Hell grasped a Corpse
"Hell grasped a corpse and met God."
- from John Chrysostom's Easter Homily
Foreplay
God moves in a mysterious way. Very often, in the midst of hardship, we don't understand why God is "so far off." Why does He come, and then seemingly go? We know that we are pilgrims on earth, groaning for Christ's final return when all creation will be made new. Perhaps this is God's foreplay. He is preparing to return, and indwell the earth. In that day, Christ will know his bride.
From Peter Leithart's exposition of the Song of Songs:
"Why didn’t the Son come in the flesh just outside Eden? The erotic theology of the Song of Songs provides a possible hint. Throughout the Song, the lovers admire each other’s bodies and express their longing desires to be together. Union comes at the end of reciprocal arousal. ”Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” the bride says at the outset. ”How beautiful you are, my darling, how beautiful you are!” says the bridegroom. But the bride doesn’t get her winekiss until later, until he takes her to his “house of wine” (2:4) and until his enters the locked garden and drinks of the wine, milk, and honey of her lips and mouth (4:11-5:1). A period of intensifying desire precedes tasting and touching; distance, approach, distance, approach, repeated again and again before consummation.
The history of Israel is God’s foreplay with His bride, bringing her to a pitch of desire before He takes flesh and dwells with her. Perhaps too this provides a way of describing the frenzy of Messianic excitement that Israel was undergoing in the first century.
God waits to send His Son because He is a good lover."
Sanctification and Justification
Why, then, are we justified by faith? Because by faith we grasp Christ's righteousness, but which alone we are reconciled to God. Yet you could not grasp this without at the same time grasping sanctification also. For he “is given unto us for righteousness, wisdom, sanctification, and redemption” [I Cor. 1:30]. Therefore Christ justifies no one whom he does not at the same time sanctify. These benefits are joined together by an everlasting and indissoluble bond, so that those whom he illumines by his wisdom, he redeems; those whom he redeems, he justifies; those whom he justifies, he sanctifies…Thus is is clear how true it is that we are justified not without works yet not through works, since in our sharing in Christ, which justifies us, sanctification is just as much included as righteousness.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, bk III, ch. 26.1
Robinson Crusoe on the Providence of God
"If so, nothing can happen in the great Circuit of his Works, either without his Knowledge or Appointment. And if nothing happens without his Knowledge, he knows that I am here, and am in this dreadful Condition; and if nothing happens without his Appointment, he has appointed all this to befal me."
- Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe, 79.
This quote from Robinson Crusoe exemplifies Defoe's Calvinistic worldview. There is of course the doctrine of Predestination involved, and how God created, knows, and is in control of all things. But much further than that, this passage shows Defoe's doctrine of Salvation. He starts with the question of where everything came from, and ends with adoring that Creator. Realizing that God is the Creator leaves Robinson Crusoe without any pride. He has nothing to stand on which God has not given him, therefore all complaining, all rebellion, and all despair loose their place and meaning. Having contemplated these things the only thing for Crusoe to do is to cry out to God, praise him, and trust him in all he does. He has no more right to question God's eternal decree's as to his location than a tree on the island would. He therefore can rest in the confidence that God has brought this about for his good, and not for his evil. Crusoe's next question was to ask why God had chosen to bring these things upon him. He had scarcely thought this when he realized how he had been going against God's will and his life's calling all his days. In spite of all this, Crusoe realized that God had spared him through incredible circumstances. How can Crusoe doubt that God was up to something in his life? When Christ offers grace to a particular sinner, that grace is irresistible and un-stoppable.
Gregory of Nazianzen
Gregory of Nazianzen wrote against Apollinarianism, the belief that Jesus incarnated into man but did not indwell a human mind, saying,
If anyone has put his trust in him as a man without a human mind, he is wholly bereft of mind, and quite unworthy of salvation. For that which he has not assumed he has not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved
-Gregory of Nazianzen, Letter to Cledonius in The Person of Christ by Donald Macleod, 160.
