Are you longing for true connection? The Bible calls Jesus the friend of sinners, but it’s hard to imagine what friendship with Jesus really looks like. How are we supposed to feel that close to a holy, perfect, and invisible God? How do we see Jesus as the real person he is? And how do we experience true friendship with him when we struggle to maintain true friendship on earth?
My new book Friendship with the Friend of Sinners: The Remarkable Possibility of Closeness with Christ explores these questions. Here are 25 quotes from the book that I trust will prompt you to delve deeper:
1. “In a very real way, at the moment I most deserved to be utterly alone and rejected, Jesus came into that room, sat on the floor next to me, put his arm around me, and said, ‘It’s going to be okay.’At the lowest moment of my life, I came face-to-face with my real self. And I came face-to-face with the truest friend. I found him true because at that moment I had the least to offer him.” – p.14
2. “Biblically speaking, of course, Christianity is both religion and relationship. In fact, these categories, properly understood, are not so distinguishable from each other, and it turns out each must fuel the other. A relationship with Jesus without a commitment to his commands, to his church and her ordinances, to his shaping of our entire lives through the (even imperfect) pursuit of disciplines according to his like- ness isn’t the kind of relationship he desires from us. Similarly, a Christian religion without a spiritual hunger for his grace, a humble surrender to his character, and a desperate desire for intimacy with his very presence is just religiosity.” – p.18
3. “The less we become like Jesus, the less we will understand how to do real friendship.” – p.25
4. “The truth is, we’re all terrible friends to Jesus. But he is still the truest friend we could have.” – p.31
5. “The reality of friendship with Jesus depends on a serious reckoning with the reality of Jesus. Most of us, Christians included, however, have grown accustomed to conducting a relationship with the idea of Jesus. But Jesus is a real person.” – p.44
6. “As the aim of spiritual growth in Christianity is to become more conformed to the image of Christ, it behooves us to remember that for Christ to be made real in us, we must be drawing near to a real Christ.” – p.52
7. “We can come to the Bible for more knowledge, and that’s fine. Its facts are impeccable. We can come to the Bible for artistry, and that’s fine. Its words are beautiful. We can come to the Bible for instructions on the religious life, and that too is fine. The law of God is holy and glorious. But if we don’t come to the Word of God for life, we run the risk of dying smart, entertained, and religious.” – pp.56-57
8. “There is no friend closer than Jesus. As we follow him, he never strides too far ahead. He never dodges or ditches us. If we are weary, he slows. If we pull up lame, he stops. If we wander, he circles back. He won’t let us be lost.” – p.61
9. “He has come to dwell among us. He won’t even keep a superior detachment from sinners! He gets up close and personal. He touches people’s sores. He holds their hands. He puts his spit in people’s eyes. You couldn’t keep him at arm’s length if you tried. You certainly cannot cordon him off from your life with chains of flesh or velvet ropes of religion.” – pp.70-71
10. “Remember the good news that God loves sinners. Jesus died for sinners! He isn’t looking for awesome people to unite to himself. He isn’t looking for put-together people for his Spirit to indwell. He isn’t looking for religious people to become brand ambassadors for him. Jesus came to save sinners. He came to unite to himself people who could add nothing to him.” – p.73
11. “Our feelings are no barrier to him.” – p.78
12. “You don’t need a particularly mighty faith to receive the favor of God. Because it isn’t the strength of the faith that saves but the strength of the Savior. If the faith is true, however small, it can lay hold of all the riches of grace in Christ Jesus.” – pp.88-89
13. “He gets so close to the whores and the cheats and the drunkards that he’s accused of their very sins. He’s willing to bear the shame they bear, hear the insults they hear, feel the rejection they feel. Jesus is willing not just to preach to sinners but, risking his own reputation, to be their friend. Indeed, Jesus isn’t just willing to give up his reputation for sinners; he is willing to give up his life.” – p.91
14. “We can’t become like anyone with whom we don’t spend any time. So he draws us to himself. He invites us into his unbothered, undistracted presence.” – p.97
15. “To sit at the feet of Jesus is the highest and best experience we can have. He knows we need to change. He knows we need to produce good fruit and perform good works. But he also knows that none of that matters — or can truly even happen — if we don’t make it a priority to sit still with him and listen.” – p.105
16. “Maturing Christians come not to begrudge the inefficiency of discipleship but to embrace it. We know that the very lament of not being further along is itself a sign of the Spirit’s working in us. The conviction we feel about our sin is a sign of his closeness. The pain we feel in our battle with the flesh is a sign of bearing Christ’s cross. You cannot get close to Jesus without touching his wounds.” – p.108
