Simply christian pdf download

But eventually the Israelites reached the land they had been promised. There, too, things went both well and badly, as other local tribes ruled over them and other liberators rose up to set them free. The centerpiece of what should have been the story of his kingdom being established was instead the story of his running away from his rebel son, Absalom. Again the pattern repeats itself: David goes into exile, and returns sadder and wiser.

This time the storyline ran out of steam. There was no return home. The kingdom of Judah struggled on, focused on Jerusalem. But as Assyria became weaker, a darker enemy arose: Babylon, which established its huge, sprawling, all-conquering empire, and swallowed up the little state of Judah like a sea monster gulping down a minnow.

Jerusalem was destroyed, Temple and all; the family of David was disgraced and decimated. The people who had sung the songs of yhwh found that the words stuck in their throats in a strange, hostile land. And then it happened again: a homecoming. After seventy years had passed, Babylon fell to Persia, and the new Persian ruler decided to send the Jews home. Jerusalem was reinhabited, and the Temple was rebuilt.

Exile and homecoming, the great theme of Jewish storytelling from that day to this, was cemented into the consciousness of the people who once again began to go up to Jerusalem in the belief that heaven and earth overlapped in the Temple, that there yhwh would meet with his people in forgiveness and fellowship, that his project to rescue his people and set the world to rights was still on course despite everything.

At least, not the same as it had been in the world of David and Solomon, when Israel was free and independent, when the surrounding nations were subservient, when people came from far away to see the beauty of Jerusalem and to hear the Israel 79 wisdom of the king.

Israel had come back from Babylon; but, as some writers of the time put it, they were still slaves—in their own land! Was this, wondered the Jewish people, what homecoming was really all about? Was this what it would look like when God rescued his people and put the world to rights?

Somewhere in the middle of this period a learned Jew compiled a book of stories about Jewish heroes and visionaries under foreign rule. The book, named Daniel after its principal character, emphasizes the undying hope that the whole world will somehow be brought to order under the kingship of the one creator God, yhwh, the God of Abraham. We are familiar with people in our own day who use old prophecies to calculate current events. Lots of Jews in what we call the last two centuries bc tried to work out, on the basis of this prophecy, when their exile would be over, when God would rescue them and set the world to rights.

This is where we meet a belief which goes on to become one of the leading themes of early Christianity. Earlier Israelite poets and prophets had declared that their God would become truly king of the world. The Hope of Israel Almost, but not quite. First, the king. The spectacular promises God made to David— promises that his royal house would continue forever 2 Samuel 7 —came on the back of warnings issued by the prophet Samuel about the oppressive way all earthly kings behave 1 Samuel 8.

Psalm 89, one of the most majestic and haunting of the whole collection of the Psalms, states the problem as starkly as it can be put. On the one hand, God made all these great promises to David; on the other hand, it looks as though they have all come to nothing. What are you going to do about it? When he takes his throne, the poor will get justice at last; creation itself will sing for joy.

May he judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice. Israel 81 May the mountains yield prosperity for the people, and the hills, in righteousness. May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor. The echoing voice that calls for justice will be answered at last.

Second, the Temple. In theory, as we have seen, the Jews believed that the Temple was the place where heaven and earth met. Even the priests who worked there treated it disdainfully, as the prophet Malachi complained. In the centuries immediately before Jesus, two men used Temple restoration as a means to advance their own royal claims, despite the fact that neither of them was descended from David himself.

Judas Maccabaeus enjoyed spectacular success in his rebellion against Syria in bc. He overthrew the foreign tyrant and restored the Temple which had been used for pagan worship to its proper use. That was enough to establish his family as a royal house for a century and more. Their dynasty came to an end a few years before the Temple itself was destroyed in the year But the principle was established.

The deep human longing for spirituality, for access to God, would be answered at last. Third, the Torah, the Law of Moses. That is the logic underlying the increasingly focused study and practice of the Torah from the Babylonian exile to the time of Jesus and beyond. The Torah was never intended as a charter for individuals, as though anyone, anywhere, might decide to try to keep its precepts and see what would happen.

It was given to a people, edited by and for that people, and applied in the postexilic period at least to that people; and at its heart it was about how that people would live together, under God and in harmony—that is, justice—with one another. Anthropologists have increasingly recognized that many of the taboos and customs enshrined in the Torah were, at the symbolic level at least, ways of keeping the nation together, of protecting its identity as the covenant people of the one God, especially during times of pagan threat.

