Suffering, Authority and Christ
Wednesday 20 December 2006 at 10:18 pmTim Keller has been preaching a bunch lately on suffering, just in time for Christmas. In a lecture called Suffering and the Steward-Leader he makes some startling comments on suffering. He states that suffering is one of the resources that God brings into our lives that has to be cultivated and that we live in one of the only cultures in history that doesn’t see suffering as natural and normal but have no place for it at all.
I have also been doing a lot of thinking about realized eschatology, "the now and the not yet". I’ve been doing the book "Simply Christian" in a men’s group and NT Wright has really been pushing (as does Keller often) on the changes that the crucifixion and resurrection accomplished in reality. I’ve been looking at what NT Wright has to say about "the little apocalypse" in the Synoptics and reflecting on the fact that one of the reasons for joy in the NT church was the fact that they saw (much more than we do) that the resurrection meant the end of the "present evil age" and the beginning of the "age to come". Jesus’ resurrection was "first fruits" of the resurrection for us all.
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