Jesus’s birth. While Mark draws readers back to Isaiah’s prophecy as “the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, God’s Son” (Mark 1:1), John reaches farther back in the Old Testament, to the absolute beginning, compelling readers to recall the beginning words of Genesis: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). Like Moses’s ancient text, John’s Gospel begins not with creation but the absolute beginning, from before creation’s beginning. So, John situates his account concerning the Messiah neither geographically like Mark, beginning in the Judean wilderness in fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy, nor genealogically like Matthew and Luke, respectively tracing Jesus’ human descent from Abraham and back to Adam.

Literary Development and Structure

The literary structure of John’s Gospel reveals a carefully arranged work that differs markedly from the synoptic tradition (i.e., the other three gospels).^[1] Indeed, how the four Evangelists arranged their respective Gospels bears heavily on what each one communicates. Rather than following the chronological framework common to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, John organizes his material around a series of “signs” (miracles) and extended discourses that reveal Jesus’s identity and mission (though there is still chronological progression in the gospel). John’s structural development reflects his theological purpose without rendering chronological concerns irrelevant. Each section builds on the previous one, developing a crescendo that culminates in the passion narrative and resurrection account. Light is a dominant motif in John’s narrative and brackets the beginning and end: the prologue (John 1:1–18) serves as a literary-theological prelude, presenting the arrival of the Light. The epilogue is a literary-theological postlude, featuring a post-resurrection appearance of the Light, which graciously restores and commissions Peter, and subtly reprises themes and motifs from John’s Gospel that reinforce Jesus’s actions.

1. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are often called “synoptic” gospels because they tell the story of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection in a similar way, or from a similar vantage point. The word synoptic comes from the Greek words syn (together) and optikos (visual, visible, or related to the act of seeing). Thus “synoptic” means seeing together or common perspective. John is typically contrasted with the synoptic gospels because he tells the Jesus story in a very unique way.

Many commentators have understood the Gospel’s structure as consisting of two major sections, which they identify as the Book of Signs (chapters 1–12) and the Book of Glory (chapters 13–21). Acknowledging these two large segments of the Gospel and recognizing that the beginning and ending serve vital roles as a prelude and a postlude, here is my broad outline of John’s Gospel.

1. A Prelude: The Light Dawns in the Darkness (John 1:1–18).
2. The Glory of Jesus Shines in Darkness through His Deeds and Words (John 1:19–12:50).
3. The Glory of Jesus Shines in Darkness through His Passion, Death, and Resurrection (John 13:1–20:31).
4. A Postlude: The Light Shines Forth (John 21:1–25).

The Book of Signs (parts I & II above) focuses on Jesus’s public ministry, featuring seven miraculous signs that point to his divine identity. Accompanying some of these signs are extensive theological discourses that interpret their meaning. The Book of Glory (parts III and IV) centers on Jesus’s final hours with his disciples, instructing them concerning his departure, featuring his crucifixion and resurrection, presenting these events as the ultimate revelation of God’s glory.^[2]

2. James Hamilton’s book, In the Beginning Was the Word: Finding Meaning in the Literary Structure of the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2025) presents an intriguing and provocative thesis that John structured his entire Gospel as a large chiasm with multiple sub–chiasms.

Historical Context, Dating, and Authorship

Authorship

Like each of the Synoptic Gospels, the Fourth Gospel is formally anonymous; the author does not explicitly identify himself. However, early witnesses overwhelmingly identify the Apostle John as the author. Critical scholars, including Richard Bauckham, argue against the Apostle John, the son of Zebedee, as the author of the Gospel of John.^[3] Despite this, for many reasons, including the early witnesses of church history, most evangelical scholars have contended that the Apostle John, brother of James, is the author.^[4]

3. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017, 562–71).

The Role of the Beloved Disciple

4. For a helpful discussion concerning the authorship of John’s Gospel, see D. A. Carson, The Gospel according to John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 68–81.

Within John’s Gospel is an inconspicuous but important character, the author who identifies himself as “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” who emerges only during the latter half of the Gospel (John 13:23; 19:26; 20:2; 21:7, 20). This unnamed disciple presents himself as an eyewitness source concerning the Gospel’s content and testimony (John 21:24). Within the narrative, he fulfills a crucial role, bearing testimony to Jesus’s ministry and establishing the Gospel’s authority and witness. It is therefore likely that this disciple is the author of the book, referring to himself in the third-person so as to establish the credibility of his eyewitness testimony. Moreover, it is clear this disciple is one of the twelve as only the twelve were at the last supper (cf. John 13:23; Matt. 26:21–22; Mark 14:17), and of the twelve John is most likely for a number of reasons.^[5] This disciple’s unobtrusive references to himself and his testimony contributed significantly to the Gospel’s reception as apostolic.

5. Once again, see Carson, The Gospel According to John, 71–80.

Historical Context and Dating

John wrote his gospel near the end of his life, sometime before the close of the first century (i.e., the century in which Jesus lived). While this claim used to be disputed by critical scholars, in 1934 a papyrus fragment (P52) from around A.D. 125 that contains a portion of John 18:31–33 and 18:37–19:1 was discovered, all but settling the question. Thus, we have both good biblical and historical reasons to accept the early Christian tradition that John, the son of Zebedee, wrote the Gospel, perhaps ten to fifteen years after the fall of Jerusalem, from Ephesus.^[6]

6. Some argue that the Gospel’s “silence” about the destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple indicates that its writing took place before A.D. 70, but this is a minority position.

The Central Message of John’s Gospel

The Purpose Statement

Near the end of his Gospel, John explicitly states the purpose for his writing: “Now these things were written that you might believe that the Christ, the Son of God, is Jesus, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (20:31; author’s translation). This statement summarizes the Gospel’s central message, revealing its dual focus on two questions: (1) Who is the Messiah? (Christology), and (2) What has Jesus, the Messiah, accomplished? (Eschatology). The Gospel’s message centers on the identity of Jesus as God’s Son who has come into the world to reveal the Father and bring eternal life to everyone who believes the message he reveals. This message is developed through a series of carefully curated narratives, discourses, and symbolic presentations that progressively reveal Jesus’s true nature and mission.

Incarnational Theology

At the heart of John’s message lies a profound incarnational theology. The prologue’s declaration that “the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us” (John 1:14)^[7] presents a profoundly full announcement, establishing the fundamental premise that governs the entire Gospel. Though Jesus is a great teacher and prophet, he is far greater. He is the eternal Word of God, God with us in a human body, revealing the Father to us. Yet, more than this, the Word, who took on human flesh, intercedes for us by interposing himself in his own body on our behalf as the Passover Lamb who delivers everyone to live eternally who looks to him.

7. The word “dwelt” (ESV) is the Greek word skēnoō, a verb which comes from the word for “tent” or “tabernacle.” Thus, John is intentionally saying that in Jesus, God dwells with us in a way that far exceeds his dwelling with ancient Israel in the tabernacle.

This incarnational message permeates every aspect of the Gospel’s presentation. Jesus’s signs are not simply miraculous works but revelatory acts that disclose his heavenly glory. His discourses are not merely teachings but divine self-revelations. His passion and death are not merely historical events but the revelation of the manner in which God loved the world (John 3:16).

The Gift of Eternal Life from Above

John’s Gospel consistently presents Jesus as the source of eternal life for everyone who trusts in him. This message is conveyed through numerous images, including Jesus as the bread of life (John 6:35), the living water (John 4:10; 7:38), the light of the world (John 8:12), the good shepherd (John 10:11), the resurrection and the life (John 11:25), the way, truth, and life (John 14:6), and the true vine (John 15:1). Each of these images contributes to the Gospel’s central message that by taking on human flesh, the Word brought eternal life from above to earth that everyone who believes in him will not be condemned but resides in Jesus and receives a quality of life that transcends physical death and connects believers to the eternal life of God. The Gospel presents eternal life not merely as quantitative (life that endures forever) but qualitative (life that partakes of God’s own life). This eternal life is already a present reality for all who now hear the voice of the Son of God (John 5:25), but not yet fully realized “for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment” (John 5:28–29).

Mission and Sending

John’s Gospel also features the theme of mission and sending. Just as the Father sent the Son into the world, Jesus sends his disciples into the world to continue his mission (John 20:21). This sending motif establishes a continuity between Jesus’s mission and the mission of the church, grounding Christian mission in the very nature and design of God’s covenantal, redemptive work in the Messiah.

Major Themes in John’s Gospel

Light and Darkness

Prominent among the themes in John’s Gospel is the cosmic conflict between light and darkness. At the outset of his Gospel, John introduces the Light-Darkness theme that spans the whole Gospel. This contrasting theme presents the Word as the Light that penetrated creation’s darkness on the first day, and now as the Light penetrating human darkness, antithetical to new creation in these latter days.

John introduces this contrasting theme early in the prelude: “And the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness is not able to apprehend it” (John 1:5). This, the first of several uses of double entendre in the Gospel—“not able to apprehend it”—is an initial compactly summarized message of John’s Gospel: The Light reveals the Father, exposing the evil darkness of humans who refuse to welcome the Light with understanding, and thus wickedly endeavor to squelch and bury the Light—only to be thwarted and conquered when the Light bursts forth from his tomb.

Of course, the Light is another designation for the preincarnate Word, which becomes evident in the subsequent verses:

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to bear witness about the Light, that all might come to believe through him. He was not the Light but came to bear witness about the Light. The True Light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. The Light was in the world, and the world was made through the Light, yet the world did not know the Light. The Light came to its own, and its own people did not receive the Light. (John 1:9–11; ESV, with purposeful edits for emphasis)

This light-darkness theme operates on multiple levels. Jesus as Light reveals truth about God and exposes the darkness of human sin and ignorance. Those who come to the Light receive life and truth, while those who reject the Light remain in darkness and death. This paired theme underscores the Gospel’s emphasis on the necessity of belief and the consequences of unbelief.

Belief and Unbelief

Belief and unbelief form another contrasting theme that spans John’s Gospel, portraying the fundamental response to Jesus’s revelation of the Father, reception or rejection. The Gospel presents belief not as mere intellectual assent but as a willful entrusting of oneself to Jesus, receiving eternal life, already transforming behavior in preparation for the resurrection unto life eternal (John 5:25–29). Various characters in the Gospel illustrate different responses to Jesus, from the immediate and undeveloped belief of the first disciples (John 1:35–51) to the persistent unbelief and antagonism of many Jews and their religious leaders (John 8:31–59). While John’s narrative presents Jesus as responding to “Jews who had believed in him” (John 8:31), the Evangelist makes it clear that there is a kind of “believing” that fails to lay hold of Jesus as the promised Messiah, thus, a belief to which he does not bequeath eternal life and which remains disobedient and becomes recalcitrant, confirming one’s condemnation (John 3:36).^[8] Thus, whether readers already believe or have yet come to believe, John’s Gospel appeals to all: “Now these things were written that you might believe that the Christ, the Son of God, is Jesus, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31; author’s translation).

8. See A. B. Caneday, “God’s Incarnate Son as the Embodiment of Last Day Resurrection: Eternal Life as Justification in John’s Gospel,” SBJT 18.4 (2014): 67–88.

Glory

During Jesus’s last Passover, Greeks who were in Jerusalem approached Philip with the request, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus” (John 12:21). Jesus responded to this request by announcing, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (John 12:23). Glory forms a unifying theme throughout John’s Gospel. Unlike Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels, where Jesus’s glory features at his future return, but like Mark’s Gospel, with greater development, John presents Jesus’s glory as revealed throughout his earthly ministry but reaching its climax in his death and resurrection. The Gospel’s distinctive perspective sees the cross not as a defeat but as the ultimate revelation of the Messiah’s divine glory. This theme unfolds throughout John’s Gospel as Jesus’s deeds and teachings glorify the Father, who, at the climax of his Son’s mission, glorifies the Son. This reciprocal relationship throughout the Gospel affirms the intimate unity between Father and Son indicated in the initial verse: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God . . .”

Revelation: Understanding vs. Misunderstanding

Embedded within Jesus’s announcement concerning his being glorified is another linked theme, “belief and unbelief,” a motif that pairs understanding versus misunderstanding as a theme in John’s Gospel. Because Jesus’s teachings, dramatic acts, and signs are masterful symbolic revelatory acts, their meanings do not lie cheaply on the surface. Everything Jesus taught, all his dramatic actions, and all his signs require understanding that comes through belief. For example, early in his Gospel, John makes the case that the disciples’ understanding of Jesus’s riddle in the Temple (“Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up” [John 2:19]) dawned on them only after the crucified Messiah’s resurrection. Likewise, the crowds of Jews at Passover misunderstood Jesus’s purposeful double entendre when he stated, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). They correctly understood “lifted up” to refer to being “lifted up on a Roman cross.” However, because they failed to apprehend the allusion to Isaiah’s prophecy, where both “lift up” and “glorify” occur together, Jesus’s hearers had no comprehension that his crucifixion would be integral to his exaltation.

Revealing and Concealing: My Hour Has Not Yet Come

The Word, who is in intimate relationship with the Father, now veiled in flesh, makes known the Father whom no one has ever seen except “he who descended from heaven” (John 1:14, 18; 3:13). From this derives the revealing and concealing theme that permeates John’s Gospel, with Jesus presented as the revealer of divine truth according to his Father’s appointed time. Hence, when his mother wants him to intercede after the wedding wine is depleted, Jesus’s statement, “My hour has not yet come” (John 2:4), hints that his turning water to wine is an immanent foreshadowing of the imminent revealing of his glory. He shrouds the revelation of his glory in signs, riddles, teaching, and dramatic prophetic actions, even hiding himself as acts of judgment, in the flesh, he imitates God’s hiddenness to dramatize divine judgment by concealment (John 12:36) until the full display of his glory is revealed when he dies as the Passover Lamb upon the cross (John 3:14; 8:28; 12:32–34; 19:31–37).

