During my dissertation process, I struggled greatly in writing the proposal, the prospectus, and many of my chapters. In addition to interpretational and theological difficulties, a lack of full understanding about a number of key elements concerning writing a dissertation made my task very challenging.

In answer to my prayers and the prayers of many others, God greatly helped me to progress by directing me to the best book that I have ever read concerning research writing: A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers, 7th Edition, by Kate L. Turabian. Had this book been available to me before I ever began writing my dissertation, I would have had far less difficulty with the process than I did. Moreover, the quality of my entire dissertation would have been much better.

Reading Part I of the book, Research and Writing: From Planning to Production, helped me immensely in understanding better what I needed to do to write a dissertation properly. I read it thoroughly at least once and skimmed it at least two other times.

I wish that I had had this work before I ever began college. It would have saved me so much grief over the years.

Anyone who wants to do any kind of research writing well should consider reading Part I of this book several times. I also recommend that anyone who wants to do well in high school and college in any academic subject should make good use of this superb resource.

Scripture provides information about Paul’s conversion in five passages (Acts 9, 22, 26; Gal. 1; 1 Tim. 1). Christ’s judging for God is an easily overlooked aspect of his conversion.

Paul was traveling to Damascus to persecute believers when Christ appeared to him to judge him by confronting him with his sin and by blinding him (9:3-9).[1] Statements in parallel accounts by Ananias (22:14) and Paul (Gal. 1:16) show God’s ultimate agency and Christ’s intermediate agency (cf. 9:17, 26:16) in His appearing to Paul. Through His judging Paul, Christ provided salvation for him.[2]Hence, the conversion accounts of Paul evidence the soteriological importance of Christ’s work as the God-appointed Judge.

In Luke 18:1-5, Luke records Jesus’ parable about the repeated appeals of a widow to an unrighteous judge. Jesus gave the parable to convey the necessity of continual prayer in the midst of circumstances that tend to make people lose heart (18:1). Since the widow persisted in her appeals to the judge that he avenge her against her adversary, he gave her the relief that she requested (18:2-5).

Christ demanded that His teaching concerning the words of this unrighteous judge be heard (18:6). He then emphatically asserted through the use of a rhetorical question that demands a positive answer that God, the righteous Judge, in stark contrast to the unrighteous judge in the parable, will certainly avenge His elect who are crying out to Him day and night (18:7a). In the same question, He also taught that God would do so in spite of delays in His response (18:7b).

Furthermore, He proceeded to declare directly that God would quickly give them justice (18:8a). Christ followed up with a question that points to the necessity of faith in God’s ultimate vindication of His own at the coming of the Son of Man (18:8b). The flow of thought in the passage shows that Christ, as the Son of Man, is the One who will execute that vengeance as the Father’s agent.

By giving this parable and its application, Christ validated appeals to God to avenge His own of their adversaries. The emphatic teaching in this parable strongly implies that believers’ crying out to the Father to avenge them of their oppressors is a righteous practice. Such appeals are in keeping with many similar appeals in the Old Testament (for example, Ps. 10) as well as related content in the New Testament (Rom. 15:31; 2 Thess. 3:2).[1]

Furthermore, Christ’s teaching here accords with His own supreme commitment to entrust Himself in His sufferings to the Father as “the One who judges righteously” (1 Pet. 2:23; cf. Luke 23:46). Moreover, this parable underscores that through unfailing prayer to God, faith in Christ is essential for properly handling injustices that believers are powerless to overcome (cf. Acts 7:59-60).[2] Luke’s inclusion of this account in his Gospel argues for the importance of this dimension of the scriptural teaching about Christ as God’s judicial delegate.[3]

In the account of Abraham’s intercession for Sodom (Gen. 18:16-33) and the subsequent judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah (19:1-29), God’s work of judgment through agents is clear. Genesis 18:1-15 shows that the Lord appeared to Abraham with two other men. After two of the group departed (18:22), Abraham interceded with the Third (18:23-32), the Lord, “the One who is judging all the earth” (18:25, my translation).

The two who left were angels (19:1). Later in Sodom, they supernaturally turned away the attempt of the men of the city to molest Lot (19:9-11). They made clear their mission as emissaries of the Lord both explicitly (“the Lord has sent us to destroy it,” 19:13) and by stating that the Lord was the One who was about to destroy the city.

The subsequent account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, however, makes no mention of the activity of the angels in destroying those cities (19:24-29). It states that the Lord who appeared to Abraham destroyed them by raining “brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven” (19:24). This verse shows that the One who destroyed those cities was the preincarnate Christ, and that He did so as the agent of Another, the Lord who was in heaven.

