When one studies Luther on the doctrine of predestination, it quickly becomes apparent that he believed in what has been called “double predestination.” In this teaching, it is recognized that the same God who sovereignly predestined the elect to salvation also sovereignly passed over others.   Martin Luther is best remembered today as the Reformer... Continue Reading

The Reformation, Protestant and Catholic, may have been fueled by pamphlets. But who, beyond a small group of scholars, reads those pamphlets today? To the rest of us they are, at best, the throwaway productions of a bygone age, at worst an example of the way in which human beings can treat each other with... Continue Reading

It’s God’s love to feeble me, not my love to him that gives me peace with God. Salvation is entirely by grace alone, God’s sovereign power alone, his effectual work alone, “No other work, save thine,” no human strength, or effort, or perceived ability can break my bondage.   For the first time in five... Continue Reading

The marriage covenant celebration of sex not only points a husband and wife to their one-flesh union, but for the one who has eyes to see it, it also points to the union we enjoy with Christ. Even the bliss we can experience in sex points ahead to the bliss of the marriage supper of... Continue Reading

Jesus walked out of a tomb and nothing have been the same since…Down and down and then up and up is the shape of the Bible’s story and of many of its stories. It’s the shape of our lives, repeated deaths and resurrections until the Lord returns to raise the faithful dead.   David Foster Wallace... Continue Reading

“The end to which all church order, on the Puritan view, was a means, and for which everything superstitious, misleading, and Spirit-quenching must be rooted out, was the glory of God in and through the salvation of sinners and the building up of lively congregations in which people met God.”   I have read sentences... Continue Reading

For us Christians, let vaccines be vaccines and not sacraments. Let science be science and not a new religion. If something may not be questioned, however, it is a religion and not science.   John Calvin (1509–64) famously wrote that the human heart is a “perpetual factory of idols” (Institutes 1.11.18). What he meant is that... Continue Reading

One of the banes of liberalism in our time is the unwillingness to criticize bad ideas honestly for fear of being misconstrued as a bigot; the assumption of the lowest possible motive when assessing these criticisms is the other. Together, they constitute a strait jacket—they make progress impossible.   A review of Woke Racism: How a... Continue Reading

Nothing will prevent the Spirit of God from uniting all souls of God’s elect church to Christ by faith. Not even foreseen unbelief will prevent this. It too will necessarily give way and be overcome by grace. Having chosen men without regard to conditions, no condition will hinder Him in bringing those appointed to eternal... Continue Reading

When we share the gospel we do so admitting our mistakes, doubts, sins and shortcomings. The more we take God’s call to holiness seriously, the more some of these flaws seem to matter in fact. It means we can share the grace of God with a humility that is attractive to people who are also... Continue Reading