17. “Every Christian wakes up with Jesus as a ready and eager friend. And no matter how the day has gone — and you might have really blown it! — every Christian goes to bed at night with Jesus as a ready and eager friend.” – p.127
18. “God isn’t keeping score. Because his Son is victorious, so are you. Because his Son is beloved, so are you. And because his Son is eternally resting from the work of atonement, so are you.” – p.132
19. “It was in my lowest, most broken, most desperate devastation that Christ came near in the sweetest grace and care. My sin didn’t surprise him. My blowing up my life did not startle him. He saw it all coming, and in a way, I was on a collision course with a life-changing awakening to the gospel, sovereignly directed by his own will. The truth caught up with me, but so did the grace of God. And when I was most exposed, he was the most tender.” – pp.148-149
20. “Nobody slips through the cracks.” – p.161
21. “This is how our friend Jesus receives our stupid efforts at obedience. We bring the weeds of our works and the mess of our efforts to him, and with the warmest gaze, not even pretending, he says, ‘Oh, how precious!’ He is a gracious Savior. Compared to what he’s given us, he receives so little. But he gladly accepts it all. He receives everything from us with nothing but love.” – p.164
22. “The Giver is himself the gift. And there’s no gift he can give us that can exceed the preciousness and worth of his very self.” – pp.165-166
23. “The closer we walk with him, the more our stride begins to resemble his.” – p.169
24. “The good news is, we aren’t high maintenance to Jesus.” – p.176
25. “Jesus is real. Even now, in our hearts, we can see his face.” – p.212
Friendship with the Friend of Sinners is available now wherever good books are sold.
Editor’s Note: The Theology in the Everyday series seeks to introduce and explain theological concepts in 500 words or less, with a 200-word section helping explain the doctrine to kids. At For The Church, we believe that theology should not be designated to the academy alone but lived out by faith in everyday life. We hope this series will present theology in such a way as to make it enjoyable, connecting theological ideas to everyday experience and encouraging believers to study theology for the glory of God and the good of the Church. This week, the soul.
Have you ever considered what you are made of? Answering this question, a person might speak of all the inner workings of our bodies: our brains and nervous system, our blood and veins, our organs and their functions, our bones, ligaments, and joints. Truly, every eighth-grade biology student would tend to know these facts. Indeed, the Scriptures speak to the fact that humans “have been remarkably and wondrously made” (Psalm 139:14, CSB). However, if we stop at being made as “functional bodies” alone, we fall short of the full Biblical picture of our being. We as humans are bodies and souls.
Concerning the soul, the great confessions of the Protestant Faith usually state something like what we see in the Second London Confession: “After God had made all other creatures, He created man, male and female, with reasonable and immortal souls.”[1] Notice, reasonable and immortal souls. Of course, it is not true that all we are is our soul, either. God created us as both body and soul. But what exactly is the soul? The Old Testament most often uses the Hebrew word nephesh to describe the soul, and this word is closely associated with the life that God breathes into Adam in Gen 2:7 where Moses writes that after God breathed the breath of life in Adam, he “became a living being.” So, we could say that the soul is the immaterial “life” that is part and parcel of the wholeness of being a human. Just as we need our heart to pump and our brain to function, we need our soul to live. Though we know that the other creatures that God created have life—thus some kind of “soul”—we are certain that mankind’s soul is set apart due to mankind being made in God’s image and likeness (Gen 1:27). This, the confession speaks of, as mankind’s soul being reasonable and immortal. Let us look more carefully at these two ideas.
The idea of reasonable
When God created mankind in His image and likeness, He created them as creatures of reason. Far above the rest of creation, God instills in mankind a knowledge of nature and Himself. For instance, after God creates Adam, He gives Him dominion over the earth and charges him with the naming of the animals (Gen 2:19). The animals do not name themselves, but God instructs Adam to, with the reason and authority God gives him (a reflection of God’s authority and reason), name the animals. As Adam is naming the animals, he reasons that though there are male and female companions amongst the animals, there is not one found who befits him (Gen 2:20). Furthermore, it seems that reason given to mankind by God is expressed in the law written on their hearts by which God also commands them to obey (Rom 2:15; Gen 2:15-17).