Thus, throughout his teachings, miraculous signs, and dramatic acts, Jesus fulfills the Old Testament Scriptures. He does this by replicating the revelatory giving of the prophetic Scriptures as he moves toward the climactic hour, escalating his conflict with religious authorities who zealously endeavor to protect Jerusalem’s Temple from Jesus who riddled, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). Integral to this escalation also are Jesus’s numerous “I am” sayings. We see this in John 6, where Jesus presents himself with the divine name, “I am.” He allays his disciples’ fright as he walked on the sea’s surface (John 6:20; also 8:24, 58; 13:19; 18:5, 6), and he completed the phrase “I am” by announcing he is the Original Manna (John 6:35), the Light of the world (that is, greater than the sun, in John 8:12), the Sheep’s Entrance (John 10:7, 9), the Good Shepherd (in contrast to Israel’s false shepherds, in John 10:11, 14), the Resurrection and Source of Life (John 11:25); the Way, the Truth, the Life (John 14:6); and the True Vine (meaning he is the Authentic Israel; see John 15:1, 5).^[9]

9. Caneday, “God’s Incarnate Son,” 71–75.

True and Truth

That Jesus says, “I am the True Bread” (John 6:35) and “I am the True Vine” (15:1, 5), prompts the need to mention two English cognates, the noun truth (alētheia) and the adjective true (alēthinos/alēthēs), which occur frequently in John’s Gospel.^[10] These uses of the adjective “true” follow its use in John 1:9, where “the True Light” does not contrast with “false light.” Rather, the Word is “veritable light” in contrast to the Baptist who “was not that light” but only bore witness to the light (John 1:9). John the Baptist was a mere earthly replica of the greater Light. Here, John’s use of “true” features the Word as the Original Light versus all other lights that are only copies. Likewise, manna was an earthly copy of the heavenly “True Bread” as Israel is an earthly copy of the “True Vine.” Thus, “True” features divine verity akin to “the exact imprint of the divine essence” as in Hebrews 1:3.

10. Truth (alētheia, 25 times) and true (alēthinos, nine times; alēthēs, 14 times).

Similarly, in John 1:17, where John states, “the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ,” his use of truth does not suggest that the Law Covenant was devoid of grace or truth (John 1:16). Rather, the Law Covenant foreshadowed the grace and truth that now come through Jesus Christ, who embodies “grace and truth.” Thus, the grace entailed in the Law Covenant mediated through Moses reached its fulfillment and replacement in the grace that came through Jesus Christ, “who is full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

Love

Love also runs through John’s Gospel as a significant theological theme. Because the English word “so” is unclear, Christians mistakenly assume that John 3:16 speaks of the magnitude of God’s love for the world.^[11] Elsewhere, in 1 John 3:1, John speaks of this, but not in John 3:16. Here, his concern is to expound the manner of God’s love. Hence, he explains, “God loved the world in this manner, that he gave his only Son.”^[12] The giving of his Son is the expression of God’s love. Jesus’s love is the model for Christian love (John 13:34–35). This love is surely not devoid of emotion but is a willful act of self-sacrifice that seeks the good of the beloved. John’s treatment of love is both cosmic (God’s love for the world) and intimate (Jesus’s love for his friends). This theme reaches its culmination in Jesus’s voluntary laying down of his life for his friends, which the Gospel presents as the greatest expression of love (John 15:13).

Conclusion

The Gospel of John represents a remarkable achievement in early Christian literature, combining historical narrative with profound theological reflection and amazing literary genius. The Gospel’s numerous themes work together to create a distinctive and coherent theological presentation of the Messiah’s deity, presenting the Word who was with God as Jesus, the incarnate Word, “the Light” overcoming darkness, and “the Life” giving resurrection life already the acquitting verdict of the Last Day and the assurance of resurrection life to come. Distinctive among the Four Gospels, John’s Gospel’s escalating storyline, message, and themes climax with a purpose statement that invites readers to believe that the promised Messiah is none other than Jesus of Nazareth (John 20:30–31).

While dozens of commentaries have been published on each of the gospels since the year 2000, we recommend these below because they have stood the test of time in an “evergreen” way. That said, the field of biblical theology—understanding the bible on its own terms and tracing the redemptive story of God across the sixty-six-book canon—has grown significantly in the past few decades. Older commentaries, with few exceptions, are not as sensitive to this unfolding storyline of Scripture. Thus, if one is using a commentary below for preaching or teaching on one of the gospels, we would recommend supplementing it with resources that are especially geared towards the types, allusions, and citations of Old Testament texts within these gospels. Christ Over All has sought to model this type of biblical-theological reading of texts in our April 2025 theme on the Cross in the Old Testament, and we plan to spend an entire month on the topic in October of 2025. Moreover, Progressive Covenantalism—the theological framework that sees a progressively developing sequence of covenants as undergirding the redemptive story of God that climaxes in Jesus—is undergirded by a biblical theological understanding of the Bible.

For more insight into these gospels, check out our articles on Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And for additional commentary ratings, you can check out the seventh edition of D.A. Carson’s New Testament Commentary Survey, along with bestcommentaries.com.

Matthew

1. D. A. Carson (Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Matthew 1–12 & 13–28) (1984)
   • Still highly regarded by many pastors and scholars as “indispensable” for preaching and exegesis on Matthew.
   • Balanced, conservative, and featuring the redemptive-historical tone of Matthew’s Gospel. Carson interacts with liberal scholarship fairly and thoroughly.
2. R. T. France (NICNT) (2007)
   • Frequently endorsed by leading evangelical scholars as a solid, accessible yet technical commentary.
   • Clear evangelical scholarship, especially strong on the Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24–25) and theological contexts.
3. David L. Turner (BECNT) (2006)
   • A readily accessible, evangelical commentary on Matthew’s Gospel.
   • Well-suited for pastors and students who desire an exegetical commentary.

Mark

1. James R. Edwards (PNTC) (2002)
   • Readable, thoughtful, pastorally sensitive, with a focus on the “call to faith and discipleship.”
   • From the Pillar New Testament Commentary, edited by D. A. Carson, a commentary set —widely recommended for theological insight rather than dense syntax analysis.
2. William Lane (NICNT) (1974)
   • An indispensable classic commentary still frequently cited by outstanding Markan scholars.
   • Exhaustive, conservative, characteristically reliable.
3. Robert H. Stein (BECNT) (2008)
   • A well-regarded, more recent evangelical technical commentary with detailed Greek exegesis.
   • Ideal for pastors or seminarians needing robust exegetical foundations.

Luke

1. I. Howard Marshall (NIGTC) (1978)
   • Technically rigorous, long respected in evangelical scholarship.
   • Ideal for advanced users wanting Greek-critical engagement.
2. Robert Stein (NAC) (1993)
   • Often preferred by seminary professors for its rich literary-theological approach to Luke’s Gospel.
   • Integrates narrative theology and a socio-historical perspective with theological sensitivity.
3. Darrell L. Bock (BECNT, 2 vols.) (1994–1996)
   • Frequently cited by several scholars as a premier evangelical commentary on Luke’s Gospel.
   • Comprehensive, historically detailed, and engages scholarly debates while remaining practical.

John

1. D. A. Carson (PNTC) (1990)
   • Frequently named “the best commentary” on John by numerous Johannine scholars.
   • Blends theological depth, practical preaching helps, and sober interaction with scholarly criticism.
   • Exegetically insightful and accessible.
2. Leon Morris (NICNT) (1995)
   • A long-established evangelical favorite, praised for its clarity and scholarly restraint.
   • Technical discussions are mostly in footnotes, making it accessible without oversimplifying.
3. Craig S. Keener (ECC, 2 vols.) (2003)
   • A publication known for its scholarly depth, attention to historical and cultural background, and engagement with vast literature.
   • A go-to for richer reference work with detailed sourcing.

My first introduction to John MacArthur came during my college years through the “Grace to You” radio broadcasts. I recall tuning my radio to our local Christian radio station while in my car to hear his clear and authoritative exposition of Scripture. It was not merely the precision of his teaching that struck me, but the evident conviction with which he preached. John MacArthur didn’t use God’s Word to decorate his opinions; he let the Word speak for itself. Those radio broadcasts of his preaching made evident his love for truth and his passion for Christ’s glory. It planted seeds of conviction and clarity in my own approach to Scripture.

While attending my alma mater, Grace Theological Seminary, and after, I had the opportunity to hear John MacArthur preach in person. Those occasions are etched deeply in my memory, for the voice I had heard many times on the radio was embodied before the seminary student body. It was not just that he opened the Scriptures with clarity, but that he modeled a kind of pastoral courage and biblical fidelity that called every man training for ministry to a higher standard. He was not a man performing, but a man fully submitted to the authority of the Word he proclaimed. Such commitment to God’s Word garners influence—the authority with which he spoke was not his own, but that of Scripture itself.

With the arrival of the internet, I have watched numerous clips from John MacArthur’s sermons. What deepened my admiration and appreciation for him even further was his resolute leadership during the tumultuous days of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 and 2021. As the California state and local governments imposed restrictions on public gatherings, including the assembly of the saints, John stood firm—not recklessly, but resolutely. With clarity of thought and calm conviction, he led Grace Community Church to defy governmental overreach, not out of rebellion, but out of allegiance to the Lordship of Christ. And the Lord blessed the church with a resounding legal victory and financial settlement. John MacArthur’s leadership throughout those disruptive days was marked not by bluster but by obedience to the Lord of the church. His actions rebuked the cowardice of so many other ministers with a clarion call to pastoral fidelity.

In John MacArthur, I witnessed a man who feared God more than man, who loved the church more than his own reputation, and who longed for Christ’s “Well done” more than the applause of the world. His living voice has now gone silent, but his legacy will continue to echo in churches, seminaries, and hearts influenced by his faithfulness.

So, I along with the team at Christ Over All, thank God for the life of John MacArthur. His ministry, though from afar, influenced me, encouraged my resolve to stand boldly with Christ Jesus, and reminded me of the glory and sufficiency of God’s Word. John MacArthur fought the good fight. He kept the faith. And now, by God’s grace, he shall receive the crown of righteousness on the Last Day, which awaits everyone who longs for the Lord’s coming (2 Tim. 4:8). Soli Deo Gloria.

Far more profound is man’s language, which, contrary to frequent assertions, is not a human construct but a gift bequeathed by God. We speak only because our Creator, who speaks, bestowed the gift of speech to man formed after the likeness of God, who creates, reveals, relates, and redeems. When God spoke both material and immaterial creation into existence and endowed man with the skill of language, speech with words became a crucial, integrated feature of the created order. Hence, from the beginning, the Creator’s word communication with and among humans prophetically anticipated its mysterious fulfillment in the incarnation of Jesus Christ—the Word of God made flesh. This article explores the theological trajectory of language, from its origin in God, whose creation foreshadows the new creation, reaching its culmination in the Incarnate Word, offering a vision of language not only as a means of human expression but as a divine medium for revelation and communion.^[1]

1. Readers who desire to explore a theology of language in greater depth may consider Vern Sheridan Poythress, In the Beginning Was the Word: Language, A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009).

1. Because God Speaks, Man Speaks

Genesis 1 reveals that God’s reported speech is performative, creating reality from nothing.^[2] He spoke the entire creation into existence throughout six consecutive days, with words of command to form the heavens and shape the earth (Gen. 1:1–2). He spoke and light burst forth, separating the light from the darkness, which he named Day and Night (Gen. 1:3–6). God’s speech separated the waters above and below (Gen. 1:6–8), divided the seas and dry land (Gen. 1:9–10), populated the earth with vegetation (Gen. 1:11–13), hung the sun and moon and heavenly lights in the sky as lights to rule the day and the night (Gen. 1:14–19), filled the seas with living creatures and the sky with birds (Gen. 1:20–23), and ordered the earth to bring forth living creatures according to their designated kinds (Gen. 1:24–25).

2. Philosophers of language call this a “speech-act.” See Gregg Allison’s Christ Over All article, “Speech Act Theory, Scripture, and the Holy Spirit.”

Then, on the sixth day, the Creator’s performative, creative speech turned to divine deliberative discourse: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” to have dominion over the creatures that fill the seas, the heavens, and the land (Gen. 1:26). Unique among the Creator’s land-dwelling creatures is the last one formed from the dust of the earth, as with the land animals. By forming man after his likeness and in his image, the Creator distinguished man from every other aspect of his creation (the heavens, the earth, vegetation, and animals), all of which speak wordless languages. All man’s essential qualities reflect God, his person, attributes, and senses. Because the Creator formed man to resemble his own likeness, God, who sees, hears, and speaks, bequeathed to man eyes, ears, and a mouth. Hence, our ability to acquire and intelligently employ a language, or more than one, is no mere tool for communicating with one another, but a medium for praising the Lord God who made us in harmony with creation’s wordless praise. Formed in God’s likeness, we see, hear, and speak because our Maker sees, hears, and speaks, a point implicit in the rhetorical questions of Psalm 94:8–9.

⁸ Take notice, you senseless ones among the people;
    you fools, when will you become wise?
⁹ Does he who fashioned the ear not hear?
    Does he who formed the eye not see?

We are replicas of our Creator; he is not a copy of us. Thus, Moisés Silva reasonably observes that while we speak of anthropomorphisms that portray God with human attributes, we may better speak of ourselves as theomorphisms, because we are formed after his likeness, not he in our image.^[3]

3. Moisés Silva, God, Language, and Scripture: Reading the Bible in the Light of General Linguistics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990), 22. My own work on God’s revelation and the function of anthropomorphism convinces me that its proper definition emerges from the soil of Scripture: “Because God formed Adam from the ‘dust of the earth’ and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, making him in his own image and likeness, God makes himself known to his creatures in their likeness, as if he wears both their form and qualities, when in fact they wear his likeness” (Ardel B. Caneday, “Veiled Glory: God’s Self-Revelation in Human Likeness—A Biblical Theology of God’s Anthropomorphic Self-Disclosure,” in Beyond the Bounds: Open Theism and the Undermining of Biblical Christianity, eds. John Piper, Justin Taylor, Paul Kjoss Helseth (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2003), 161.

Adam’s assigned role was to till and guard the Garden of Eden without eating fruit from the one tree God banned with speech: “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:15–17). Then, to instruct the man that his solitude called for a complementary mate, God required him to name the animals (Gen. 2:18–20). Made after God’s likeness, man—chief among the creatures—imitated his Creator by classifying the animals. Like his Creator, Adam engaged in performative speech, which was no mere zoological exercise, but an act implying perception, discernment, and authority. Adam received dominion over the earth’s creatures in keeping with the Creator’s design by carrying out a significant aspect of his divine image-bearing. He employed his God-given language to participate in God’s creative design as a steward over creation through understanding, naming, and exercising dominion. This assignment taught him that none of the creatures he classified corresponded with his creational design, preparing the man to welcome a mate who would complement him in every way, including bodily, for an intimate familial relationship, akin to what he witnessed among the animals. Thus, the Creator formed man’s companion, not from the ground but from a portion of his side, whom Adam called Woman “because she was taken out of Man” (Gen. 2:21–23). “So, God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27).^[4]

4. For a brief but potent read concerning these issues, see Vernard Eller, The Language of Canaan and the Grammar of Feminism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982).