Both moves had the same purpose: they were ways of destroying national identity, of breaking the spirit. The Maccabean revolt was as much about the Torah as it was about the Temple. And the Torah was all about living as the people—the family—of God. Israel 83 It was an answer to that cry for true relationship, with God and with one another, which echoes around every human heart. Fourth, new creation. Daniel was not the only book to reach right back to the global promises God had made to Abraham.

The beauty of this new world is matched by the beauty of the ancient poetry which evokes it. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many people; they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

Isaiah —4 The prophet is holding out a vision of peace and hope, not only for Israel but for all the nations. The spirit of yhwh shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of yhwh. His delight shall be in the fear of yhwh. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.

He shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins. The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.

The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of yhwh, as the waters cover the sea. Isaiah —9 The rule of the Messiah, then, will bring peace, justice, and a completely new harmony to the whole creation. Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live.

I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David. See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to yhwh for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off. Isaiah , 3—5, 12—13 And the key theme, which points on from the great poetry of the Old Testament to the astonished delight of the New, is the renewal of the entire cosmos, of heaven and earth together, and the promise that in this new world all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well: For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.

But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says yhwh.

Isaiah —18, 25 That selection of passages could have been multiplied several times over. The theme of a new Eden the thorns and briers of Genesis 3 replaced with beautiful shrubs picks up one of the main subtexts of the whole biblical story. Ultimately, the real exile, the real leaving-home moment, was the expulsion of humankind from the Garden of Eden. The themes of king and Temple, of Torah and new creation, of justice, spirituality, relationship, and beauty, come rushing together in the dark theme which lies at the heart of the same book of Isaiah.

Israel 87 The lifeboat goes out to the rescue, and the captain gets drowned in the process. That theme, developed out of the royal picture in Isaiah 11 but with the strange new twist of a vocation to obedient suffering, is laid out, step by step, in Isaiah 42, 49, 50, and 52— The Servant will be cast away, like Israel in exile, overwhelmed with shame, suffering, and death; and then brought through, and out the other side.

This message is taken up in different, though converging, ways in other prophecies, not least in Jeremiah through the theme of the new covenant, and Ezekiel as he declares that God will cleanse his people, give them a new heart, and take them back to their own land in a rescue operation for which the only appropriate metaphor is the resurrection of the dead.

We noticed in the previous chapter how the Temple functioned that way. The God of Israel is the creator and redeemer of Israel and the world.

It is not only heaven and earth that are to come together. Rich, multilayered, full of pathos and power. But why should anyone suppose that it—or anything else that might be built upon it—is anything more than a dream? The whole New Testament is written to answer that question. And the answers all focus, of course, on Jesus of Nazareth. Something that happened to Jesus of Nazareth. Something that happened through Jesus of Nazareth.

In other words, Christianity is not about a new moral teaching— as though we were morally clueless and in need of some fresh or clearer guidelines. So what is Christianity about, then? He has done it. A great door has swung open in the cosmos which can never again be shut. In particular, we are all invited—summoned, actually—to discover, through following Jesus, that this new world is indeed a place of justice, spirituality, relationship, and beauty, and that we are not only to enjoy it as such but to work at bringing it to birth on earth as in heaven.

In listening to Jesus, we discover whose voice it is that has echoed around the hearts and minds of the human race all along. Writing about Jesus has been a growth industry for the last century or more. We still date our lives in reference to his supposed birth. Actually, the sixth-century monk who did the calculation got it wrong by a few years; Jesus was probably born in or shortly before 4 bc, the year when Herod the Great died.

In my country, even those who know little or nothing about Jesus still use his name as a swearword, which is a kind of backhanded compliment to his ongoing cultural impact.

There are plenty of those. Something about Jesus, and the chance that there might be more to him than our culture has realized, still awakens in millions a sense of new possibilities and prospects. People write revisionist biographies of Winston Churchill, for whom we have truckloads of evidence; or of Alexander the Great, for whom we have considerably less.

We obviously have far less material about him than we do about, say, Churchill or John F. But we know a good deal more about Jesus than about most people in the ancient world—say, Tiberius, the Roman emperor when Jesus died, or Herod Antipas, the Jewish ruler at the same time. In fact, we have so many sayings attributed to Jesus, so many actions he is said to have performed, that we are spoiled for choice, and a short treatment like the present chapter and the next can only touch on a few of them.

Nobody tells us what Jesus looked like or what he ate for breakfast. This is because it has been central to Christian experience, not merely to Christian dogma, that in Jesus of Nazareth heaven and earth have come together once and for all. It is Jesus himself. The same cosmology which made sense of the claim about the Temple makes sense of this claim, too. It is more like writing the biography of a friend who is still very much alive and still liable to surprise us. It is hard enough, even when studying the historical evidence with full seriousness, to avoid remaking Jesus in our own image.