The idea of immortal
God also creates mankind after His likeness. Just as His Spirit is eternal, so too is mankind’s soul (though created and thus having a beginning) is eternal. Scripture teaches us that when mankind dies, though his body returns to dust, his spirit (or soul) is with the Lord (Gen 3:19; 2 Cor 5:8). When the believer is resurrected their transformed and glorified body will reunite with their soul, but whereas their body died and needed resurrection their soul has lived on, because it is immortal (1 Thes 4:13-18). Paul speaks of the decay of the outer man (which needs resurrection) but of the renewal of the inner man, the soul, which lives on.
Eternal Souls Do Not Equal Eternal Life
Though the soul is immortal, just as the body needs a resurrection, the soul needs regeneration. Humanity is born “dead in our trespasses and sins” (Eph 2:1). However, God does not leave us without hope. Jesus, though eternally God, as the eternal Son, put on humanity—He is truly God and truly man—lived a perfect life we could not live, died a death on the cross we deserved, received the judgment of God we deserved, was buried, and three days later rose again. He did this so that all who would believe in him might be reconciled to Him, the Father, and the Spirit. When a person trusts in Him, they are regenerated, and to the point of our current study, their souls are made new (John 3:1-21).
Conclusion
To summarize, the soul is the life-giving immaterial part of the human being which God created without which mankind would not be whole; he is body and soul. God created mankind in His image, breathing life into him, part and parcel of which is this life-giving reality known as the soul. The soul needs to be regenerated which is what happens when one places their trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, His perfect life, death, and resurrection as the only means to be reconciled to a Holy Triune God.
For the Kids:
When my kids were little, we taught them Biblical truths with questions and answers. One of those questions was: “Who made you?” If your parents are teaching you in the same way, you may know the answer to this: “God made me!” This truth is very important for you to know. It is also important for you to know that God made you as one who not only has a body, but also a soul. The soul is part of who you are, that part of you that you can’t see. Just like it is necessary for your heart to beat, your soul is also necessary for you to live. Though our bodies get hurt and will eventually die (and need to be raised to new life), our souls live on forever. Just because our souls live forever, doesn’t mean that we will live forever with God. Every part of us, even our souls, are sinful, so we need Jesus to make our souls new. He lived without sin, died for sinners, and rose again, so that if we trust in Him, our souls will be made new (and one day our bodies too), and we will live with God forever!
[1] The Second London Confession, 4.2.
While the Old Testament prophets appear to have understood most of what they declared, God did not allow the majority of those in the old covenant to understand the prophets’ words (e.g., Isa 6:9–10). And as a judgment, the people’s blindness continued into the days of Christ (Matt 13:13–15)1. Nevertheless, fulfilling Old Testament predictions (e.g., Deut 30:8), Jesus’s teaching and work began disclosing to his disciples truths that remained distant from the crowds: “To you has been given the secret [Greek mystērion] of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables” (Mark 4:11–12).
The New Testament’s “mystery” language appears to come from the book of Daniel, where the Greek translation uses the term mystērion (“mystery”) to render the Aramaic rāz (2:18–19, 27–30, 47). King Nebuchadnezzar has a troubling dream and then looks to Daniel for the full interpretive revelation. The “mystery” that God revealed to Daniel (v. 19) included both the initial dream and its interpretation, as the God in heaven “who reveals mysteries … made known to King Nebuchadnezzar what will be in the latter days” (v. 28). When Jesus alludes to this text by speaking about the “secret of the kingdom” (Mark 4:11–12), he indicates that the Old Testament’s message would remain permanently hidden for some but temporarily hidden for others.
The New Testament employs the Greek word mystērion twenty-eight times, all as a technical term for an end-time reality largely hidden in the Old Testament but now disclosed more fully through Christ. All the New Testament occurrences deal with the end-times and are in some way linked to the Old Testament.