2. God’s Speech Structures Man’s Speech—All Languages Are Ordered by God

Language, which the Creator bequeathed to man, is not a human social construct but a cognitive creaturely structure resembling intra-Trinitarian communication. God designed our speech to function as an integrated representation of reality, visible and invisible. This representation is grounded in divine truth, which establishes language as a medium through which humans can relate, understand, and communicate the order of creation. The Creator wove the essence of speech into the fabric of material and immaterial existence, making words not only a means of expression but a reflection of the divine order and purpose. Thus, human language, bestowed by God, serves as a testament to the inherent harmony and structure within God’s created order, a testament that ultimately finds its profound fulfillment in the Incarnate Word, Jesus Christ.

Yet, the original harmony of the Divine Word, man, and world became ruptured through the sinful corruption of language, which exploited speech contrary to its created design: truth-telling, a spoken correspondence to reality. Man’s sin originated from yielding to a false verbal representation of reality when the serpent disputed the Creator’s prohibitive command: “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” (Gen. 3:1). The serpent uttered a lie: “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:4). Language, the God-given aural vehicle for conveying truth, became a tool for deceit and all kinds of evil. The man and his wife “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom. 1:25).

Instead of obeying God’s first command, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28), like Adam, humans became disobedient, proud, and rebellious. Instead of obeying this cultural mandate to take dominion of the whole earth, they exploited the Creator’s bequeathed singular unifying language to construct a culture that defied the Creator. They gathered in one place, built a high tower, and defied God’s command to fill the earth (Gen. 11:1–9). Consequently, God judged humanity by fragmenting his bequeathed solitary language into numerous tongues, scattering the people across the face of the earth into countless groups divided by tongues, each with languages they understood in common. The implication is that individuals within the same families could not understand one another. So, they formed new relationships with others and bonded together around newly shared speech patterns.

Until Babel, all human speech adhered to a single, common language, an invisible but discernible structured system governing how words and sentences formed and were understood. The Creator, who authorized the universal grammar rules that provided the framework enabling humans to communicate clearly and effectively, from that one common language established thousands of different languages, dividing humans by the strange sounds their tongues spoke, their ears heard, and their minds processed. Previously unknown sentence structures (syntax), word formations (morphology), sound systems (phonology), word meanings (semantics), and the uses of language in context (pragmatics) erupted, generating a din of sounds that separated individuals from established relationships and attracted them to strangers whose words they understood.

As numerous and diverse as the languages became when God generated them from one common source at Babel, all reflected divinely authorized rules and patterns. The rules of any language, often referred to as its grammar, function both prescriptively and descriptively as a structured system that governs how words and sentences are formed and understood.^[5] These guardrails provide a framework that instructs users how to speak or write to communicate clearly and effectively. These governing patterns include syntax (sentence structure), morphology (word formation), phonology (sound systems), semantics (meaning), pragmatics (language use in context), and phonics (correlation of sounds and written symbols). Native speakers and writers instinctively internalize these rules, so when English speakers use multiple adjectives to describe an object or a person, even if they cannot articulate the rule, they correctly rank them according to the following order: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, and purpose.^[6] This inviolable hierarchical order reflects not a human artifice but God’s created order. Thus, “My Greek Fat Big Wedding” is a violation of nature, as is an “old kind woman” or a “leather office green chair.” Yet, violations of another simpler grammar rule abound even among academics. For clarity, a single-word restrictive modifier must be placed directly before the word it restricts. Yet, English speakers, including scholars, routinely misplace the restrictive modifier, creating ambiguity, confusion, even theological error, as with the Beach Boys’ song, “God Only Knows.” As written, the title puts a restriction on God instead of on all others except God: “Only God Knows.”

3. The Prophetic Word: Revelation Through Language

Despite sin’s inherent corrosion of language and sinful humans’ calculated corruption of communication for malevolent purposes, God continues to speak to sinful humans. Throughout the Old Testament, God chose prophets as his mouthpieces. The formula “Thus says the Lord” appears repeatedly, affirming that divine speech is mediated through human language, which itself needs redemption from the decay of depravity. The prophets do not merely deliver messages; they also embody them, living out God’s Word in dramatic, symbolic, and often costly ways.

The revelation of God in the Old Testament is intensely verbal. The Torah is written, read aloud, and memorized. The Psalms, Israel’s hymnbook, teach how to pray and sing God’s words back to him as praise. The covenants are linguistic realities grounded in God’s promises and stipulating belief that springs into obedience. God’s self-revelation, while sometimes manifest in visions and miracles, is most frequently and enduringly expressed through words.

Yet the limitations of human language remain evident. God’s ineffability constantly presses against the constraints of human language. God is utterly holy. His thoughts are not our thoughts (Isa. 55:8–9). The prophets themselves struggle to articulate the fullness of divine revelation. Moses says he is “slow of speech” (Ex. 4:10). Jeremiah objects that he is too young (Jer. 1:6). The Word of God is both near and transcendent, intimate and overwhelming.

4. The Word Incarnate: Christ as Fulfillment of Language

Many mistakenly adopt the notion that John’s Gospel correlates the Word which was “in the beginning with God . . . and was God” with the Logos of Hellenistic philosophy found in Stoicism and Philo’s writings. The Word of whom John wrote is not an abstraction or intermediary but personal. He is God become human. Long before John wrote, “And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us,” (John 1:14), the Old Testament frequently presented “the Word of the Lord” as God personified. The psalmist declares, “The heavens were made by the word of the Lord, and all the stars, by the breath of His mouth” (Ps. 33:6). Likewise, the prophet announces, “Then the word of the Lord came to Isaiah” (Isa. 38:4; cf. Jer. 1:4; Ezek. 1:3). “The word of God” brings judgment and deliverance (Isa. 55:11; Ps. 29:3–5). “The word of God” heals Israelites from a disease that inflicts certain death (Ps. 107:20). It is not in doubt that the Old Testament influenced John to write “the Word was God.”

The Word’s incarnation is the climactic embodiment of the theology of language. In Jesus Christ, God does not merely speak another message. God is the Word; he is the Message in human flesh. The Word, eternally with God, takes on flesh and enters human history, human culture, and human language. The Word incarnate is no metaphor but a miracle.

Christ’s Incarnation is not only the union of divine and human natures, but the union of divine and human language. Jesus speaks in Aramaic, reads the Hebrew Scriptures, and engages with Greek-speaking Gentiles. He teaches in parables, debates the Pharisees, comforts the grieving, and cries out from the cross. Every word the Word speaks is the Word of God, but now in human form, speaking human words.

The Word, who spoke the heavens and earth into existence long ago, is the same Word whose performative words inaugurated the new creation by opening and closing ears as he taught the crowds, healed maladies, forgave sins, exorcised demons, created wine from water, fed a vast multitude, and raised the dead. He decreed the leper, “Be clean,” and it was so (Mark 1:41–42). Again, he commanded Lazarus, “Come out,” and the dead man arose and emerged from his tomb (John 11:43). With access to the Word, the four Evangelists preserve fragments of intra-Trinitarian communication as when a Voice from heaven declares at his baptism, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11) and a Voice from the cloud announces at his transfiguration, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him (Mark 9:7). Yet, the time came when the Incarnate Word also embodied God’s silence. On the cross, the Word cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34; Ps. 22:1), but Heaven was both dark and silent. At last, alone, he uttered the fulfilling performative utterance, “It is finished” (John 19:30), signifying the fulfillment of the Word’s redemptive mission.

5. Pentecost and the Redemption of Language

A fitting theology of language does not terminate at the cross because the Word of Life arose from the tomb. Thus, on Pentecost, the Word poured out the promised Spirit, empowering the apostles to speak in multiple languages the wonderful works of God in Christ Jesus (Acts 2:4). Pentecost in Jerusalem was more than a reversal of Babel’s judgment. Whereas Babel signaled God’s scattering judgment by confusing tongues to render family members strangers to one another, Pentecost signified the Spirit’s unifying blessing, enabling strangers to hear and comprehend the message concerning the Word in their own tongues.

The early church became a multilingual, multicultural body bound not by a single language but by the single Word—Jesus Christ. The New Testament, written in Greek, the lingua franca of the Roman Empire, spread the Gospel far beyond its Hebrew roots. The Word, who came from heaven to tabernacle among us, is to be proclaimed to all the nations. Hence, a theology of language calls for the Scriptures to be translated into every tongue to aid in proclaiming the Word of the Lord and the discipling of all the nations.

Conclusion: The Word Who Reveals God to Us is Now Our Word with God

The story of language in Scripture begins with God’s speech creating all things and climaxes with speech that redeems. From the “Let there be” of Genesis to the “It is finished” of the cross, and onward to the “Come, Lord Jesus” of Revelation, language is the thread that ties creation to new creation.

With the coming of Christ, the Word is no longer only spoken, but embodied in human flesh. The Word, who was with God and is God, made known him whom no one has ever seen, the immortal, invisible, the only God (John 1:1; 1 Tim. 1:15–17). To fulfill his mission, the infinite took on finitude, the transcendent became immanent, and the eternal became bounded in time. Here is his glory: the Word who was with God, who inhabited the prophets’ speech and numerous prefigurations for long ages, stooped to clothe himself with flesh to dwell among us, becoming our redeeming Word, whose “sprinkled blood speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Heb. 12:24), for the Word is now exalted to the right hand of God where he speaks for us, pleading his own sacrificial death on our behalf that we shall never again be separated from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom. 8:31–39).

As these two men sorrowfully reflected on the week that began with joy and anticipation, someone whom they did not recognize joined them. Their unrecognized guest inquired, “What is this discussion you are having with each other as you walk along?” The question puzzled the two men, stopping them in their tracks.

Cleopas wondered, “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?”

Their fellow traveler asked, “What things?”

The two grieving men recounted how they set their hope upon Jesus of Nazareth—a man approved by God, whose deeds and words testified that he was the Messiah who would redeem Israel—but those hopes had been dashed three days ago when he was handed over by Jerusalem’s religious authorities to be crucified by the Romans and laid in a garden tomb. They recounted how some women reported that after visiting his tomb early that very morning, angels told them that Jesus was alive. Meanwhile, when others went to the tomb, they found it empty and did not see him.

Their yet unrecognized fellow traveler responded, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” Then, he began to expound all the Scriptures concerning the Messiah, beginning with the five books of Moses and proceeding to the Prophets. With this summary, Luke tantalizes those of us who might wish for at least a brief transcript of that exposition of the Old Testament. But instead, in keeping with the pattern of God’s revelation, Luke imitates our Lord by concealing the details of Jesus’s exposition while the Messiah reveals himself.

The Instructive Role of Luke 24:13–35: Errors to Avoid

Luke’s account is richly instructive, as it replicates for us, his readers, how the resurrected Jesus himself taught those who could not recognize him. We, who likewise “believe him though we have not seen him” (cf. 1 Peter 1:8–9), need to ask, “Why does Jesus not show himself plainly to the two disciples?” Instead, he keeps them from recognizing him until after he expounds how the Scriptures prophesy that the Messiah had to suffer and die before being glorified! If we do not carefully reflect on this, we open ourselves up to some harmful errors concerning how the New Testament writers appealed to the Old Testament to prove the legitimacy of their belief that the crucified and risen Jesus is the promised Messiah.

One error is the notion that the memories of Jesus’s earliest followers had concerning him defined the Messiah’s mission and became the source of their “radical reinterpretation” of the Old Testament. In this view, Jesus’s disciples even discarded the contexts of Old Testament passages, if necessary, as they altered their meanings, creatively using them to support their newfound faith.[1] For example, George Ladd claims the New Testament “involves a rather radical reinterpretation of the Old Testament prophecies . . . demanded by the events of redemptive history.”[2] Another error (that reinforces the first) is to overlook or downplay an essential detail of the episode, how Jesus (as told by Luke) places side by side two distinguishable but inseparable dimensions: (1) how he concealed his identity from the two Emmaus Road disciples and later revealed himself to them, and (2) how the Old Testament Scripture’s simultaneously concealed and revealed the Messiah promised long ago to the patriarchs.

The Old Testament’s Messiah-Focused Revelation

Concealment and revelation frame Luke’s entire episode concerning Jesus’s dialogue with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. The narrative hinges on the divine restraint of the two disciples’ eyes from recognizing Jesus (Luke 24:16) until the appointed moment when Jesus removes the restraint, opening their eyes to recognize him (Luke 24:31), at which time Jesus suddenly disappears from their sight.[3] Jesus took this occasion to distinguish how these two disciples would come to see him as the resurrected Messiah by believing the Scriptures, which inverts how both the women who had accompanied him from Galilee and Peter came to believe. For the women and Peter, sight of the empty tomb and the testimony of angels prompted belief. Though the two travelers to Emmaus had heard testimony that their Lord was alive, they had not seen the empty tomb or their risen teacher. Hence, when Jesus approached them, they did not yet believe the good news. He did not rush to reveal his resurrected glory to the two disciples. Instead, he prevented them from recognizing him (Luke 24:16).

Jesus intended to confirm their belief concerning the resurrected Messiah, not by first seeing him, but by hearing the testimony of the Scriptures. Specifically, Jesus wanted them to know him by hearing what the Scriptures say about the Messiah’s prophesied suffering, and only after this, entering into his glory. Therefore, Jesus kept them from recognizing his form, face, voice, manner, and the wounds of his crucifixion. Instead, Jesus expounded the Old Testament teaching that the promised Messiah had to die and rise from the dead to elicit their belief (Luke 24:26, 46). Jesus taught them this from all the Scriptures, by rehearsing the Old Testament plotline concerning the Messiah: “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets he thoroughly explained what was said concerning him in all the Scriptures” (Luke 24:17). Only later, as their home guest, when he broke bread (a symbolic act reminiscent of the Last Supper), did Jesus suddenly open their eyes and impart belief (Luke 24:31, 35).[4] The two disciples instantly realized they were in the presence of Jesus, whom they had been mourning, and that he was the promised Messiah of the Old Testament, raised from the dead. As instantly as they recognized Jesus, he vanished from sight.