When we abandon history, the brakes are off and the portrait slides away into fantasy. The nastiest of these fantasies was the attempt by some German theologians in the s to invent a non-Jewish indeed, an anti-Jewish Jesus—an attempt which has some worrying similarities with more recent non-Jewish portraits of Jesus. One of the healthy signs in contemporary scholarship has been the determined attempt to understand Jesus afresh within the Judaism of his day.

By itself, though, this still leaves several questions unanswered. Granted that Jesus was a first-century Jew, what sort of a firstcentury Jew was he?

This at least puts us at the right point from which to begin. Can We Trust the Gospels? The key question for studying Jesus is: Can we trust the gospels? There has been a recent spate of books, both scholarly and popular, urging us to think that these gospels were only four among dozens of similar works that were around in the early church, and that these four were eventually privileged, and the others discarded, suppressed, or even banned.

Does this mean we have to tear up all the pictures of Jesus based on the canonical gospels and start again? All kinds of other documents have indeed turned up, not least a whole cache found in Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in , some of which give us fascinating glimpses of what people were saying about Jesus at the time of their writing. The Dead Sea Scrolls, by the way—found not long after the Nag Hammadi documents—say nothing whatever about Jesus or the early Christians, despite many ill-informed assertions to the contrary.

But none of them, in fact, is able to trump the gospels we already had. Take the best known, and one of the longest, of the Nag Hammadi documents: a collection of supposed sayings of Jesus known as the Gospel of Thomas.

This is the book which, it has often been suggested, could and should be treated as at least equal, and quite possibly superior, to the canonical gospels as a historical source for Jesus himself. The version of Thomas we now have, like most of the Nag Hammadi material, is written in Coptic, a language spoken in Egypt at the time. Sayings have, in many cases, been quietly doctored in Thomas to express a very different viewpoint.

There is hardly any narrative about things Jesus did or things that happened to him. But the four canonical gospels are quite different. They are not mere collections of sayings. Part of the reason for the historical study of Jesus and the gospels is that the church itself, let alone the world, needs reminding again and again of what the gospels are really talking about.

What is more, those four canonical gospels must all have been written by about ad 90 at the very latest. I am inclined to think they are probably a lot earlier than that, but they cannot be later. Palestine is a small country. In a world without print and electronic media, people were eager to hear and eager to pass on stories about anyone and anything out of the ordinary.

The chances are, as John suggests at the end of his gospel, that there was in fact far more material available about Jesus than any one of the gospel writers had space to put down. Source material must have been plentiful. As one of the early preachers says, these things were not done in a corner. It is not as easy to reconstruct the sources of the gospels as has sometimes been imagined. It is much more likely, in my judgment, that the gospel writers were able to draw on a bewildering variety of sources, many of them oral in a world where oral reports were prized more highly than written ones , and many of them from eyewitnesses.

Assessing their historical worth can be done, if at all, only by the kind of painstaking historical work which I and others have attempted at some length but for which there is no room in a book of the present kind. Above all, it makes coherent sense in itself.

The gospels tell the story in such a way as to hold together the ancient promises and the urgent current context, with Jesus in the middle of it all. There is no good reason to doubt that this was how Jesus himself saw his own work.

Daniel had envisaged a coming time when the monsters that is, the pagan empires would do their worst, and God would vindicate his people to set everything straight.

The world was to be turned the right way up at last. Heaven was arriving on earth. The Romans put down the rebellions with their usual cold, brutal thoroughness. God, he said, was quite capable of raising up children for Abraham from the stones lying on the ground. It was more devastating. God was issuing a fresh challenge to Israel, echoing back to his promises to Abraham: Israel is indeed the light of the world, but its present policies have been putting that light under a bucket.

How do you get across a message as radical as that? How do you say something so drastic to people who are expecting something quite different?

In two ways in particular: by symbols particularly dramatic actions and by stories. Jesus used both. There is no doubt, historically, that he possessed healing powers; that was why he attracted not only crowds but also accusations of being in league with the devil. Nor was it just a way of attracting people to listen to his message. Rather, the healing was a dramatic sign of the message itself. Equally, he told stories—stories which got under the skin of his contemporaries precisely because they both were and were not the stories they were expecting.