What was this “mystery”? In the Synoptic Gospels, the “mystery” relates to the unexpected, gradual, already-but-not-yet fulfillment of God’s end-time reign (e.g., Mark 4:11). In Paul’s epistles, which comprise twenty-one of the term’s New Testament occurrences, the revealed “mystery” or “mysteries” refer to insight into God’s end-times purposes (e.g., 1 Cor 4:1) most directly associated with more fully understanding Christ and the gospel (e.g., Rom 16:25). In Revelation, “mystery” relates to the nature of the church (Rev 1:20) and the self-destructive nature of Babylon (17:5, 7).
Jesus, Paul, and John speak of God revealing a “mystery” to communicate how, in Christ, we gain full disclosure of things that God significantly hid from most in the old-covenant era. Strikingly, as Romans 16:25–27 teaches, the very “mystery” that is now revealed in and through Christ is also now made known to all nations through the Old Testament itself. In the coming of Christ, an era of understanding replaces an era of ignorance as light overcomes darkness and as God grants a fresh perspective on old truths (cf. Eph 3:4–5).
Still, G. K. Beale and Benjamin Gladd rightly affirm that “full or ‘complete’ meaning is actually ‘there’ in the Old Testament text; it is simply partially ‘hidden’ or latent, awaiting a later revelation, whereby the complete meaning of the text is revealed to the interpreter.”2 These parallel truths bear at least three implications for interpreting the Old Testament as the Christian Scripture it is: (a) Only those with spiritual sight can interpret the Old Testament correctly. (b) Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection provide a necessary lens for fully understanding the Old Testament’s meaning. (c) There is an organic relationship between the Old Testament’s testimony and the meaning the New Testament authors attribute to it.
Regarding many of his Jewish contemporaries, Paul declared, “For to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away” (2 Cor 3:14). Those who understand “God’s mystery, which is Christ” (Col 2:2), are those to whom God has given “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor 4:6). Indeed, Christ is “the radiance of the glory of God” (Heb 1:3), and by his Spirit, he enlightens the eyes to see what the Old Testament revealed all along (Eph 1:17–18).
To have the “mystery” of God’s kingdom purposes revealed means, in part, that one’s spiritual eyes have been opened to properly understand the Old Testament. Through rebirth, we become spiritual people who can spiritually discern and rightly understand spiritual truths (1 Cor 2:13–14). True Christians are the only ones who can rightly grasp all that God intends to communicate through the Old Testament.
The Old Testament is filled with declarations, characters, events, and institutions that bear meaning in themselves but also find that meaning enhanced and clarified in Christ’s person and work. For example, the meaning of events like the exodus or of objects like the sacrificial lamb are amplified when the New Testament treats Christ’s saving work as an “exodus” (Luke 9:31) and calls him “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Jesus’s triumph validated him as the ultimate object of all Old Testament hopes, and this, in turn, transformed the apostles’ reading of the Old Testament (John 2:22; 12:16).
Once Paul met the resurrected Christ, he, too, never read the Old Testament the same way. Indeed, as an Old Testament preacher, he “decided to know nothing … except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2). At no stage in interpreting the Old Testament should Christians act as if Jesus has not come. Reading from the beginning through Scripture gets us to Christ, but once we find him, we must interpret all the Old Testament through him.
Passages such as Roman 16:25–26, 1 Peter 1:10–11, and 2 Peter 1:20–21 imply that the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament is natural and unforced, aligning with the Old Testament’s own innate meaning, contours, structures, language, and flow. The New Testament authors are making organic connections with the whole of Scripture on its own terms, in alignment with God’s original intentions.
Other passages, such as Colossians 2:16–17, testify that the prophets often envisioned the very form we now enjoy, not only seeing the shadow but also embracing the substance that is Christ, though perhaps more like an acorn or sapling anticipates a great oak. Even if the Old Testament authors were not fully aware of all God was speaking through them, they would have affirmed retrospectively the trajectories that later biblical authors identify.
Scripture calls us to see both an organic unity and a progressive development between the Old and New Testaments. There is a natural connection between what the Old Testament human authors intended and what the New Testament human authors saw fulfilled in Jesus, but the Old Testament meaning is now often fuller, expanded, or deepened because through Christ God reveals the mystery. Jesus’s saving work supplies the spiritual light that enables one’s spiritual senses to see and savor rightly, and his person and work provide the interpretive lens for properly understanding and applying the Old Testament itself in a way that most completely magnifies God in Christ. Figure 1 unpacks what is happening with respect to Scripture’s progressive revealing of Old Testament meaning, and figure 2 elucidates further the way Christ operates as a lens, supplying us a developed understanding of the Old Testament’s meaning.
