**This response is thorough, easy to understand, and personable. The question is answered completely with appropriate background explanation to best help the questioner know God’s truth, and the tone is genuinely kind. **
Question: What is considered a/the major theme of the New Testament?
Profile: Male, North America, Over 60
Answered by: Darren Kendall, who has been a volunteer with us since June, 2015.
Answer: When we look at the New Testament as a whole, there is an obvious person who stands out, the person of Jesus of Nazareth. We see him as the focus of all 4 gospels, we see the early church speak boldly about him consistently in the book of Acts and he is the central truth that is the foundation of all the epistles. Therefore, when we are looking for a major theme in the New Testament, we must begin with Jesus. However, before we discuss the New Testament, I think it is important to briefly look at the Old Testament.
In the book of Genesis – the first book of the Old Testament – we are introduced to a problem. God created a paradise for humans to live, a paradise that allowed people to live in perfect relationship with God, yet Adam and Eve sinned—they disobeyed God which created a separation between God and man (Genesis 3). So man is separated from God and therein lies the problem. So we begin to ask this question, “How will humans become reconnected with God?” The story continues. We are soon introduced to a man named Abraham, a man whom God promises that he will create a great nation through (Genesis 17:1–8). God comes through on this promise, and Abraham and his wife Sarah give birth to their son Isaac. We follow the story of Abraham’s descendants—through Isaac comes Jacob, Jacob has 12 sons and they move into the land of Egypt. As we read the story of the formation of Israel, we are told time and time again that God will bless the world through Israel—God’s chosen nation. And so as we follow Israel’s history (beginning in the book of Exodus), we believe that it is through Israel that God will reveal himself to the world and restore man into a proper relationship with him. But as we look at the nation of Israel, we are immediately confronted by their failure to follow God’s commandment time and time again (Exodus 32 for example). By the time we get to the end of the Old Testament, we understand that it is not through the nation of Israel that God will restore people to himself because people are too trapped in their sin to save themselves. Instead there is going to be a Messiah, a Saviour who comes through the Nation of Israel and he will complete God’s redemptive work (Micah 5:2, Psalm 40:6–8, Isaiah 35:5–6) And it is at this point that we enter into the New Testament. And we enter into the New Testament with this question: “Who is the Messiah who will save us from our sins and restore us into relationship with God (Matthew 11:2–3)?” This question and answer to this question is the major theme of the New Testament as it is answered in the person and work of Jesus Christ — Jesus who is fully God and fully human and died on the cross in payment for our sins. The entirety of the New Testament writings point us to this—they point us to the truth of who Jesus was and what he accomplished on the cross through his death and resurrection.
So, to answer your question, there are many themes in the New Testament—both in individual books and the New Testament as a whole. However if you wanted to boil down the New Testament to one specific theme, the major theme of the New Testament is the saving work of Jesus (the Son of God) on the cross. This theme completes the narrative that began in the Old Testament and answered the question that began at the fall of man. This is the theme that the apostle Paul carried as he traveled through the Roman empire, which he did in unison with all the other disciples who carried the same message. Again, if you look at all the books in the New Testament, you will see the theme of Jesus as man’s Saviour front and center.
** This response is thorough, well written, and connects personally with the questioner. It does a good job of describing the tension between doing our best in all that we do for God’s glory and trusting the results to Him. The response explains biblical truth clearly, gives practical advice, encourages, and points the questioner to God. **
Question: I’ve been a caregiver for close to 5 years. Over the years I’ll overly report or just say nothing at times thinking I’m just being anxious. Whenever a resident passes away I think maybe I could’ve done MORE. Maybe I don’t say enough. It makes me feel so guilty and neglectful. I was thinking yesterday of a resident that passed 3 years ago. Right so long ago. And she passed maybe A day after I worked with her. I didn’t report that there was blood in her catheter. Maybe I was being lazy, maybe I thought someone else would notice it or that it was no big deal. To this day I don’t know what caused her death but I feel it’s my fault. I don’t know what to do with myself.
Profile: Female, North America, Christian, 26–35
Answered by: Beth Hyduke, who has been a volunteer with us since December, 2009.
Answer: Hello. Thanks for writing in with your question.