The ancient prophets had spoken about God replanting Israel after the long winter of exile; Jesus told stories about people sowing seed, about some seed being fruitful but a good deal going to waste, about seeds growing secretly and then a sudden harvest, about tiny seeds producing great shrubs.

And there were. It was in response to this criticism that Jesus told some of his most poignant and powerful parables. The younger of two sons leaves home, disgraces himself and his family, and then returns penitent to an astonishing welcome.

He casts a shadow across the pages of the story. But in Jerusalem, the center of power, it was the chief priests, the guardians of the Temple itself, who actually ran things. Behind them all, operating through a governor who could call up reinforcements from nearby Syria, was the brooding power of Rome. It was time for God to act, to take his throne, to rescue his people, to bring in his kingdom, to put the world to rights.

H H H So what did Jesus intend by it all? What did he think would happen next? Why did he walk into trouble in this way? And why, after his own violent death, did anyone take him seriously any longer, let alone suppose that he was the living embodiment of the one true God? Not all Jews of this period believed in or wanted a coming Messiah. But those who did, and they were many, cherished a frequently repeated set of expectations as to what the anointed one would do when he arrived.

He would rebuild, or at least cleanse and restore, the Temple a task that, as noted earlier, the Herod family had undertaken, to press their claim to be the true royal house. A hundred years after Jesus, Simeon ben Kosiba was hailed as Messiah by one of the greatest rabbis of the day, Akiba. Simeon minted coins with the year 1, then 2, and then 3, before his rebellion was crushed by the Romans.

One of those coins carries a picture of the Temple, which was still in ruins after the disaster of ad He had led no military uprising, nor did it look as though he would do so. Some have tried to argue otherwise, but the case is hard to make.

He had acted in powerful ways, collecting and holding crowds; but then, just when people were going to hail him as king, he had slipped away and escaped John Most people saw Jesus: Rescue and Renewal him as a prophet, and Jesus seems to have acted and spoken in such a way as to encourage that view. Nevertheless, his closest followers saw him as more than just a prophet, and he himself hinted at this when he spoke cryptically about his cousin John.

One of the last biblical prophets had spoken of the prophet Elijah returning to prepare the world for the coming great day. After Elijah there was only one person left to come—namely, the Messiah himself. Jesus had suggested that John was Elijah.

The implication was clear Matthew — But nobody in this period supposed that the Messiah would have to suffer, let alone die.

Indeed, that was the very opposite of normal expectations. Jesus appears to have seen it differently, and here we come close to the heart of his own understanding of his vocation. Jesus seems to have combined the two interpretations in a creative, indeed explosive, way. The Servant would be both royal and a sufferer. And the Servant would be. Jesus himself. Like an optician putting several different lenses in front of our eyes until at last we can read the screen in front of us, we need to have all these themes and images in mind if we are to understand what Jesus believed he was called to do, and why.

There is every reason to suppose that Jesus did the same, and that he allowed this study to shape his sense of what he had to do. His task, he believed, was to bring the great story of Israel to its decisive climax.

The long-range plan of God the creator—to rescue the world from evil and to put everything to rights at last—was going to come true in him. Temple, Supper, and Cross Matters came to a head when Jesus, with his disciples and a growing crowd, arrived in Jerusalem for one last Passover. The choice of festival was no accident. Jesus was as alive as anyone to the symbolic power of the ancient scriptural stories. But, to the surprise of many in Jerusalem, on his arrival he directed his attack not at the Roman garrison, but at the Temple itself.

As with most of his symbolic actions, Jesus backed this up with detailed teaching that made the same point: God would destroy the city and the Temple, and would vindicate not the Jewish nation as a whole, but Jesus himself and his followers. Jesus must have known the likely result, though he could still have avoided arrest had he wanted to.

All the Jewish festivals are packed full of meaning, and Passover is the most meaningful of all. The festival involves a dramatic retelling of the exodus story, reminding everybody of the time when the pagan tyrant was overthrown, when Israel was set free, when God acted powerfully to save his people.

Celebrating Passover always carries, to this day, the hope that God will do so again. He spoke of the Passover cup as containing his own blood. The time had now come when, at last, God would rescue his people, and the whole world, not from mere political enemies, but from evil itself, from the sin which had enslaved them.

In meeting the fate which was rushing toward him, he would be the place where heaven and earth met, as he hung suspended between the two. He would love his enemies, turn the other cheek, go the second mile. The next few hours were tragic and brutal. Jesus wrestled in prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, with the darkness which he felt caving in upon him while he waited for arrest. The chief priests did what one might have expected: carried out a quick, quasi-legal procedure—enough to frame a charge of seditious talk against the Temple and ultimately of blasphemy.

