Easter: A Welcome Holiday, a Wild Story
It’s bizarre to claim that death is not the end and yet, isn’t it bizarre to claim it is?
It’s bizarre to claim that death is not the end and yet, isn’t it bizarre to claim it is?
For many of us, preaching on Romans seems like the Everest of preaching, or like what playing Hamlet is for an actor: you need to spend a career preparing for it, and shouldn’t do until you’re ‘ready.’ But I want to say: go for it.
Because Romans 8:28 exists, those who love God and are loved by him can have confidence that he is working through all of life’s circumstances to bring good out of bad, light out of darkness, joy out of sorrow.
The difference lies in the additional rhetorical flourishes and theological claims they are making. Spurgeon explicitly claims that the circumstances a believer finds themselves in are the optimal circumstances for them. This is saying much more than Romans 8 or Ephesians 1.
This is how I take it: Revelation is written in the apocalyptic genre, mainly about what life will be like between the first and second coming of Jesus, designed to encourage persecuted Christians.