Plantinga Ch. 4

 

This Chapter in Engaging God’s world is about our salvation and redemption.  God has made a Covenant with His people from the beginning of creation promising to save them from their sins.  Genesis 17:7, “ I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations to be an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee and thy seed after thee.”

When man fell, God provided a means to be saved.  One quote from the Plantinga Ch. 4 that I really liked is:“What we have lost… is a full sense of the power of God—to recruit people who have made terrible choices; to invade the most hopeless lives and fill them with light; to sneak up on people who are thinking about lunch, not God, and smack them up side the head with glory.”

I think that this is a very powerful statement concerning what happened to us after the fall, and how badly we need Christ to save us. 

Another quote that I really liked from this chapter concerns the Ten Commandments.  “…Ten Commandments, a set of requirements that people have to fulfill not in order to get rescued by God from slavery, but because they have been rescued.” This quote is telling us that we can’t do any good to participate in our own salvation.  It is entirely of God’s grace that we may be saved.  We obey God’s commandments because he has saved us, not in order that we may be saved. 

As a final word, “How fair and lovely is the hope which the Lord gave to the dead when He lay down like them beside them.  Rise up and come forth and sing praise to Him who has raised you from destruction.”  As a result of our glorious salvation, we should be thanking and praising God’s holy name.  We must also live our lives as witnesses to this wonderful truth.