Just as Jesus first concealed himself from the two disciples only later to reveal himself to them at the right moment by opening their eyes, another dimension of concealing and revealing becomes discernible to these men. Once their eyes were opened, Cleopas and his friend immediately reflected on another opening: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was speaking to us on the road as he opened the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32—the same Greek word is used in Luke 24:31). Thus, in Luke’s episode, Jesus’s acts of concealing and revealing entailed both eyes, the human capacity of interpretation, and Scripture, God’s gift of revelation.

We, like these two men, need both our eyes and the Scriptures opened. Both are God’s work. He opens our eyes when he wakes us from death’s slumber to believe in Christ Jesus, who arose from death. Our Lord opens the Scriptures to us by disclosing what he concealed there throughout the narratives, psalms, and prophecies. The concealing and revealing entail God’s giving of revelation and our need for correct interpretation. Though revelation and interpretation are inseparable, they are distinguishable, and revelation controls interpretation. Like a fully furnished but dimly lit multi-room palace, the Old Testament is a complex entity. When a lit lamp is introduced, nothing that was not already present is added. However, the light dispels dark shadows, and things shrouded begin to emerge with clarity, even as shadows linger, still semi-concealing.[5] The glory of the resurrected Jesus brings to light the wondrous mystery of the promised Messiah, revealing the Old Testament’s concealed prophetic foreshadowings, prefigurations, harbingers, and types that were always there to be seen clearly through the eyes of faith.

5. The illustration concerning how God’s revelation within the two testaments relates is from B. B. Warfield, Biblical Doctrines (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1929; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981), 141.

While on their way to Emmaus, Jesus dramatized for his two disciples the blessing he would announce a week later to Thomas: “Because you saw me, you believed; blessed are those who do not see but believe” (John 20:29). Thus, Jesus assigned a role to his two disciples they did not recognize until after their encounter with him. They represent us who “believe Christ though we have not seen him” (1 Peter 1:8–9). Jesus blessed these two disciples by reversing the order of belief and understanding that his apostles experienced. For example, after arriving at the tomb before Peter, “stooping to look in,” John “saw the linen cloths lying there, but he did not go in” (John 20:5). Then, Peter arrived and entered the tomb where he “saw the linen cloths lying there, and the face cloth, which had been on Jesus’s head, not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself” (John 20:6). John’s Gospel explains they both “saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that Jesus must rise from the dead” (John 20:8–9). Sight induced Peter and John to believe, although they did not yet understand how the Scriptures prophesied that the Messiah must “first suffer and then rise from the dead on the third day” (Luke 24:46). Jesus situates the two Emmaus Road disciples differently, planting their faith firmly in the Old Testament revelation concerning the Messiah before confirming it by showing himself to them.

Cleopas and his companion, like their Old Covenant forebears, became characters in God’s unfolding drama of redemption, which simultaneously reveals and conceals, eliciting their believing inquiry but eluding their understanding. They understood the Old Testament sufficiently to anticipate the promised Messiah, but because the promised one is also veiled in figurations, types, foreshadowings, and prophetic utterances that awaited greater illumination, their misunderstanding—signified by their restricted eyesight—awaited the Messiah’s lifting of the veil. Also, like many of their forebears, they occupied representative roles that they themselves did not comprehend until after their encounter with Jesus on that road.

Luke produced a literary replication of Jesus’s discourse with his two disciples on their way to Emmaus, calling for us to ground our faith concerning the resurrected Messiah within the unfolding mystery of the Old Testament’s storyline, which entails God’s revelatory words correlating with His redemptive acts. Jesus prevents the two men from seeing him as the climactic resolution of redemption’s mystery until they recognize the Messiah revealed within the countless divinely hidden disclosures throughout the Old Testament. These prefigurings of the Messiah’s suffering and subsequent glory are consequential to the grand story’s dramatic climax. By expounding Scripture’s plotline concerning the Messiah’s suffering and death, Jesus obligates his two disciples to ponder the mystery’s foreshadowing clues embedded throughout the Old Testament. He does this before revealing to them that he, now resurrected, is the One who was crucified—the very One that has reversed the circumstances they failed to anticipate from these same Scriptures. The irony of God’s concealing and revealing resolve in the Messiah’s self-disclosure, for in him converge (1) two covenants—promise and fulfillment, (2) two eras—the old and the new, (3) two realms—the earthly and the heavenly, and (4) two forms of revelation—the objective unveiling of Messiah and the subjective clearing of our obscured vision.

Thus, Luke’s account of Jesus’s conversation with his two disciples on their way to Emmaus teaches us to plant the roots of our faith and understanding of the resurrected Messiah deep in the soil of the entire Old Testament, where God revealed and concealed his progressive prophetic words with his redemptive actions richly suffused with typological prefigurations and foreshadowings of the Coming One, his suffering and glorious Son.

Conclusion

With each fresh revelation God gave, his prior revelation that came in various forms—whether trope, type, foreshadow, parable, allegory, etc.—had a shroud of darkness recede as the dramatic escalation of God’s story of redemption unfolded. This darkness receded especially when the climactic finale emerged from the shadows and Light broke forth from death’s tomb. All human-authored mystery novels imitate God’s grand mystery of redemption. Within characters, events, settings, and plotted conflicts throughout their storylines, mystery writers embed hints, foreshadowing, prefigurations, harbingers, and portents that evoke anticipation of a full and climactic resolution. This resolution is revealed through surprising reversals, which invoke credibility and satisfaction. Infinitely grander is the original, the storyline of God’s unfolding mystery, the story of which we are not only readers, but participants. Though we are participants, we do not inhabit the storyline as characters who fill roles imbued with varied typological significance as did Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Rahab, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Ruth, David, Isaiah, John the Baptist, Mary, Jesus, and Cleopas (and his friend) on the Emmaus Road. For each of them, as they completed their redemptive-historical roles, the unfolding mystery generated an expectation of the coming promised Seed of the woman and Seed of Abraham, the very Seed who would accomplish redemption and reconciliation.

For these Bible characters and Bible readers alike, integral to the conflict of the plotline of rising hope are numerous other cast members (protagonists; antagonists), events (e.g., exile; exodus), places (e.g., wilderness; Canaan), and institutions (e.g., temple; kingship). These are all infused with an oft-layered symbolism, and they pose as puzzling shadows, enigmas, riddles, tantalizing conundrums, and prefiguring types of things to come with Messiah—yet veiled from full comprehension as disclosures accumulated. All these escalated toward the plotline’s climactic resolution. At last, the time is fulfilled, and the mystery is finally revealed in its variegated culmination, converging in Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, who suffered, died, was buried, rose, and was glorified.

Thus, when we read the Old Testament, do we see our Lord, who suffered and then was glorified, revealed there as the One who formed Adam from the dust of the earth and shaped Eve from a portion of Adam’s flesh (John 1:3; Col. 1:16; Heb. 1:2)? Do we recognize him when he appeared to Abraham “by the oaks of Mamre,” accepted being addressed as Lord, announced the birth of the promised son to Sarah a year hence, and announced the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18; John 8:56)? Do we see our crucified and risen Savior prophesied in the dramatized parable on the mountain when the ram, caught in the thicket, substituted for Isaac, Abraham’s “only son” (Genesis 22; Heb. 11:17–19)? Do we see him revealed in the Passover lamb whose blood on the doorframe delivered the “firstborn son” from death (Exodus 12; 1 Cor. 5:7)? Do we acknowledge him as “the Lord’s presence” signified by the pillar of fire by night and the cloud by day, guarding the Israelites during their days in their time of wandering? Do we also see him in the wilderness as the bronze serpent lifted high on a pole to which everyone bitten by a poisonous snake should look and live (Num. 21:8–9; John 3:14)? Likewise, do we see him in the ritual of the Day of Atonement (Lev. 23:26–32) and in each Sabbath, whether weekly, annually, septennially, or in the fiftieth year (Leviticus 23–25)? In his sermon on Pentecost, Peter taught us to recognize David’s prefiguring prophecy concerning our suffering and resurrected Lord by quoting, “For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption” (Ps. 16:10; Acts 2:31). Thus, we should not be surprised that David, for whom God promised an eternal kingdom over which his seed would reign (2 Sam. 7:12–17), speaks of Messiah’s resurrection in the next psalm: “As for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness; when I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness” (Ps. 17:15). Do we recognize our crucified and risen Redeemer as prefigured by Moses, Joshua, David, and all the prophets? Like those two disciples who listened intently to Jesus’s exposition of the Scriptures on the Emmaus Road, when we read or hear the Old Testament expounded, do we not put our foreheads to our palms and exclaim, “Did not our hearts burn within us? There he is, present throughout the whole Old Testament. He is right there before our eyes from the beginning in Genesis. How could we have missed him? How could we not have seen him until he made himself obvious?”

What is now revealed is what was hidden in plain sight, seen by both Scripture’s characters and readers, though dimly because God’s revelation awaited its climax in Christ Jesus. This is how the Old Testament reveals the Messiah. This is how Scripture bears witness to him. This is how Jesus reveals himself. Throughout his ministry, even to the end, Jesus, the incarnate one, veiled in flesh, replicated Scripture, concealing while revealing with symbolic acts and speech, ever progressing toward his passion and resurrection. How could it be otherwise? How else could the Creator reveal himself to his creatures as their Redeemer? Hence, if we characterize Jesus’s exposition of the Old Testament to his two disciples on the Emmaus Road as “Christ-centered interpretation,” we can do so only because the entire Old Testament is “Christ-centered revelation.” God’s word-revelation constrains us to acknowledge the incarnate Word, who came to give himself as a ransom for many, whom the whole Old Testament prophesied.

God Promised the Savior at the Beginning in the Garden of Eden

In the Garden, God announced in advance his verdict of the Last Day on humans concerning sin: condemned to eternal death (Gen. 2:15–17). Thus, when the Serpent induced Adam (through Eve) to disobey God by eating fruit from the forbidden tree, sin’s indictment condemned the man and woman, with their progeny, to the punishment of death. Since then, every human born by the union of earthly parents has been subjected to the Creator’s same condemning verdict for sin, punishable by death in both the temporal and the eternal dimensions. Likewise, the Creator subjected the entire creation to futility in the hope of one day being liberated from its slavery to corruption—when God would redeem the bodies of his children by raising them from the dust (Gen. 3:19; Rom. 8:20–23). Thus, from the beginning, God revealed by way of prophetic prefiguring the ensuing cosmic war between the “Serpent’s seed” and the “woman’s seed,” the Coming One conceived not by the union of earthly parents but born of a woman nonetheless, who would crush the Serpent’s head—but not without the Serpent striking a wound to the Coming One’s heel (Gen. 3:15).[1]

1. The remarkable expression, “the woman’s seed,” should give pause to every reader to contemplate how noteworthy it is. Everyone knows that when conception occurs, the man, not the woman, contributes the “seed.” Hence, this is an early prophecy that a virgin would conceive the Coming Redeemer. Of course, the “woman’s seed” also gives rise to a people born not of flesh and blood but of the Spirit, a people who will participate in the trampling of the Serpent underfoot (Rom. 16:20).

Only the Coming One, born of a woman but uncreated, could remediate mankind’s and creation’s common plights—corruption and death. He entered his creation from heaven as the Second Man, the Last Adam, “a life-giving spirit” (1 Cor. 15:45–49). As the head of a new humanity, he would sweep forward into time the judgment of the Last Day by his obedience unto death, even death on a cross (Rom. 5:19; Phil. 2:8). Thus, the visitation of God’s Last-Day-wrath upon Christ in his death on the cross effected both (1) that “we shall be saved” from the coming “wrath of God” (Rom. 5:9) and (2) the dawn of the New Creation “by which the world has been crucified” to Christ’s people and they “to the world” (Gal. 6:14–15). Likewise, he brought forward the resurrection of the Last Day into the midst of history when he arose from the dead, which was his “justification” before God (1 Tim. 3:16; Rom. 1:4), thus grounding our justification (Rom. 4:25).  Because Christ lives, we who are in him shall be saved by his resurrection life (Rom. 5:10). Hence, he makes all his progeny righteous (Rom. 5:19), fulfilling the prophet Isaiah (53:11) by creating a people born not from flesh and blood but from the Spirit (John 1:12–13).

Christ Jesus Brought Forward the Last Day Judgment and Resurrection

The vast glory of God’s gift of salvation in Christ obligates Christians to ponder the multifaceted imageries Scripture uses to portray its grace and beauty. God’s Word reveals salvation, eternal life, adoption, justification, sanctification, reconciliation, redemption, regeneration, remission of sins, resurrection, and other imageries as isolated doctrines or primarily past referring.[2]

2. The remarkable expression, “the woman’s seed,” should give pause to every reader to contemplate how noteworthy it is. Everyone knows that when conception occurs, the man, not the woman, contributes the “seed.” Hence, this is an early prophecy that a virgin would conceive the Coming Redeemer. Of course, the “woman’s seed” also gives rise to a people born not of flesh and blood but of the Spirit, a people who will participate in the trampling of the Serpent underfoot (Rom. 16:20).

All biblical imageries of salvation in Christ Jesus entail two phases or aspects: what Scripture presents as already occurring but not yet exhausted as God’s triumphant salvation entering the present age ahead of the Last Day with the advent of his Son. Jesus vividly dramatizes the presence of the Last-Day-resurrection at Lazarus’s tomb. He enhances and develops Martha’s correct belief in “the resurrection on the Last Day” by announcing, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:24–26). Jesus’s raising Lazarus from death’s grip signified that he brought forward into the present time “the powers of the coming age” (Heb. 6:5). This prefigured his resurrection. Likewise, Jesus preached that the not-yet resurrection of the Last Day already begins in this present age through the proclamation of the gospel: “Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live” (John 5:25). The Son’s rising from the dead was the dawn of the last days.

