Theological Fragments

Have you ever read Ruth and wondered, "Why did Ruth get her own book?" Why was it so important to tell the story of this one woman, of all the women on Earth, all the women in Biblical history? Deborah was the only woman to ever lead Israel, and she didn't get a book. Mary gave birth to the Messiah, and she didn't get a book. Why Ruth? She didn't preach a famous sermon, perform a miracle, win a battle, or save a people. She wasn't even an Israelite. She was a Midianite widow who got married and had a baby. Hardly the stuff of legend. And yet, at some point the Spirit of God inspired someone to write a book about this one, average woman, and the people of God preserved it and retold it for thousands of years. What did she do? In one common view of the Gospel, she did nothing very special--she just happened to be the great grandmother of David. If the Gospel is only about evangelism, if the only point of being a believer is making more believers while you ...

I introduced the Vocational Gospel through a four-part series that went through Scripture cover-to-cover--literally, from the first chapter of Genesis to the last chapter of Revelation. Now, I want to expand on that introduction by showing individual instances in the Bible where we see the Vocational Gospel explicitly preached or displayed. I'm calling it "The Gospel According To..." Today I want to start with John the Baptist. John was a man of two worlds: he was the last prophet of Israel, and he was the first preacher of the Gospel, before even Jesus. In Matthew 3:2 John begins to preach, "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand"--which is, word-for-word, exactly how Matthew summarizes Jesus' message in 4:17. John's preaching is our first glimpse of the Good News that accompanies the arrival of the messiah, Jesus. So what does he preach? Well, as we just saw, he preaches repentance. In Luke's account, John's call to repentance is p...