The Roman governor was weak and indecisive; the priests, manipulative. Jesus went to his death on a charge of which he was innocent—actual rebellion against Rome—but of which most of his contemporaries were guilty, at least in intention.

Barabbas, a rebel leader, went free in his stead. The meaning of the story is found in every detail, as well as in the broad narrative. The pain and tears of all the years were met together on Calvary. Nothing in all the history of paganism comes anywhere near this combination of event, intention, and meaning. Join over Simply Christian is essential reading for anyone who wants to consider the real fundamentals of Christianity or is intrigued by its claims about the place of justice, beauty and love in our daily lives.

A Mere Christianity of the 21st century, coming out as Tom Wright's popularity grows and grows, and at a peak point of interest in CS Lewis. The book provides an intelligent, grownup introduction to Christianity - what Christians believe, and why, how should we live? Not since C. In Simply Christian, renowned biblical scholar and Anglican bishop N.

Wright makes a case for Christianity from the ground up. Why is justice fair? Why are so many people pursuing spirituality?

Why do we crave relationship? And why is beauty so beautiful? Wright argues that each of these questions takes us into the mystery of who God is and what he wants from us. For two thousand years. Get Simply Christian Books now! Some of the techniques listed in Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.

DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url. If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed.

Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to religion, theology lovers. From the author of the acclaimed Simply Christian and Surprised by Hope comes a book that addresses the question that has plagued humans for centuries—what is our purpose?

As Christians, what are we to do with that ambiguous time between baptism and the funeral? It's easy to become preoccupied with who gets into heaven; the real challenge is how we are going to live in the here and now.

Wright dispels the common misconception that Christian living is nothing more than a checklist of dos and don'ts. Nor is it a prescription to "follow your heart" wherever it may lead.

Instead, After You Believe reveals the Bible's call for a revolution—a transformation of character that takes us beyond our earthly pursuit of money, sex, and power into a virtuous state of living that allows us to reflect God and live more worshipful, fulfilling lives.

We are all spiritual seekers, intuitively knowing there is more to life than we suspect. This is a book for anyone who is hoping there is something more while we're here on Earth. There is. We are being called to join the revolution, and Wright insightfully encourages readers to find new purpose and clarity by taking us on an eye-opening journey through key biblical passages that promise to radically alter the work of the church and the direction of our lives.

The final book of the Bible, Revelation prophesies the ultimate judgement of mankind in a series of allegorical visions, grisly images and numerological predictions. According to these, empires will fall, the "Beast" will be destroyed and Christ will rule a new Jerusalem. With an introduction by Will Self. Focus on what matters most—and intentionally remove the rest. Logically, we all know our purpose in life is not wrapped up in accumulating possessions, wealth, power, and prestige—Jesus is very clear about that—but society tells us otherwise.

This book will be helpful to at least three groups of people: 1. Those who have never heard of the "Restoration Movement. The book introduces readers to Christian Churches and Churches of Christ which continue to share this vision. Those who know a little about this fellowship of churches, but want to learn more. Those who want an up-to-date look at the most recent available facts and figures, along with a review of the basic principles of the Restoration Movement.

Book jacket. John MacArthur has an answer for those finding the Christian life too complicated, their zeal diminished, their relationship with Jesus grown cold and predictable. This practical tool can help readers restore the fire and conviction of their first love for Christ by helping them to better understand His character, His Glory, and His love for them.

MacArthur counsels all who want more love for Christ to pursue Him by making Christ their focus each day, in every activity, in every contact, and in every thought. Featuring a brand-new cover design, this edition of N. Wright first outlines the essential messages of six major New Testament books -- Hebrews, Colossians, Matthew, John, Mark, and Revelation -- looking in particular at their portrayal of Jesus and what he accomplished in his sacrificial death.

In the second part of the book Wright takes six key New Testament themes — resurrection, rebirth, temptation, hell, heaven, and new life in a new world — and considers their significance for the lives of present-day disciples. In Simply Jesus, bestselling author and leading Bible scholar N. Wright summarizes years of modern Biblical scholarship and models how Christians can best retell the story of Jesus today. In a style similar to C.

The Christian faith is full of apparent paradoxes: - a compassionate God who sanctions genocide - an all-powerful God who allows horrific suffering - a God who owns everything yet demands so much from his followers - a God who is distant and yet present at the same time Many of us have big questions that the Christian faith seems to leave unanswered.

So we push them to the back of our minds, for fear of destabilizing our beliefs.