I have been an RN for over 15 years. In the case where a patient dies who is under our care, it is obviously not the outcome we desire or hope for as caregivers. In such cases, I have often reflected on decisions, interventions, and treatments that were done or deferred. It is easy to begin second-guessing what I and the rest of the team did or didn’t do, and wondering what we might have done differently that could have resulted in a more positive outcome. In one sense and to a certain degree, I believe this introspection is not only natural, but a necessary qualification to the seriousness of the work we do. We are dealing with people’s lives. How we perform on the job, and what we do or neglect to do, impacts not only our patients’ lives but the lives of their families in a significant way. As Christian healthcare workers, we need to take special care to follow the instruction of Colossians 3:23, to do our work diligently and to the best of our ability. In healthcare work, everyone we are dealing with is sick or in pain which if we’re not careful can cause us to become desensitized to the needs of the population we care for. It’s also busy and demanding work, physically, mentally, and emotionally, and unfortunately, the high pressure environment makes some healthcare workers more inclined to cut corners that should not be cut.
For these three reasons, everyone who works in the healthcare field should be conscientiously and constantly reviewing and critiquing their own aims, performance, and focus to make sure they have not become callous, insensitive, distracted, or negligent towards patients. This kind of introspective review can be remarkably beneficial and instructive as it can help shape our future practice. As human beings who are as fallible and as incapable as ever of seeing into the future, we are still able to learn and benefit from our past mistakes so that we are less likely to repeat them going forward.
I said that being conscientious enough to be your own professional critic is practically necessary and beneficial to a certain degree. The degree is of course determined by what we know and profess as Christians to be truth. We always need to remember that it is God who determines every person’s lifespan and fully controls when they die. As Ecclesiastes 3:2 puts it, there is “a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot…” Since we aren’t all-knowing and we don’t have access to this calendar, we can only try our hardest to help people live to their fullest until they die.
Additionally, the Bible teaches that it is God – not us – who heals people of their illnesses and infirmities, both physical and spiritual (Exodus 15:26, Psalm 103:3, Mark 2:17). God makes this amazing Self-claim in Deuteronomy 32:39: “…There is no other god but Me! I am the one who kills and gives life; I am the one who wounds and heals…” Matthew Henry once wrote, “God is the Great Physician. If we are kept well, it is He who keeps us; if we are made well, it is He who recovers us.” And, I would add, when a patient dies from any number of physical causes, it is ultimately because God has purposefully exercised His divine prerogative to take them at that precise moment in time. If we remembered and acknowledged God’s sovereignty throughout the span of human life, it would revolutionize healthcare.
From the Christian perspective, the purpose of medicine, hospitals, doctors, nurses, caregivers etc. is not to ultimately prevent physical death, which as human beings is inevitable (Hebrews 9:27), but to combat, and as much as it is able, to limit the negative effects of the Fall such as illness, pain, and suffering.
Your work is important, and you should be conscientious in doing it to the best of your ability, but you also need to remember and respect the line between human responsibility and divine prerogative. When we recognize that it is God who kills and gives life, and who wounds and heals, it spares us of a lot of unnecessary guilt and anxiety over the outcome of patient care. Whether a patient lives or dies is ultimately not up to us. Our job as healthcare workers is to assist the patient in his or her potential recovery, and if that is not possible because it is the patient’s time to die, to make them more comfortable in their present discomfort.
As long as you are doing that to the best of your knowledge and ability, you are an asset to the profession and you will be helping your patients by serving their physical needs. I just want to point out though, that as a Christian caregiver, you also have the ability to speak and minister to their spiritual needs as well, which can benefit them in an everlasting, and not merely a temporal, way. It’s kind of interesting to observe the parallel between our role in the spiritual care of others as Christians and our role in physically caring for others as healthcare workers. In both callings, our human responsibility begins and ends by actively loving and serving other people. We are called to address their spiritual need for Jesus in the work of evangelism, and as healthcare workers, we are called to address the physical needs of our patients. But the outcome of our evangelism – whether or not the person is saved spiritually – belongs to the Lord and not to us, just as the outcome of whether or not a patient recovers physically belongs to Him and not to us. In both cases, our job is simply to do our best loving and serving other people and leave the rest to God whose business is the outcomes (1 Corinthians 3:7).
I hope this helps and provides you some comfort, depressurization, and peace in your calling. Put your love for others to work and let God be God. I prayed for you today!
