Utumishi Blog

Can’t resist one more quote from Piper’s Christmas devotional, The Dawning of Indestructible Joy – discussing Hebrew 8:4-10:

First… Jesus fulfils and replaces the shadows of the Old Testament.
Second… God makes the reality of Christ real to us personally by the work of the new covenant when he writes his truth on our hearts. God moves powerfully into our hearts and minds to overcome our resistance to the beauty of his reality. He writes his will—the truth of the reality of Jesus—on our hearts, so that we see him for who he really is and are willing and eager to trust him and follow him—freely, from the inside out, not slavishly under constraint from outside.
That would be the greatest salvation imaginable—if God should offer us the greatest reality in the universe to enjoy and then move in us to see to it that we could enjoy it with the greatest freedom and the greatest pleasure possible… And that is exactly what he has done.
(Dawning, p. 67-68)

God does not send Christ into the world to die for sins and leave his salvation plan there. He goes the whole way, sending his Spirit right into our hearts and grabbing us and uniting us to the Son. God does not create a possibility of salvation or a system of salvation, he actually saves. This is one of those things where once you see it you start seeing it all over the Scriptures:

• Acts 3:17-26 – from the suffering of Christ, foretold by the prophets, through to God grabbing us by our shoulders and turning us around;
• Ephesians 1:1-2:10 – the Father choosing us before time, Christ bleeding for us at the Cross, God raising us from the dead and opening our eyes;
• Titus 2:14 – cross and sanctification, Christ dies for a people to grab a people who he will make zealous;
• Titus 3:1-7 – Christ and Spirit, justification and regeneration, the appearance of the Saviour and our personal salvation & transformation – wonderfully tied together;
• 1 Peter 1:1-9 – from before eternity to last time, Father, Son, Spirit, death, resurrection, new birth, inexpressible joy.

He saves us
all the way
to the utmost.