Why Does Each Gospel Sound Different?

The first four books of the New Testament report the same Gospel account, but from four different perspectives. They give the same message with differing but perfectly harmonious emphases. Matthew presents Jesus as the sovereign, whereas Mark presents Him in the extreme opposite role as servant. Luke presents Him as the Son of Man, whereas John presents Him as the Son of God. The same Jesus is shown to be both sovereign God and servant man.  

In presenting the sovereignty of Jesus, Matthew begins his Gospel with the genealogy of the Lord - going back to Abraham, the father of the Hebrew people through King David, Israel model King. In presenting Jesus' servanthood, Mark gives no genealogy at all, because a servant's lineage is irrelevant. In presenting Jesus as the Son of Man, Luke traces his genealogy back to the first man, Adam. In presenting Jesus as the divine Son of God, John gives no human genealogy or birth and childhood narratives. He opens up his Gospel, by giving, as it were, Jesus divine genealogy: 'in the beginning was the Word, as the Word was with God, and the Word was God.' 

John MacArthur, Matthew 1-7, pp xi-xii

Book review: The Glory of Heaven. John MacArthur

Here's the headline; if you've been allured, led astray, by the recent vogue for heaven tourism books, this is the necessary antidote. And i'm sorry.

Let's deal with those two statements backwards. I'm sorry because if you've read such books as 'Heaven is for real,' or  'To Heaven and Back' two cite to popular books, then, at some level you've been let down by the church. No one who is even familiar with the Bible should need books like these to help their faith, no one who is even familiar with the Bible would accept these books as compatible with Christianity. The fact that these books sell so well points to a systemic failure in the church. And it stinks. And i'm sorry.

This book, The Glory of Heaven, is the antidote. This book will fill you with longing for Heaven, actual heaven, the Heaven we find in the Bible, not in the, at best, dreams, or, at worst, demon inspired accounts of the near dead.

The Glory of Heaven was originally published in 1996, and the recent republished work is much the same, save for a new introduction, a new chapter at the beginning, and appendices at the end which deal, idea by idea, with three of the best selling Heaven tourism books. This lack of editing is an undoubted strength of the book. Why? Because MacArthur, with his typical faithful and probing exegesis focuses this book on what Heaven is like, and that never changes. The best way to deal with error is not neccesarily to refute it, but to tell the truth. Don't just sit there and tell me that Big Macs are bad for me, feed me steak. The reasons why heaven tourism books simply can not paint a real picture of Heaven are as long as your arm, but much better to focus on truth than error. The appendices are helpful for dealing with the errors in those books, but i'm thankful, for the sake of my heart, that the majority of the book retells the Biblical visions of heaven.

MacArthur writes chapters on what Heaven will be like, what we'll be like when we're there, the new Jerusalem, and angels. Reading it made me hungry for Heaven, hungry for Jesus, and hungry for the Word. It made sin seem foolish and Jesus seem glorious. It reminded me that Heaven is glorious in the most terrifying sense of the world, and that no one who has really been to Heaven and back could come back speaking of anything other than Jesus' glory. That, after all, is the theme of Revelation.

It's a fairly short book, only 215 pages including the appendices, but, if you want a beautiful, Biblical portrait of Heaven, there's nothing i've read like it. If you're not interested in Heaven tourism books, you should read this anyway, for the sake of your faith, for the sake of your heart. And if you've been drawn away from the Bible by what those books have to say, run, don't walk to imbibe the antidote, which makes Jesus look big and us look small. Truly the theme of Heaven itself.

On Biography

Hebrews 11 is the divine mandate for Christians to reading biography. We should look to the heroes of the past and learn from them, and to do this, we are blessed with an abundance of good books we can read to learn from people who have lived an died, and now, because of their faith, live again.

Reading biography does have this impact on me, as i saw again reading a biography of John Macarthur by Iain Murray, and of CS Lewis by Alister McGrath. Two very different men, who lived very different lives in very different contexts, but loving and serving the same God.

These two men inspired me in different ways, Macarthur by illustrating that God will take care of the width of a ministry as long as you take care of the depth. Macarthur never would have guessed when he started as Pastor of Grace Church that decades later he'd have travelled the globe, preached through the new Testament, founded a college among much else. But his one desire, his one resolution was to preach the Gospel, and that's it. And that's what he did. In an area, and through a time when the Gospel waxed and waned in it's fashion, his devotion to it never waned. He stood in front of his people week after week and preached the Gospel. God took care, and takes care of the rest. The pressure to use quick growth gimmicks is something that will never go away, but Macarthur is a great example of how God's work does God's work.

If Macarthur's story is fairly straight forward, Lewis's is anything but. What are we to make of this enigma? The great strength of this book is that the author never knew the subject. CS Lewis is 'Lewis' all the way through, never 'Jack.' McGrath is also great at interacting with primary sources, leading him to re-date Lewis's conversion from theism to Christianity from early 1929 to mid 1930. Despite the unorthodox choices that Lewis made there is no doubt there he was a Christian. But Lewis's relationship with Mrs Moore, his clandestine marriage to Joy Davidman, and his sympathies with Catholicism do raise some flags. Lewis is not someone we should read for doctrinal clarity. His strength is in anything but, his strength is in his use of imagination and emotion to provide depth and clarity to truth. For that reason we should read Lewis, and his use of the mind in this area inspires me as much as Macarthur does in his preaching.

The great thing about biography is that it makes us think and it helps us to think. We can't be the major player when we're reading about other people. We are forced to see the world through another set of eyes, and this is necessary to our health as a Christian. It helps us to think about the world, to see the world differently and see our faith, to see our saviour from a different perspective.