In the same way, Scripture portrays salvation as already ours in Christ Jesus (Eph. 2:5, 8; Titus 3:5), but we have not yet received it exhaustively (Rom. 8:24; 13:11). Thus, Jesus instructs us that everyone who comes to faith in him to receive salvation must persevere to the end to be saved (Matt. 10:22). Hence, the frequent biblical imagery of the athlete sprinting forward from faith’s starting blocks endeavoring to lay hold of the prize who is Christ Jesus, to be found in him, to attain unto the resurrection from the dead (Phil. 3:8–11). As we ponder these imageries of God’s salvation in Christ Jesus, we need to believe and speak even-handedly, avoiding errors by exaggerating either the already or the not yet aspect to the suppression or exclusion of the other.[3] Among Christians, the error regularly occurs, overstating the already to the neglect of the not yet, portraying salvation as already possessed exhaustively. Hence, most Christians think of salvation as exclusively taking place in the past, testifying, “I am saved,” or asking, “Are you saved?”

3. Exaggerating the already while suppressing the not-yet aspect inclines one toward antinomianism. Exaggerating the not-yet while suppressing the already aspect inclines one toward a system of works-righteousness.

Likewise, caution is necessary because of another mistake. Scripture does not present any of its multiple imageries of salvation in Christ Jesus as standalone doctrines to be detached from the many other portrayals. The Bible presents the revelation of God’s salvation through multiple variegated imageries, each like a single facet of a finely cut multifaceted diamond, together reflecting the glorious light shining forth from our Savior, Jesus Christ. No solitary imagery adequately displays the richness or fullness of Christ as our redeemer. Hence, when pondering Scripture’s theology, inevitably, we discern theological categories and thus do some level of systematic theology. For this reason, Christian theology is the activity of every believer, not just pastors, teachers, and academic theologians. Yet, we must never separate the many distinguishable imageries as isolated doctrines. For example, we must distinguish two imageries from the legal realm—justification and forgiveness of sins—but not isolate them. To emphasize this point, the remainder of this article will show how the Apostle Paul’s teaching obligates us to hold these two together.

Two Correlated Imageries—Forgiveness of Sins & Justification

Paul contends that Jesus has already brought resurrection and divine judgment forward from the Last Day because God has already poured out his wrath on his Son on the cross. The Righteous One from heaven bore God’s wrath in the place of unrighteous people (Rom. 3:21–31). With his first advent, God’s Son brought forward two correlated acts of God—resurrection and judgment—that belong to the Last Day, which consummates the present age and ushers in the coming age. The gospel orients everyone to Christ’s cross as the public display of God’s wrathful judgment against sin, for Christ, who knew no sin yet was made sin for us, being condemned as our substitute (Rom. 3:21–31; 1 Cor. 1:18; 2 Cor. 5:21). Likewise, the gospel orients us to Christ’s resurrection as God’s vindication of his Son; Christ, the Righteous One, was acquitted by being raised from the dead for our acquittal (Rom. 1:4; 4:25; 1 Tim. 3:16). These two acts stand together as the advance visitation of God’s Last Day courtroom. All those in Christ Jesus are assured that Christ’s acquittal will be ours on that day. Thus, Paul preaches already “everyone who believes is justified” (Acts 13:39).

Thus, with the advent of God’s Son (cf. John 3:16–21), the gospel already announces God’s Last Day verdict ahead of time: (1) “guilty and condemned” to all who disbelieve; (2) “sins forgiven and justified” to all who believe. Paul presents the forgiveness of sins and justification as correlated because to be justified is to have one’s sins forgiven, as Paul indicates concerning Abraham and David (Gen. 15:6; Ps. 32:1–2; Rom. 4:3–8). Accordingly, “sins forgiven” means “no condemnation” (Rom. 8:1). When Paul states, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” he uses a figure of speech called litotes which uses a negated understatement to express an emphatic affirmative.[4]  Rom. 5:16, 18 supports this; the opposite of condemnation is justification. Thus, Christ Jesus does not simply expunge our criminal record against our Creator, wiping out the past charges against us and giving us a fresh start. The litotes mean, “Everyone in Christ Jesus is most assuredly justified already”—that is, we’ve been declared righteous on account of Christ’s resurrection (Rom. 4:25).

4. Litotes is a much more common figure of speech than many might suppose. For example, to say, “This is no small matter,” means, “This is a very important matter.”

It is crucial to recognize that when the gospel announces the forgiveness of our sins and our acquittal (justification) to all who believe in Jesus Christ, the proper reference point is the Last Day, the Day of Judgment, and not the moment we first believe the gospel message. God’s pronouncement of justification and forgiveness does not concern only our present or past sins but all our sins reaching forward to the Last Day (Rom. 4:4–8; Eph. 1:7; Col. 1:14; 2:13).[5] This does not nullify our need to confess our sins to receive God’s forgiveness or our need for deeds commensurate with justification (1 John 1:9; James 2:14–26).

5. See Geerhardus Vos, The Pauline Eschatology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1938; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), 55.

Here is the precise point where, while affirming the already aspect of forgiveness of sins and justification, we must not relinquish affirming equally firmly our need to heed the gospel’s perpetual call to persevere in Christ Jesus. This is why, though Paul’s emphasis is on the gift of justification already received by belief in God who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead (Rom. 4:24; 5:1, 9; 8:30; Gal. 3:6; Tit. 3:7), he also presents justification as the future hope not yet exhaustively received, for which believers yearn. “For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness” (Gal. 5:5). Justification is a gift “we eagerly await” because it is what we “hope for.” Paul affirms, “We have now been justified” by the death of Christ (Rom. 5:9), yet, he locates the gift of justification as coming to us in the gospel from the final day, when he confidently exclaims, ^“Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing” (2 Tim. 4:8).

Believers are already justified, yet believers await the crown of justification not yet awarded to us until the Day of Redemption. To be justified already provides no basis to behave as though the crown of righteous were already in hand so that our behavior is irrelevant to our justification, for “we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7). The gift of justification is not yet exhaustively ours as if our speech doesn’t matter, for Jesus affirms, “I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned” (Matt. 12:36–37). With its even-handed presentation of the gift of justification as both already ours but not yet exhaustively possessed, the gospel constrains us to obey the Lord Jesus Christ so that the good work God has begun in us may be brought to completion until the day of Jesus Christ (Phil. 1:6).

Conclusion

Doing theology responsibly requires our capability to distinguish concepts without separating them. Severing the already and not yet aspects or phases from one another, as if justification and forgiveness of sins consisted of two separate proclamations by God, is to flirt with (if not fall into) serious error. Scripture holds the two aspects together harmoniously. This obligates us to distinguish the two phases of justification and forgiveness of sins without separating them. Thus, to claim that any attempt to account for the not-yet aspect of justification and forgiveness of sins is tantamount to embracing a Roman Catholic doctrine of works-righteousness is to dismiss a vital truth to which Scripture testifies. It is also necessary to distinguish the basis of our justification—Christ’s bearing the Father’s wrath on our behalf and being raised from the dead—and the means of our justification—belief in Christ Jesus, who alone bore our deserved wrath and rose from death on our behalf. We are wrong to isolate the gospel’s proclamation of justification and condemnation from God’s verdict on the Last Day. We must learn how to affirm that the announcement of God’s justifying verdict in the gospel’s proclamation to everyone who believes is also the individually assured advanced declaration of God’s published verdict of acquittal on the Last Day.

Justification and forgiveness of sins are singular with discernible but inextricable aspects, both now and not yet. The already and not yet aspects of justification and forgiveness of sins are no more divisible than the moon’s first crescent and full phase. The same and singular moon reflects light with discernible and distinguishable phases, the crescent as the promise of the full. There are not two moons. Likewise, there are not two justifications or two remissions of sin, one when we believe in Christ and a second on the Last Day. Whether Scripture speaks of justification and forgiveness of sins now or not yet, it is the singular Last-Day-verdict with distinguishable aspects, the advance announcement testified to by the Holy Spirit as the promise of the public pronouncement on the Last Day. God already assures us, his children, by Spirit-bequeathed-faith that we stand justified before him with our sins forgiven, but not yet do we have the published verdict of justification and forgiveness of sins when we will be publicly revealed as God’s sons (Rom. 8:19).[6] At that time, the Creator will at last liberate creation from its bondage to corruption due to Adam’s disobedience, then set right by the Last Adam who obeyed for us.

6. “By faith” and “by sight” derives from Paul’s rule, “for we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7), with which John agrees, “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared” (1 John 3:2). See also Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., By Faith, Not By Sight: Paul and the Order of Salvation (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster), 93.

1. Dan Goldman made this comment on social media on February 29, 2024. Goldman is the Congressman for New York’s 10th Congressional District in the House of Representatives.

For many years, the idea that women have “freedom to choose” an abortion has held some sway over Americans. It’s a slogan that assumes complete human agency. But the appeal of the congressman’s argument that people are “forced” reflects a new stage of progressing moral absurdity. Indeed, dehumanization now extends not only to babies in the womb, but to the women and mothers themselves. The implication is that their choice to engage in sexual relations doesn’t count as a choice.[2] Such an argument dishonors the humanity and agency of women and, further, what it means for any of us to be human.

2. This is seen also in a Chicago Public Schools program to provide free condoms to students, including elementary schools. During his radio program, Rush Limbaugh regularly responded to such absurdities by declaring, “Abstinence. It works every time it is tried.”

Here is our thesis: in our age, there is an inverse relationship between victimization and personal agency. The more people are perceived as victims, the less personal responsibility they are perceived to have. As the neo-Marxist doctrine of victimization (detailed later in this article) has escalated, acknowledgment of personal agency has proportionally diminished, as if the all-powerful oppressors have rendered humans utterly helpless—like pieces of driftwood tossed about on the waves of life’s boundless sea. In other words, as the doctrine of victimization has come to dominate the culture, so has the belief in an impersonal force, often called “The Universe,” that robs individuals of agency, rendering personal decisions pointless and wholly ineffectual. 

To put it more tersely, and at the risk of being rude, never in history have so many people been whining, complaining fatalists—politicians and people alike.

This argument about “force” did not win out in the 2024 U.S. election, but it did have sway with the broader American public. Why is this so? How did we get here? What does Scripture say to this?

Though the concept of victimization has gained prominence in cultural, social, and political discussions in recent years, it is hardly new. While reality constrains us to acknowledge genuine suffering and oppression exist and obligates compassion, it also requires us to acknowledge that the doctrine of perpetual victimhood—an ideology that frames individuals as powerless, blameless, and entirely at the mercy of external forces—stands in opposition to reality and starkly contradicts the teachings of Scripture. This article explores how the deceptive doctrine of victimization subverts personal agency and responsibility while emphasizing God’s irrevocable design for human beings to function as agents whose choices are consequential.

The Roots and Rise of Victimhood

Ideas indeed have consequences. So do idols. Victimization is an idol fashioned over centuries by the hands of men, with dire consequences for people and society.

A generation ago, Allan Bloom demonstrated how Jean-Jacques Rousseau “single-handedly invented the category of the disadvantaged.”[3] Rousseau led the way in linking the assault against human culture while simultaneously calling for both the unrestrained self and compassion. The combination of these three attitudes—“hostility toward the bourgeoisie [the upper middle class], faith in the self, and the embrace of compassion”[4]—became the policy foundation for modernity’s attitude toward culture.[5] Bloom points out that before Rousseau, “men believed that their claim on civil society had to be based on an accounting of what they contributed to it. After Rousseau, a claim based not on a positive quality but on a lack became legitimate for the first time.”[6]

3. Allan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990): 196.

4. Charles J. Sykes, A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992): 77.

5. Sykes, A Nation of Victims, 77.

6. Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs, 196.

In Rousseau’s ideal republic, society is founded on the principle of tolerance, whereby “compassion,” for the “sensitive man” (L’Homme Sensible), is not to be regarded as a sacred duty owed either to God or fellow humans but a way to refine one’s sense of self-identity and self-awareness. Consequently, for “the Romantics of the early nineteenth century, concern for the downtrodden and with human suffering became not only fashionable but a form of self-therapy and elaborate self-indulgence. Abstracted from the moral order, pity became contagious, turned first on a lengthening and shifting list of putative sufferers but ultimately back upon the se1f.”[7] Thus Joseph Amato appropriately affirms that “Suffering itself became a vehicle for self-identity and expression.”[8]

7. Sykes, A Nation of Victims, 78.

8. “Sorrow, misery, and suffering provided fertile material for self-dramatization. Identifying oneself with suffering was a way to assert one’s sincerity and profundity. It served many as a shortcut to ‘originality.’ To suffer as Jean Jacques Rousseau—founder and master of the art of self-cultivation—taught, made one sensitive, serious, interesting, something other than a superficial, materialistic, and vulgar member of the middle class, whom artists and bohemians from Baudelaire’s time on condemn with such righteousness and spleen” (Joseph Amato, Victims and Values [New York: Praeger Publishers, 1990]: 113).

Consequently, obsession with self and compassion for others became inseparably linked. Genuine “moral concern had become virtually indistinguishable from aesthetic posturing.”[9] So, as the twentieth century dawned, the revolution of ideas gave birth to a fully developed “sensitive man” who, thanks to the twentieth century’s Cultural Marxists, has become the “virtuous human” who fixates on the alleged oppressor v. oppressed dynamic, publicly signaling one’s virtue.

9. Sykes, A Nation of Victims, 79.

Hence, our therapeutic society transforms any disadvantage from a misfortune that needs to be overcome to the essence of existence and, thus, an entitlement to dependence on society. Virtue signalers coddle the alleged oppressed victim and condemn the oppressive circumstances and agents as victimizers. Two generations ago, Herbert Schlossberg correctly identified and rejected the politics of our therapeutic culture, which

exalts categories of weakness, sickness, helplessness, and anguish into virtues while it debases the strong and prosperous. In the country of ontological victimhood, strength is an affront. Denying the possibility of strength for the weak keeps them weak. Being freed from dependence would bring the victim back into the human family, responsible for himself and others. How much better to remain a victim, shielded from trouble and responsibility by altruism.[10]

10. Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and its Confrontation with American Society (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1983): 69–70.

Schlossberg’s assessment appropriately applies to every form of alleged oppression. He also observes that Rousseau promoted embittered enviousness.

Ressentiment begins with a perceived injury that may have a basis in fact, but more often is occasioned by envy for the possessions or the qualities possessed by another person. Ressentiment has its origin in the tendency to make comparisons between the attributes of another and one’s own attributes: wealth, possessions, appearance, intelligence, personality, friends, and children. Any perceived difference is enough to set the pathology in motion.[11]

11. Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, 51–52.