Verse 24 also shows that the righteous Judge of all the earth with whom Abraham interceded (18:25) was the preincarnate Christ. Genesis 18-19, therefore, presents that His divine working as the Lord, the righteous Judge who spares and destroys (18:23-32), was yet as the minister of God’s judgment. This passage that presents the deity of the preincarnate Christ and presents Him as the Lord, the righteous judicial agent of Yahweh, testifies, therefore, to the importance of His judicial agency with reference to His being the Lord. Moreover, in view of the abundant use of κύριος in Genesis (in the LXX) to present God as the Judge,[1] its use in Genesis 18-19 in explicit connection with an emphatic use of the verb κρίνω to speak of work of the preincarnate Christ establishes an important judicial significance for its subsequent reference to Him as κύριος.[2]

Many later Old Testament references to this account further support viewing this passage as an important one.[3] In addition, the New Testament writers’ extensive use of Genesis 18 and 19 (three quotations, twenty-nine allusions and verbal parallels, UBS3) further validates the assessment of these chapters as important to the teaching of the New Testament. Of particular significance are the several New Testament references to the judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah that show that this is an important account for understanding apostolic teaching concerning Christ as God’s judicial agent.[4]

Genesis 18-19 shows Christ’s rendering judgment for God. Because Genesis 3:15 prophesied of His future work of judgment, Scripture begins with testimony about Christ’s judging for God both in history and in the future.

Isaiah 36-37 records Yahweh’s judicial deliverance (37:7, 29, 36) of His people, Judah, from the blasphemous assault of the Assyrians. The importance of the deliverance recorded in this account is confirmed by the lengthy records of it in two other books of the Old Testament (2 Kings 18:13-19:37 and 2 Chron. 32:1-23).

Faced with a humanly insurmountable opponent that reproached Yahweh as being incapable of deliverance, King Hezekiah (37:14-20) and Isaiah (cf. 2 Chron. 32:20) prayed to Yahweh. They requested that Yahweh rebuke the arrogant assertions of the Assyrians (37:29), who blasphemed Yahweh as being even less capable of deliverance (2 Chron. 32:15) than the deities of the peoples they had already conquered (36:13-20). They requested His deliverance from the hand of the king of Assyria so that all the kingdoms of the world would know that He alone is the Lord (37:20).

In response to their prayers, Yahweh promised to defend Jerusalem and to deliver it for His own sake and for the sake of His servant David (37:21, 33-35). Yahweh’s promise made no mention of His use of any agent (37:35). The account of the actual deliverance, however, states, “Then the angel of the Lord went out, and struck 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians; and when men arose early in the morning, behold, all of these were dead” (37:36),[1] indicating that part of the judgment that Yahweh promised He would render was actually carried out by the Angel of the Lord.[2]

Unlike Isaiah 37 and 2 Kings 19, the parallel account in 2 Chronicles 32 does not record Yahweh’s promise of deliverance. In addition, it differs from the other accounts by specifying that ”the Lord sent an angel who destroyed every mighty warrior, commander and officer in the camp of Assyria” (32:21).

This version of the account explicitly states that the angel was sent by Yahweh to judge for Him. The chronicler adds, “So the Lord saved Hezekiah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem from the hand of Sennacherib the king of Assyria” (32:22a). Because the Lord delivered them from the Assyrians through the destruction that was effected by the angel whom He sent (32:21), these verses show that He saved them through the work of the angel as His judicial agent.

The account of Yahweh’s deliverance of Hezekiah, including the significant variation between Isaiah 37 and 2 Chronicles 32, has important bearing on the assessment of passages that do not explicitly speak either of Christ’s judging or of His judging as God’s judicial agent in contexts that were originally spoken of as judgment that Yahweh promised to execute (See, for example, Acts 3 and 7 compared with Deuteronomy 18). It shows that understanding Christ’s judging for God in such passages despite an explicit statement to that effect is biblically based (cf. 2 Sam. 24:12-13 with 24:15-16; John 5:22).

It also shows the vital link between God’s promise of deliverance for His people who trust in Him and Christ’s judicial work for God. As the Angel of the Lord, He was God’s judicial executor who both saved God’s people and destroyed their enemies.

The books of the NT in their canonical form are twenty-seven books that were inspired by God as whole documents, and not as separate discourses, chapters, or verses. Because God did not inspire any particular parts of any book independently of the rest of the book, a right assessment of the any NT book is impossible without appropriate consideration of what each book as a whole communicates. An examination of the books from that perspective reveals that teaching about God permeates the NT since every book explicitly speaks of Him.

Furthermore, every book clearly refers to God as the Father and Jesus as the Christ, except Third John, which has three occurrences of “God” (1:6, 11 [2x]; likely references to the Father) and one mention of the Name (1:7; likely a reference to Christ). Thus, twenty-six of the twenty-seven NT books explicitly present Christ as distinct from the Father. Because the term Christ in Scripture signifies an anointed one who was “chosen, accredited, and empowered” by God for one or more particular tasks, this nearly universal use of that term for Jesus shows that the NT pervasively communicates His agency.[1]

Moreover, each book does so at the beginning of the book:

God as the Father is mentioned in distinction from Jesus of Nazareth in the first chapter of each book by the use of one or more of the following titles for Jesus: “Son” (Heb.); “Jesus” (Luke, Acts); and, “Christ” (all the remaining books except Matthew and 3 John). Matthew speaks of Christ as distinct from the Father through references to the Father as Lord (1:20, 22, 24). Third John likely presents Christ as “the Name” in distinction from the Father as God.

Teaching that communicates the agency of Jesus as God’s Christ, therefore, is a pervasive emphasis of the NT.