Sermons on the Lord’s Prayer - The Lord’s Prayer : Misinterpretations and Truth

The author has an interesting/creative theology of baptism and salvation (i.e. soteriology). Since this book is a collection of sermons, it has a lot of repetition as well. I feel sorry for the author, as his theology appears to completely miss the Messianic OT background of Jesus’ baptism, and he doesn’t seem to understand the “Lamb of God” within its Jewish Passover context (but instead only as a “once-and-for-all day of atonement” at the baptism of Jesus). Basically, everybody has been saved already at Jesus’s baptism, and you just don’t know it. So, when Jesus is forgiving people of their sins explicitly in the Gospels, he is actually just informing them that they’ve already been forgiven. This would be a form of “Universalism”, but limited in a sense that it is only “individually revealed” with an understanding/faith of Jesus. This misunderstanding is likely attributable to ignorance of Judaism and early Christianity, as this author is from Korea. I found his explanation of “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” to be unconvincing (using both his soteriology and that of orthodox Christianity) and also lacking in substance. The ecclesiology and eschatology of the book will sound most familiar to American Evangelical or Fundamentalists groups. This (in general) is due to whether he interprets certain Pauline statements in either a literalistic or metaphorical way.