One very good thing that has come as a result of my accident is that the drugs I’ve been on made it difficult to look at a TV or computer screen without feeling very light-headed.  This forced me to fill my time with other, more constructive, things…like reading.  On top of that, when the pain in my arm would wake me up reminding me to take my medicine, I’d have a good thirty minutes to  read before the pain would subside and I could return to sleep.  So over the past two weeks I’ve been able to read through a couple of good books.  The first I’ve already quoted from in previous posts.  “In My Place Condemned He Stood” is an excellent book which details the importance and centrality of the atonement to Christ’s death on the cross.  One danger that we face today is the attempt to put God and the atonement into a rationalistic box, which leads to all sorts of false readings of Scripture.

The passion to pack God into a rationalistic box of our own making is always strong but must be resisted.  If we bear in mind that all the knowledge we can have of the atonement is of a mystery about which we can only think and speak by means of models, and which remains a mystery when all is said and done, it will keep us from rationalistic pitfalls and thus help our progress considerably.

The other book that I had the privilege to finish was C.S. Lewis’ “Surprised by Joy”.  This is Lewis’ autobiography of his early years, what circumstances led him to atheism, and how God brought him to Christianity.  It’s a book that is filled with big words and heavy intellectual statements, and therefore may not appeal to everybody.  But as he described his life journey during the early part of the 1900′s, I began to notice that while there were some cultural differences between todays problems and the problems of his time, we face some very similar philosophical problems.  One of the main ones that stood out to me was what he named, “chronological snobbery”, which by his definition is: “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.”  How to respond to this?

You must find why it went out of date.  Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do?  If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood.

Christ did not win a hypothetical salvation for hypothetical believers, a mere possibility of salvation for any who might possibly believe, but a real salvation for his own chosen people.  his precious blood really does “save us all”; the intended effects of his self-offering do in fact follow, just because the cross was what it was.  Its saving power does not depend on faith being added to it; its saving power is such that faith flows from it.  The cross secured the full salvation of all for whom Christ died.   “God forbid,” therefor, “that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Gal. 6:14 KJV).

J.I. Packer “In My Place Condemned He Stood” (P. 123)