Tradition must give way to the clear statements of the Scripture

  Righteousness of God   As for me, I belong to wicked mankind, to the company of unjust flesh. My iniquities, rebellions, and sins, together with the perversity of my heart, belong to the company of worms and to those who walk in darkness. For mankind has no way, and man is unable to establish his steps since justification is with God and perfection of way is out of His hand. All things come to pass by His knowledge; He establishes all things by His design and without Him nothing is done. As for me, if I stumble, the mercies of God shall be my eternal salvation. If I stagger because of the sin of flesh, my justification shall be by the righteousness of God which endures for ever. Faith in The Promise  When my distress is unleashed He will deliver my soul from the Pit and will direct my steps to the way. He will draw me n...

  And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw God’s Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. Mt. 3:16 Matthew might have opened his gospel as he did in order to draw a parallel between one beginning and another beginning, cf. Gen.2:4 between the creation of the cosmos and Adam and Eve on the one hand and the new creation brought by the Messiah on the other. This proposal gains support from a third consideration, namely, that elsewhere the NT sees the coming of Jesus as the counterpart of the creation account narrated in Genesis. Paul, for instance, speaks more than once of a ‘new creation’ (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15), and he likens his Lord to a ‘last Adam’ (Rom. 5:12–21; 1 Cor 15:42–50).  We are, accordingly, encouraged to conclude that the Spirit as dove originally meant—and meant also for Matthew—that the events of Gen. 1 were being recapitulated or repeated in the Messiah’s life: W. D. Davi...