Once set in motion, the evil of the Rousseau-derived-embittered-victim worldview, enhanced by Cultural Marxism’s “oppressed v. oppressors” dynamic, expanded and intensified for both the alleged aggrieved victims and their virtue-signaling coddlers and handlers.

The Nature of Personal Agency in Scripture

Victimization is almost as old as humanity. The Bible opens with the profound truth that human beings are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). Succinctly stated, this imago Dei bestows to humanity personal agency, namely the ability to reason, the capability to make moral choices, and the accompanying moral accountability for every choice. Hence, in the Garden of Eden, God gave a clear command to Adam and Eve concerning the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:16–17). Obedience would sustain life; disobedience would incur death. God granted agency to them—and by extension, to us—and holds us accountable for how we exercise it.

When Adam and Eve sinned, their initial response was to play the victim by shifting blame away from themselves to outside agents. Adam pointed to Eve, and Eve pointed to the serpent (Gen. 3:12–13). This act of deflection exemplifies the human tendency to avoid personal responsibility by casting oneself as a victim lacking agency. However, God did not absolve them of their choices. He addressed each one individually, summarizing the consequences of their actions (Genesis 3:14–19). This episode demonstrates that while external influences may tempt or influence us, each person remains a responsible agent accountable for their own decisions.

The Danger of Perpetual Victimhood

The doctrine of victimization diminishes if not denies personal agency by attributing all suffering, failure, or moral shortcomings not to personal choices, but to external forces. While injustices, oppression, and genuine harm are real and acknowledged in Scripture (e.g., Exod. 3:7–8, Isa. 1:17), the Bible also emphasizes the reality of personal agency, holding us accountable for our choices and actions, calling for repentance, and requiring us to mature in grace.

Proverbs 19:3 states, “When a man’s folly brings his way to ruin, his heart rages against the Lord.” This verse encapsulates the danger of a victimhood mentality, which encourages us to externalize blame rather than confront our own role in generating our circumstances. By doing so, it fosters bitterness, resentment, and rage.

The Biblical Balance: Recognizing Injustice Without Abdicating Responsibility

The Bible does not ignore or trivialize genuine oppression. Scripture is replete with accounts of people who suffered unjustly—Joseph, Job, David, and Jesus Himself, to name a few. However, their responses to suffering illustrate a crucial truth: while external circumstances may be beyond our control, our response to them is not.

Joseph’s story is particularly instructive. Sold into slavery by his brothers, falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife, and imprisoned unjustly, Joseph had every reason to adopt a victimhood mindset. Yet, he chose to trust God, act with integrity, and faithfully steward his responsibilities. In Genesis 50:20, Joseph acknowledges human wrongdoing and, simultaneously, God’s sovereign purpose: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” Joseph’s life demonstrates that acknowledging injustice does not preclude personal agency or trust in God’s redemptive plan.

Similarly, the Apostle Paul faced immense suffering—beatings, imprisonment, shipwrecks, and betrayal (2 Cor. 11:23–28). Yet, he declared, “I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances” (Phil. 4:11). Paul’s attitude reflects a profound understanding of personal agency rooted in dependence on Christ: “I can do all this [i.e. endure every difficulty] through him who gives me strength” (Phil. 4:13).

The Call to Personal Accountability

The Bible consistently calls on individuals to take responsibility for their choices and the consequences of those choices. Ezekiel 18:20–32 emphasizes individual accountability, rejecting the idea that children bear the guilt of their parents or vice versa. Instead, each person is judged in keeping with their own actions resulting from their own choices.

Jesus also reinforced the principle of personal responsibility in His teachings. In the parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14–30), the master entrusted his servants with varying amounts of money, expecting them to steward it wisely. The servant who buried his talent out of fear was rebuked, not because of external circumstances, but because he failed to act responsibly. Individuals are accountable for how they use their God-given abilities and opportunities.

The Transformative Power of the Gospel

The doctrine of victimization routinely leaves individuals feeling powerless, trapped, and enslaved to the imagined whims of their alleged oppressors. In contrast, the gospel offers hope, transformation, and freedom. Through Christ’s death and resurrection, believers are no longer defined by their past, wounds, or circumstances. Paul writes, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Cor. 5:17).

This new identity empowers believers to rise above victimhood. In Romans 8:37, Paul declares, “In all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” The phrase “more than conquerors” speaks to a victory that not only overcomes adversity but transforms it into a testimony of God’s grace and power.

The gospel also calls believers to be forgiving and forsake bitterness, which is key to breaking free from a victimhood mindset. Ephesians 4:31–32 exhorts, “Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.” Embracing an attitude toward those who afflict us marked by a readiness to forgive—the opposite of bitterness and resentment—does not negate the reality of wrongdoing, but it prepares us to grant forgiveness to those who sin against us when they acknowledge and repent of their sin.

One Sinful Woman’s Story

This essay argued for personal agency. But Jesus nor the Scripture writers settled for arguments alone. They brought arguments home to real people like you and me. One New York congressman took away the agency of the women he purported to help. For one “sinful woman,” Jesus did the opposite.

Jesus ate with Pharisees when she entered the room—“a woman of the city, who was a sinner” (Luke 7:36). We can imagine what sins made her famous. Almost certainly, she was involved in prostitution and sexual sin.[12]

12. What else would a woman be known for by that label? She would not be in a position to abuse servants or embezzle money.

She kissed Jesus’ feet, wet them with her tears, then wiped them with her hair. The Pharisees were upset with her, but more with Jesus. “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is … for she is a sinner” (Luke 7:39).

The Pharisees granted her personal agency, but that is all. Jesus showed her compassion, yet not by reframing her plight as something that has happened to her, like a sickness.[13] Instead, Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven” (Luke 7:48).

13. Thomas Sowell: “Many of the words and phrases used in the media and among academics suggest that things simply happen to people, rather than being caused by their own choices or behavior. Thus, there is said to be an ‘epidemic’ of teenage pregnancy, or of drug usage, as if these things were like the flu that people catch just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” The Vision of the Anointed: Self-congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (Basic Books, 1995): 198.

This lovely passage shows the kind of people Jesus forgives and the kind of love he forges in our hearts. But sitting under the surface of the text is an anomaly for our times, a truth basic for our gospel witness: she is a “sinful woman.” Whatever her circumstances, she had agency. And guilt. Luke was not unkind or unjust for saying so. In fact, it is the knowledge of sin that made it possible for her to love Jesus. “She loved much” because she was forgiven much (Luke 7:47).

The Pharisees of Jesus’ day would leave us in our sins. By a trick with words, the political Pharisees of our day do the same. Yet to all who come to Jesus, he says still today, “Your sins are forgiven.”

Unless we reject the dehumanizing project of the Neo-Marxist West, we cannot understand that statement. Unless we reject the false doctrine of victimization, we are dead in our sins.

We are human beings with the privilege and responsibility of personal agency, a necessary pre-requisite to see our sinfulness and believe the gospel. God will surely judge us all in keeping with our exercise of agency, as Romans 2:6–8 attests, “He will render to each one according to his works:to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life;but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury.”

In this brief account concerning the “Hallelujah Chorus,” I explore how Handel masterfully weaves together Jennens’ selected verses from Revelation with his musical composition, bequeathing to us his “Hallelujah Chorus” that evokes profound emotional and spiritual responses, intensifying our yearning for the full realization of Messiah’s dominion over all creation. These reflections accent how the majestic setting of Scripture to musical harmony and polyphony beckon us to raise our voices in worship of our sovereign God, King Jesus, and invigorate our hope for the fullness of his eternal reign.

Reflections on the Hallelujah Chorus: Word and Music Effectively Unified

The “Hallelujah Chorus,” the most universally memorable anthem from Handel’s Messiah, the closing chorus of Part II of the oratorio’s three parts, is regularly mistaken as the grand finale of the entire oratorio. This is because most contemporary performances of Messiah do not feature the entire oratorio but a pared-down version that includes most of Part I with the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Part II added as the grand finale.^[1]

1. Hence, the practice of standing for the “Hallelujah Chorus” is understandable and proper though the origin of this custom has been fictionalized. No evidence exists King George II attended the oratorio’s performance. More likely, standing was a common practice after sitting through a long musical performance for the audience to change their posture by standing through all the choruses when the entire choir and orchestra performed with grand effect.

The chorus features resounding portions of three passages from the Apostle John’s Apocalypse in this order:

“Hallelujah: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth” (Revelation 19:6).

“The kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever” (Revelation 11:15).^[2]

“King of kings, and Lord of lords” (Revelation 19:16)

2. Those familiar with the King James Version should observe how Charles Jennens, Handel’s librettist, does not follow the plural “kingdoms” of the KJV in Rev. 11:15. Rather, Jennens correctly represents the biblical text as “The kingdom [singular] of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ.” It seems he realized that the KJV’s plural “kingdoms” (ai basileiai), present in two late Greek manuscripts, should be rejected in favor of the singular, ā basileia.

Handel’s Section 44, known as the “Hallelujah Chorus,” begins with the familiar brief introductory sounds of orchestral strings, immediately followed by voices singing “Hallelujah” in two sequences of five.^[3] This repetition of “Hallelujah” resembles the unified “voice of a great multitude” John heard, reminiscent of “the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings” (19:6). The music swells with intensity as voices strive to express Messiah’s majesty. The interplay between harmony and polyphony reflects the richness and complexity of the biblical text. Accompanied by the orchestra, female and male voices alternately sing “Hallelujah” and “For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.”

3. Before reading further, listen here to the Hallelujah Chorus.

The fifth round is punctuated with all the voices harmonizing a somewhat prolonged “Hal-le-lu-jah!” The orchestra echoes the voices, transitioning to the midportion of the chorus, “The kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ, and of his Christ, and of his Christ,” followed by “and he shall reign for ever and ever” four times. The music begins to crescendo with interspersing repetitions of “King of kings” “and Lord of lords,” each followed by reprisals of “for ever and ever” and “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” Three “Hallelujahs!” crescendo to the climactic fourth, when the tempo slows to draw out the final “Hallelujah!” to close out Part 2 of Handel’s Messiah.

Despite Jennens’ initial misgivings concerning the speed with which Handel composed the oratorio, the composer’s genius remains undisputed.^[4] Jennens’ lyrical prodigy greatly enhanced Handel’s musical brilliance. A staunch Anglican with a profound interest in Shakespeare’s works, music, and the Scriptures, Jennens arranged the scriptures of Messiah with a remarkable understanding of the biblical storyline.

4. On the composition of Messiah, see Esther Crookshank, “The Scriptures in Handel’s Messiah: An Overview” Christ Over All, Dec 4, 2024.

Indeed, the words of each text are by themselves splendid, but Jennens’ genius is evident in how he arranges their order. Consider the placement and ordering of Revelation 19:6, 11:15, and 19:16, which constitute the “Hallelujah Chorus.” Many mistakenly suppose the “Hallelujah Chorus,” derived from John’s Apocalypse, concludes the entire oratorio. It does not. Jennens placed the crescendoing “Hallelujah Chorus” at the close of Part 2, climaxing the meditation on the Lord Christ’s death, burial, resurrection, and ascension. What could possibly follow such a climactic marriage of sacred lyrics and glorious musical scores commemorating Messiah’s exaltation? Calvin Stapert correctly observes, “The answer is this: although the victory has been won and its results are certain, the results have not yet been fully realized.”^[5] For this reason, the three passages from Revelation do not end Jennens’ libretto. Instead, Part III follows, featuring the Christian’s assured hope of being raised from death to stand justified on the Last Day, resting fully in Messiah’s own vindication by triumphing over death and the grave. Stated simply, Jennens and Handel have bequeathed to us a biblical theology set to music that tracks the Bible’s narrative arc concerning the already and not yet dimensions of Messiah’s regal triumph. His sacrificial death, burial, resurrection, and ascension already accomplished salvation for all his people who eagerly yearn for his not-yet-but-coming full royal dominion.

5. Calvin R. Stapert, Handel’s Messiah: Comfort for God’s People (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 142.

Thus, with appreciation for that overarching biblical theology, let’s look at each Scripture text.

1. Revelation 19:6: The Lord God Omnipotent Reigneth

The first Scripture in the “Hallelujah Chorus” is Revelation 19:6—“And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.” This verse exalts God’s omnipotence, declaring his reign over all creation. That the chorus begins with this triumphant proclamation sets the tone for the entire piece. The repeated use of “Hallelujah” reflects the multitude’s collective praise for God’s supreme authority and power.

With its rising crescendos and forceful rhythms, Handel’s music mirrors the awe-inspiring scene described in Revelation. The swell of the choir, representing the multitude, rises like “many waters” and “mighty thunderings.” As the voices rise and fall, the listener is drawn into the scene, almost hearing the heavenly host proclaiming God’s reign.

For Christians, hearing this verse sung with such power evokes a deep sense of reverence for the sovereign rule of God. The omnipotence of God, which may seem distant, is brought near through Handel’s music. Our hearts swell with love and awe as we reflect on the Messiah who reigns over all creation, holding the universe in his hands, and is worthy of universal praise. The music reinforces the truth of the words—“the Lord God omnipotent reigneth”—lifting our spirits to sing along, longing for the day when every knee should bow before him in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess, “Jesus Messiah is Lord,” to God the Father’s glory.

2. Revelation 11:15: The Kingdom of Our Lord and of His Christ

The second passage of the “Hallelujah Chorus” is the latter half of Revelation 11:15. “And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, ‘The kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and of His Christ; and He shall reign for ever and ever.’” The Apostle John’s vision portrays the ultimate triumph of Christ and the establishment of his eternal kingdom. It proclaims Christ’s victory over sin, death, and the powers of darkness.

Handel’s musical treatment of this verse is profound. The melody and harmony build with increasing intensity, reflecting the unassailable progression of Christ’s kingdom. As the choir sings, “and He shall reign forever and ever,” the repetition signifies the eternal nature of Christ’s rule, assuring believers that Messiah’s reign has no termination date.

In a world where earthly kingdoms rise and fall, where human leaders are flawed and prone to failure, the promise that “the kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord” fills Christians with hope. It assures us that our prayers—“Let your Kingdom come; let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”—will reach fulfillment in the kingdom ruled by the impartial, righteous, and loving King. Christ’s reign is not temporary or subject to the whims and corruption of politicians. Messiah’s reign is just, unshakable, and eternal.