The Old Testament is Christian Scripture, and God intends that we interpret it as such, not as if Christ has not come. We must read the Scripture forward, backward, and forward again. The Old Testament prophets knew they were writing for new-covenant saints living in the days of the Christ. Bound up in the gospel of Jesus Christ is the revelation of a “mystery that was kept secret for long ages but … through the prophetic writings has been made known to all nations” (Rom 16:25–26).
A relationship with Jesus is essential for rightly interpreting the Old Testament, for through him God enables understanding. By turning to Christ, “the veil is removed” (2 Cor 3:16). The light of Christ supplies us the needed spiritual sight for understanding the things of God, and the lens of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection provides the needed perspective for fully grasping the Old Testament’s meaning. God wrote the Old Testament for Christians, and he enables believing interpreters to grasp more fully than others both the meaning and the intended effect of the initial three-fourths of the Christian Scriptures.
1: See G. K. Beale and Benjamin L. Gladd, Hidden but Now Revealed: A Biblical Theology of Mystery (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 29–46.
2: Beale and Gladd, Hidden but Now Revealed, 330.
This blog series summarizes Jason S. DeRouchie’s forthcoming book, Delighting in the Old Testament: Through Christ and for Christ (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2024). You can pre-order your copy here.
Editor’s Note: The Theology in the Everyday series seeks to introduce and explain theological concepts in 500 words or less, with a 200-word section helping explain the doctrine to kids. At For The Church, we believe that theology should not be designated to the academy alone but lived out by faith in everyday life. We hope this series will present theology in such a way as to make it enjoyable, connecting theological ideas to everyday experience and encouraging believers to study theology for the glory of God and the good of the Church. This week, divine aseity.
You and I live in a world full of contingency and dependence. We require food for sustenance, water for hydration, rest for productivity, and the list goes on. To be human is to have needs, to be dependent is the lot of mankind, and we will never attain the independence and self-sufficiency we so often desire. If we did, we would no longer be human. The glories of independence and self-sufficiency are reserved for only one Being – namely, God. In Him all of our needs and dependencies find their rest, their true home and fulfillment in the only One who is self-existent, self-sufficient, free from all need or want, the source and plentitude of all life.
All of these are ways in which we can describe the aseity of God, a word that simply means that God is life in and of Himself. The term aseity comes from the Latin phrase “a se,” which means “from oneself.” When theologians speak of God being a se, they are trying to put words to the glorious reality that God does not derive His being or existence from anything outside of Himself. He is self-existent, meaning that He just simply is in the truest sense of the word.
In Psalm 36, David confesses that God is “the fountain of life,” the ever full and overflowing well of being from which we derive our life and breath (Psalm 36:9). All creation finds its true source and final end in the God who is uncreated, giving life and being to the world because He is life and being itself. This is why Augustine, in Confessions, speaks of God as “being in a supreme degree.” For God, it is “not one thing to be and another to live,” for in Him “the supreme degree of being and the supreme degree of life are one and the same thing.”[1]
Even God’s covenant name is a testimony to the reality of His self-existence. In Exodus 3 when God meets Moses in the burning bush to reveal His plan of salvation for the enslaved nation of Israel, He instructs Moses to tell Israel that “I AM” has sent him and will deliver Israel from their slavery (Exodus 3:14). And so He does. The God who hears Israel’s cry and delivers her from her bondage does so out of an immeasurable well of grace that finds its source in I AM, the God who simply is, just as His name declares.
For the Kids:
In the book of Genesis, the Bible tells us that God created the world and everything in it. The light you see shining every morning through your bedroom window, the clouds you see sailing through the sky on a sunny day, the stars you see beaming with light on a clear night, and much, much more, all came from God. God even created you, and He loves you and knows everything about you.
However, unlike you, me, and the world all around us, God was not created by anyone or anything. In the book of Psalms, the Bible teaches us that God is “the fountain of life,” which means that God is always alive, and He does not need anyone to create Him or give Him life. This also means that you and I are alive because God gave us life, and every breath we breathe and step we take comes from Him. He is always watching over us and caring for the world He created. Because He is always alive, we can trust Him to give us all that we need.
[1] St. Augustine, Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 8.