This truth stirs the believer’s deep longing for Christ’s return to complete the extent of his dominion. As the music soars with the repeated “forever and ever,” our hearts soar, filled with joyful anticipation. Our Christian hope is kindled as we look longingly to the day Christ will reign fully and visibly over all creation.

3. Revelation 19:16: King of Kings and Lord of Lords

The final words Handel weaves into his Hallelujah Chorus derive from the latter portion of Revelation 19:16—“And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, King of kings, and Lord of lords.” The acclamation powerfully underscores Christ’s supreme authority. He is not just a king among many but “the King of kings and Lord of lords.” His authority infinitely surpasses all others.

Handel gives this verse special prominence in the chorus, repeating the title, “King of kings, and Lord of lords,” multiple times. The repetition and the music’s grandeur highlight Christ’s majesty and supremacy. The choir’s voices reach their highest peaks as they proclaim these words, capturing the glory and honor due the Messiah. The words conveyed through majestic and royal musical tones evoke a profound sense of awe and reverence. It lifts our hearts to worship the One who is over all powers and authorities, holding all things together, and reigning in glory. As we listen to this part of the chorus, how can our hearts not be drawn into deeper communion with Christ to acknowledge his rightful place as King over us and the whole of creation? Truly, our affections are stirred to worship the Messiah, bowing before him in humble adoration as our lips repeat, “King of kings and Lord of lords.”

Conclusion

Handel’s Messiah is more than exceptional music thanks to the selected Scriptures arranged by Charles Jennens. The marriage of the Bible’s arc of Messiah’s storyline and musical scores worthy of such a narrative sweeps us up to exalt our sovereign God who triumphs through Christ Jesus to reign eternally over all. The profound worship of the Lord Christ, spanning nearly three hours, is an extraordinary experience. Yet, the most memorable portion of the oratorio is not the climax at the end, with “Amen” repeated numerous times, but at the close of Part II, the “Hallelujah Chorus,” four minutes of the sublime exaltation of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Five years ago this month, following dinner with our younger son’s family, my wife and I last attended a performance of selected portions of Handel’s Messiah by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestras and Minnesota Choral Artists. During dinner and following the concert, we discussed the suitability of attending what is generally accepted as a sacred oratorio performed by instrumentalists and singers who do not confess Messiah as Lord on whom every word they sing focuses. It is understandable that some, such as John Newton (Rector of St. Mary in London) in 1784, the centenary of Handel’s birth, took issue with the Messiah’s performance at Westminster Abbey.^[6]

6. Newton’s opposition prompted him to preach a series of fifty sermons. Bob Kauflin and Ben Purves comment on Newton’s approach. Here, I offer my own take.

The course of our conversation prompted me to raise several questions. Why would we presume that our Lord Jesus Christ does not receive praise from choirs and orchestras when they perform Handel’s Messiah, the words of which are entirely derived from God’s Holy Word, the Scriptures, even if those singers and instrumentalists have not yet entered God’s Kingdom? Did not the Word, the Creator of all things, bequeath to singers their talented voices and to instrumentalists their skilled fingers and lips to present the Messiah’s story so exquisitely, yes, despite their unbelief and misunderstanding? Though they know not God’s redemption in the Messiah of whom they sing, do they not bear testimony to themselves, to one another, and to every attendee concerning the advent of the King who now reigns and shall have full dominion over his entire creation? As their voices sing the words of Scripture and their fingers play harmonizing instruments, unwittingly and without constraint, do they not testify concerning the gospel of our Lord?^[7] My response to these questions is to quote the Apostle Paul, who encountered similar questions concerning some who preached the gospel with evil motives. Paul responds: “What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice” (Philippians 1:18).

7. Concerning the “Hallelujah Chorus” being sung, Newton correctly notes the impotence of the music to transform hard hearts. “The impression which the performance of this passage in the oratorio usually makes upon the audience is well known. But however great the power of music may be it cannot soften and change the hard heart, it cannot bend the obdurate will of man. If all the people who successively hear the Messiah, who are struck and astonished for the moment by this chorus in particular, were to bring away with them an abiding sense of the importance of the sentiment it contains, the nation would soon wear a new face. But do the professed lovers of sacred music in this enlightened age live as if they really believed that the Lord God omnipotent reigneth? I appeal to conscience; I appeal to fact” (John M. Brentnall, “John Newton on Handel’s Messiah,” Banner of Truth (November 1, 2000). The impotence of which Newton speaks is also true concerning his and our preaching of God’s Word. However eloquently and loftily we may preach, the power is in the gospel message, the words preached or sung.

To attend such a performance of Handel’s Messiah beckons us to acknowledge the already and not yet aspects of Christ’s reign over God’s Kingdom. It is to witness and enjoy an earthly foreshadowing of what the Apostle Paul speaks of with these words: “Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9–11).

We must not underestimate the power of God’s gospel, which is being sung by vocalists and supported by instrumentalists who have not yet submitted to the Lord Jesus Christ. I believe the occasion calls for us to pray, not oppose performances of Messiah. We should receive the occasion for what it is: a welcomed incursion of the good news of God’s Kingdom into enemy territory. Thank the Lord for the event. Pray and revel in this wonder of the Advent season as a foreshadowing of that Day when every voice will acknowledge Christ Jesus as King of kings and Lord of lords. May this tradition of the Christmas Season become heartfelt worship and adoration of the King of kings. Pray that our God will bring about a grand revival of the gospel’s powerful work to attend every performance of the Messiah.

The Necessity of Confessing “Jesus is Lord”

This is the familiar passage we consider too glibly:

If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart, one believes and is justified, and with the mouth, one confesses and is saved. (Rom. 10:9–10)

Paul’s mention of “your mouth” and “your heart” is patterned after “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” which he cites from Deuteronomy 30:14. As shown below, Paul’s chiasm emphasizes the mouth’s confessing of the heart’s believing—the central feature—while focusing fully on Jesus. Though taking place in the heart, belief in Jesus, whom God raised from the dead, is not private. It is a matter to be testified to with speech. Thus, what Paul affirms is in keeping with Jesus’s teaching: that from the abundance of the believing heart the mouth confesses, “Jesus is Lord.”

A   For if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and

B   believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

B¹ For with the heart the resurrection of Jesus is believed unto righteousness, and

A¹  with the mouth, the lordship of Jesus is confessed unto salvation.

Many readers of English Bibles do not realize that the two Greek verbs in the latter portion of Paul’s chiasm are in the passive voice—“it is believed” and “it is confessed”—as reflected above.[1] Our belief that God raised his Son, Jesus, from the dead is essential to our being declared righteous before God. The two central lines of the chiasm emphatically reiterate Paul’s assertion from Romans 4:23–25. Paul insists that Abraham, who observed that his nearly 100-year-old body was as good as dead, believed God could bring forth a living son from his barren wife. His belief typologically foreshadowed our belief in God who raised his Son from the dead. Thus, Paul wrote, “But the words ‘it was counted to him’ were not written for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:23–25).

1. One commentator who makes this point is John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, reprint 1975 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968), 2.56.

The Confession, “Jesus is Lord,” Has Lost its Edge through Repetition

Properly preached, the gospel of Jesus Christ confronts everyone with totalizing ramifications, transforming our beliefs, practices, and policies concerning every aspect of life in this world. This call subsumes our philosophy on everything: public square issues such as law and justice, politics, economics, society, and culture. In this sin-corrupted world where “repetition breeds familiarity,” our hearts are too often dull to Jesus’s universal dominion, and the preaching of the exhaustive fullness of Jesus’s Lordship becomes commonplace.[2] Three major influences have aided and abetted this dullness: our culture, the enlightenment, and Pietism.

2. Some Evangelicals preach the deviant and erroneous notion that Romans 10:9–10 does not require sinners to confess “Jesus is Lord” and believe that “God raised him from the dead” to be saved. Bob Wilkin embraces this convoluted notion (“Must we Confess in Order to be Eternally Saved?”). This aberrant teaching prompted the so-called “Lordship Salvation Controversy” of the 1980s.

The Impact of Western Culture

Ironically, the first dulling influence is Western Culture itself. How? Christianity, which profoundly shaped Western Culture, played a significant role in establishing the United States and her founding documents—especially the defense of religious freedom. Convinced that our Creator endows all kinds of rights to mankind, the founders brilliantly drafted a Constitution restricting the government’s authority over citizens’ rights. Most formidable of these rights is the First Amendment, including the freedom of religion.[3]

3. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The U.S. Constitution established a nation where Christians would not be subjected to government-sponsored persecution as many of America’s earliest immigrants from Europe had experienced. Assurance that governing officials cannot restrict religious belief and practice or impose an official religion on the citizens removed fear of government-sponsored oppression. With no government-authorized lord threatening Christians, Christians became softer. Christians began to adjust how they read, heard, and heeded what is entailed in confessing “Jesus is Lord.”

The Impact of the Enlightenment

From America’s founding, the rule of law banished tyrants from outside—but this law did not protect against the tyrants from within. The Enlightenment—an anti–Christian worldview that puts the individual at the center—continued infecting North America from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. Enlightenment thinkers shrunk the definition of “religion” and banished it from the public square to be sequestered in the church and home, far away from all that its devotees insist is religiously neutral secular turf.[4] And in that void, people increasingly looked to the state to provide our father the government to provide their daily bread. We all have been infected by this invasive worldview contrary to Christianity.

4. N. T. Wright, “Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire,” Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978–2013 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 171–72.

Thus, Aaron Renn correctly observes that the secularization of American culture took place even during what he identifies as the “Positive World,” which he suggests finally ended in 1994.[5] In the 1960s Francis Schaeffer warned Christians that they had unwittingly separated truth, facts, and reality (conceived of as objective or neutral and occupying the lower story of thinking) from religion, beliefs, and ethics (regarded as subjective or partial and isolated to the upper story of feelings).[6] The false separation of the sacred from the secular strikes again.

5. Aaron M. Renn, “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism,” First Things (February 2022).

6. Francis Schaeffer, Escape from Reason, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1968), 60ff.

Born from the Enlightenment, modernism’s seduction has induced inattentive Christians to accept its bifurcated worldview of “two-story thinking,” to use Schaeffer’s apt expression.  Christians must be alert concerning how we engage life in this present evil age, understanding the times. We need to know how to read the times in which we live in light of God’s Word, and we need to be wary of reading the Scriptures and pondering God’s ways through an Enlightenment lens that filters the sacred from the secular as though the two were divisible.

Equally, we must guard against superimposing a lens that projects contemporary social-cultural-political-economic theories onto the biblical text. The Enlightenment’s peculiar child, postmodernism, has made it fashionable to read Scripture through neo-Marxist spectacles of “oppressor versus oppressed”—in economic, ethnic, or sexual dynamics. This thinking seduces many professing Christians who gravitate toward Evangelicals for Harris and The After Party project (created by Russell Moore, David French, and Curtis Chang). Both groups are subversive to the Christian worldview that rejects the lower story-upper story separation, and Christians ought resist this kind of thinking.

The Impact of Pietism

A third harmful influence on seeing Jesus’s universal lordship is pietism, which camouflages itself behind an appealing spiritual veneer. Pietism has dulled Christian sensibilities to the social-economic-cultural-political implications of the good news in Jesus Christ. Pietism is the mistress of the Enlightenment, and both attempted to shrink the definition of “religion” and banish it from the public square merely to churches and religious institutions. By retreating from the public square, pietist Christians ironically participated in and blessed the divorce of the sacred from the secular. Today, Evangelical and Reformed pietism attracts many to its upper-story spirituality away from the lower-story political-cultural fray. Pietistic thinking directs Christians to “stay in their own lane.” Pietists declare political neutrality that functionally allows the governing Leftist political worldview to gain more ground. Pietists claim that Christian ministers have no authorization from Christ to speak concerning civic and political matters. Hence, these contemporary pietists unwittingly teach their adherents that conversations about the public square are unacceptable to both gospel interests and wholesome Christian conversation—unless the conversation comes from the Pietists themselves! Is there any wonder why pollsters anticipate that perhaps 30 to 40 million Evangelicals will sit out this year’s national election on November 5?[7]

7. Leonardo Blair, “More than 100M people of faith could sit out 2024 election: study,” Christian Post (10–10–2024).

Recovering the Full Measure of the Confession “Jesus is Lord”

The U.S. government is restrained in its power on Christian citizenry in contrast to the unrestrained government of first-century Rome. To grasp this difference, it is worth comparing how Christians in America hear the Apostle Paul’s letter and how the first recipients of the letter in Rome heard it when read to them. Though he had not yet visited Rome, Paul, who traveled throughout the Roman Empire, recognized the dangers Christians encountered living in Rome. He had suffered animosity from civil authorities on multiple occasions. He understood state-sponsored threats against Christians whose exclusive allegiance was to Christ Jesus as “Lord.”

Also worth noting, several years before Paul sent his letter to them, Christian churches in Rome endured an emperor-imposed disruption. In A.D. 49, Claudius expelled all ethnic Jews from Rome without distinguishing Christian Jews from non-Christian Jews. So, Aquila and Priscilla left their residence in the empire’s capital city, relocating to Corinth (Acts 18:1–3). When Paul wrote his letter to the Roman Christians from Corinth (A.D. 57), three years after Claudius’s death, when his edict expired, some Jews were moving back to Rome under the new Caesar, Nero (A.D. 54–68), whose depravity and persecution of Christians became notorious.[8]

8. See Kenneth Berding, “Something About the Book of Romans that will Help You Really ‘Get’ It.”

How did Paul’s first recipients of his letter hear the famous confession of Romans 10:9 “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom. 10:9)? They more than likely heard it as a totalizing claim that encompassed all of life. Only by God’s Spirit can one truthfully confess “Jesus is Lord,” affirming his incarnation, sacrificial death, resurrection, ascension, and investiture with universal dominion (cf. Phil. 2:11; 1 Cor. 12:3). Even if Rome’s later mandatory confession, “Caesar is Lord” (Kurios Kaisar), had not yet been imposed on its citizens by the time Paul sent his letter to Rome’s Christians, such inscriptions as “Nero, the lord of the entire world” already existed.[9] The emperor cult with Caesar acknowledged as a deity was emerging.

9. Vision. “Inventing Deities.”

Paul intended the Roman Christians to hear this confession, carefully crafted with chiastic repetition, as a declaration of Christ’s sovereignty over the governing authorities. Nero, in Rome, was the principal ruling official to which the apostle admonishes them to submit (Rom. 13:1).[10] Ponder Paul’s apostolic commission by the Lord Jesus Christ told to Ananias:  “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name” (Acts 9:15–16). So, Paul’s mission included preaching to kings the Lordship of the God-man enthroned on a Roman cross under the banner “King of the Jews,” and this meant nothing less than that Jesus is Lord over everything—Caesar included.

10. One could point to other familiar words—“good news,” “son of God,” “salvation,” and “justice”—as echoes of the “imperial language” associated with the worship of Caesar. See, for example, N. T. Wright, “Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire” (1998), expanded in “Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire,” Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978–2013 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 446–47.

Conclusion

Wherever idolatry reigns, whether in ancient Rome or various nations today, Christians have always faced great hostilities. Government guardians of idolatry are pleased to welcome Jesus Christ into their pantheon of deities and household gods. What they cannot allow is the confession “Jesus is Lord” to exclude acknowledgment of other deities. About 100 years after Paul sent his letter to Rome, Polycarp of Smyrna bore witness to this truth. After the Roman authorities arrested him because he refused to renounce only “Jesus is Lord” and confess divine honors to the Roman emperor, “the police captain Herod and his father Niketas met with him” in an effort “to persuade him and saying, ‘But what harm is it to say, “Lord Caesar,” [Kurios Kaisar] and to offer sacrifice . . . and to be saved [from death]?’”[11] His commitment to Jesus’s lordship is a model every Christian, “Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He never did me any injury: how then can I blaspheme my King and my Savior?”

11. The Martyrdom of Polycarp 8.2.

Vice President Kamala Harris held a political rally on Oct. 17, 2024 in La Crosse, Wisconsin. She berated her opponent, former President Donald Trump, for appointing three justices to the United States Supreme Court “with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe v. Wade, and they did as he intended.” At that instant, two male students from the University of Wisconsin—La Crosse proclaimed, “Christ is King!” then, “Jesus is Lord,” loudly enough for all in the arena to hear. V. P. Harris promptly retorted, “Oh! You guys are at the wrong rally,” drawing thunderous applause and cheers from the nearly 2500 attendees. The two confessors were promptly ushered out of the arena as V. P. Harris continued mocking them. What a commentary on the depths to which the Democratic Party’s candidate and voters have sunk! Of course, when she brought her rally to a close, without any hint of disconnect between her God-rejecting words and actions, Harris said, “God bless you. God bless the United States of America.”

The First Amendment seems to have lulled many Evangelicals into a slumber from engaging in political and cultural issues from which they must be awakened. The freedom to confess “Jesus is Lord” in the public square is in greater jeopardy than at any previous time. As hostilities increase in our nation against believers who confess exclusive allegiance to one Lord, will we stand firm and confess, “Jesus is Lord”? Are we prepared to acknowledge the exclusive lordship of Jesus, who died a criminal’s death on a Roman cross under that placard that specified his crime, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”? As Jesus taught us, the words we speak with our mouths confirm the beliefs resident in our hearts. Confession without faith is hollow. Faith without confession is proved spurious. Our mouth’s confession reveals and confirms the authenticity of our faith.

1. Context of Romans 13:1–7

The Apostle Paul’s admonition, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities,” has contextual preparation earlier when Paul exhorts Christians to “be transformed by the renewal of your mind” to be able “to discern what God’s will is” (Rom. 12:2). He expands on what this entails by addressing how (A) believers are to behave as members of Christ’s body (12:9–13), (B) Christians are to behave toward those outside the church, especially “those who persecute you” (12:14-21), (B¹) everyone who confesses “Jesus is Lord” (10:4) is to submit to governing authorities (13:1–7), and (A¹) believers are to be governed by Christ’s love in every facet of life (13:8–10).^[1] Here is a visual of the chiasm.^[2]

A   Love for members of Christ’s body, the church (12:9–13).

B   Behave peaceably in the hostile world (12:14–21).

B¹   Behave submissively toward governing officials (13:1–7).

A¹  Love for members of Christ’s body, the church (13:8–10).

Paul’s deliberate chiastic arrangement of the text aids in seeing Romans 13:1–7 within the larger framework. His chiasm also compels us to recognize crucial words occurring in both Romans 12:14–21 and 13:1–7. Consider these words linking the two passages.

Recognizing these important verbal links between Romans 12:14–21 and 13:1–7 suggests we correctly read these two passages as complementary. Especially noteworthy is Paul’s prohibition:

Repay no one evil for evil but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord” (12:17–20).

The chiasm and word connections beckon us to read Romans 13:1–7 in tight association with Romans 12:14–21 with the two portions mutually informing one another. What we read in Romans 12:14–21 prepares us for correctly understanding 13:1–7. So, in Romans 12:14–21, Paul provides directives concerning how Christ’s people are to behave toward all who are outside the body of believers, including governing officials. We are to bless those who curse us, sympathize with others whether they rejoice or mourn, always endeavor to live peacefully with others, associate with the lowly, never be conceited, never retaliate but trust God to judge rightly, lend aid to those in need, and overcome evil with good. Paul takes these significant general directives concerning how Christians are to behave in relation to people outside the church and applies them to how Christians are to relate to governing authorities.

2. The Distinction Between Submission and Obedience

Christians should always advocate for justice to prevail over injustice, and where injustice threatens, we ought always to appeal for justice, as the Apostle Paul did on multiple occasions.^[3] Paul’s conduct aligns with his admonitions to Christians concerning how we should behave toward civil authorities, especially in the letter he sent to the Christians in Rome, the governmental seat of the entire empire.

3. In Phillipi, as a Roman citizen, Paul appealed for the city magistrates, who had arrested and publicly beaten and imprisoned him and Silas without any trial, to come and release them from prison, not secretly, but publicly and officially (Acts 16:35–40). Again, as a Roman citizen, Paul appealed to have the Jews’ charges against him tried before Caesar (Acts 25:6–12).

Romans 13:1–7 begins with the Apostle Paul’s well-known injunction: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Rom. 13:1). On the surface, this seems to imply a blanket command for obedience to government officials, but correctly understanding the verb “be subject” is critical to grasping Paul’s intent. The word used here and repeated in Romans 13:5, translated as “be subject to,” is the same word Paul uses in Ephesians 5:21–22. There Paul first characterizes a body of believers as engaged in mutually “submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ,”^[4] and then he begins a new paragraph and topic when he exhorts, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.”^[5] Neither of these uses in Ephesians 5 substitutes for the verb “obey” or “be obedient,” as if Paul meant to say, “obeying one another” or “Wives, obey your own husbands.” For Paul, “submitting” (hupotassō) is distinguishable from “obeying” (hupakouō). Believers “submitting to one another” and wives “submitting to their own husbands” are distinct and different from “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right” (Eph. 6:1). The words, “in the Lord,” sufficiently bind children’s obedience to God-honoring acts.

So, within two other spheres of God’s ordered governance, the church and marriage, submitting is not equated with obeying. We misread Scripture if we read calls for wives to submit to their husbands as demands for unqualified obedience to their orders so long as their commands are not intrinsically sinful (Eph. 5:22; Col. 3:18; 1 Pet. 3:1). Likewise, we misunderstand Scripture if we presume that Christians are to yield “unqualified obedience” to church elders. Rather, the NIV correctly translates Hebrews 13:17, “Have confidence in your leaders and submit to their authority, because they keep watch over you as those who must give an account. Do this so that their work will be a joy, not a burden, for that would be of no benefit to you.”

Thus, in Romans 13:1 and 5, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities” does not command “unqualified obedience.” Rather, the word entails honor and respect, which the apostle explicitly explains when he admonishes Christians to show “respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed” (Rom. 13:7).

God has appointed multiple “spheres of sovereignty”—the individual, family, employment, church, and state—each one entailing defined authority and self-governance. Enforcing justice and executing retributive punishment for criminal behavior does not belong to individual Christians but to the state and civil magistrates. Justice and vengeance belong to those whom God appointed as governing authorities. Paul explains the governing official’s God-appointed role: “For he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer” (13:4).

Paul wrote his letter to the Christians in Rome, a diverse and persecuted community under the rule of the Roman Empire. The Roman authorities were often hostile to Christians, and many scholars believe Paul’s instruction was meant to address the community’s precarious social and political situation. Christians were viewed as a potential threat due to their allegiance to Christ as “Lord” rather than Caesar. Thus, Paul was not necessarily promoting submission to governing authorities for its own sake but encouraging believers to live peaceably, recognizing that all authority ultimately belongs to God.

Submission, as commanded in Romans 13, is an act of acknowledging the legitimacy of authority and recognizing its role within God’s created order. This does not imply that one is obligated to obey the laws or directives of a governing authority if they contradict God’s higher law. This can be seen in how Peter and John responded to the Jewish High Priest’s and his associates’ command to cease preaching in Jesus’ name and “bring this man’s blood upon us” (Acts 5:28). The two apostles countered, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). While they submitted respectfully to the governing religious authorities, they refused to obey when their specific prohibition contradicted their duty to God. Their behavior shows that submission does not preclude civil disobedience when human laws conflict with divine commands.

3. Governing Authority Is From God and Is Not Infallible

We might easily misconstrue the meaning of Paul’s assertion, “For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God” (Rom. 13:1; KJV) to refer to God’s sovereign foreordination of everything that comes to pass. The highlighted verb, ordained, is variously translated as “appointed” (NKJV), “established” (NIV, NASB), and “instituted” (ESV, CSB). Paul’s only other use of the verb is in 1 Corinthians 16:15, where he speaks of Stephanas’s household, “they have devoted themselves to the service of the saints.” The word refers to an appointment or devotion to a task. Therefore, John Murray correctly observes that, in Romans 13:1–2, Paul does not speak merely of “God’s decretive will” but rather of God’s “preceptive will,” which, if the magistrate refrains from executing just judgment against crimes, his failure to carry out justice “would be sinful.”^[6] God appoints civil magistrates to execute his vengeance on evildoers (cf. Rom. 12:19 & 13:4).

6. John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, reprint 1975, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968), 2.148–49. God’s decretive will refers to everything he enjoins in scripture: “do not murder,” “do not steal,” etc. God’s perceptive will refers to everything that happens under his divine sovereignty, including the breaking of his commandments, as when Jesus Christ was murdered on the cross (Acts 4:27–28).

Government, according to Paul, has a God-given role: to promote good and restrain evil (Rom. 13:3–4). However, history is replete with examples of governments that do the opposite—promoting injustice and suppressing righteousness. Of course, Paul understood this when he wrote these words in his letter bound to arrive in Rome, where Caesar resided. Hence, the apostle’s directives concerning the role of civil authorities implicitly obligate ministers of the gospel but also all Christians to teach our own families and our neighbors concerning our roles as citizens and also to remind those who govern us:

(1) that God appointed them to their seats of governance;

(2) that they are ministers of God for the well-being of those whom they govern;

(3) that justice—punishing evildoers and rewarding doers of good—is their primary role;

(4) that they are in positions of authority not to serve themselves but to serve those for whom they are entrusted with governing.

The apostle’s directives forbid us from engaging in activist rioting, insurrection, and disorder, but they do not keep us from peaceful protestations against injustice. The apostle’s teaching restrains us from retreating from public life within a safe Christian cloister hermetically sealed from the wicked influences around us—including evil-doing elected officials, magistrates, and bureaucrats who become tyrants. Instead, the Apostle Paul obligates us Christians to confront evil governing officials with holy rebukes to remind them of their God-appointed calling, even removing them from their roles by recall or scheduled election.

4. Christian Responsibility in Our Constitutional Republic

Paul was a citizen of an empire ruled by a pagan emperor. When writing to Christians in Rome, the emperor’s home, he admonishes them to submit to governing officials whose God-appointed role is to punish evildoers and reward doers of good. That we reside not under an emperor but under “the rule of law” in a constitutional republic does not mitigate the Apostle Paul’s admonition. We also are to submit to civil authorities not only because we fear the magistrate’s wrath, who is God’s servant for good, but also conscientiously, as to the Lord Christ himself. Because greater freedom increases one’s accountability, indeed, as citizens of a constitutional republic, where citizens are invested as the electorate, we can reasonably argue that the apostle’s appeal to submitting from a convinced conscience places responsibilities on us as voters that the Roman Empire’s form of government robbed its citizens.

Yes, God providentially bequeathed to us not only “the power of the ballot” but the freedom to appeal to other voters to join us in the righteous cause to hold magistrates accountable to conduct themselves properly as God’s servants for good. These freedoms obligate us to use our ballot to honor God by calling unjust civil authorities to account. True, our two-party political system has its offensive and restrictive qualities, but God’s providence presents us with a binary choice. Therefore, Stephen Wellum has recently observed correctly that voting is not only a citizen’s duty but a Christian’s responsibility.

As we think about political parties, we must first stand as Christians and not partisans. As a Christian, as I evaluate the GOP, I think it’s a disaster. Yet, there is still within it a direction that is not as anti-human as the Democrat Party. Further, the GOP still allows conservative Christians to influence their Party. So unless we’re going to start another Party, which presently is not viable, we have a binary choice. To sit out is not a responsible option since we lose the influence of our voice entirely. We need to make wise decisions, and for me, the only option is to vote GOP. Donald Trump is not my first choice, and I opposed him in the primaries, but as the candidate of the GOP, he’s the one I will vote for. (Emphasis added)

5. Conclusion: Submission with Discernment

Romans 13 does not demand blind obedience to every decree or policy enacted by a government. In fact, the Apostle Paul’s command is not that we are obligated “to obey” governing officials but “to submit” to them, acknowledging that all authority ultimately comes not from humans but from God. Therefore, our submission to civil magistrates is not absolute. Submission does not preclude civil disobedience when a government’s laws conflict with or contradict God’s moral law. God’s law obligates us to live peaceably, respect governing authorities, pay our taxes, and work for the common good, but we are also called to resist evil, act justly, advocate for justice, and engage responsibly as citizens who call to account civil authorities who betray their roles as God’s servants for good. Thus, our submission to governing authorities requires wisdom to discern when to follow laws and when to resist them in faithfulness to the Lord Christ. Our challenge as Christians is to navigate this tension with wisdom, courage, and a commitment to righteousness in every circumstance.