Canons of Dort (23): God Not Only Sovereignly Gives New Life But He Uses Means To Do It
"Regeneration is that active God by which the principle of new life is implanted in man , And the governing disposition of the soul is made holy."
The first is great error in the doctrines of regeneration is to downplay or even deny the need for regeneration. This is the Pelagianism. One of the reasons that the Synod of Dort regularly characterized the Remonstrant position as “Pelagian” was because the Remonstrants did downplay the need for regeneration in this sense. Pelagius and... Continue Reading
God’s Masterpiece is Less Like a Painting and More Like a Mosaic
God is in the habit of putting broken pieces back together.
A mosaic is the process of taking shards of material – glass, stone, or most anything else – and assembling them in a recognizable pattern. It takes seemingly unrelated and in many cases useless things and puts them together to reveal something only in the mind and the heart of the artist. That’s starting to... Continue Reading
Micah the Therapist
If you are counseling someone you need to give them God.
Micah prophesied doom and gloom, so his was not a popular message. But Judah had a debilitating spiritual condition, and it was Micah’s job to diagnose it and supply the cure. Let’s see what we can learn from his methods. The son of King George V, Prince Albert, or Bertie as family members called... Continue Reading
Pleasures Never Lie
Why Sin Cannot Stay Hidden
“Pleasures never lie” doesn’t mean the things we find pleasurable are never deceitful. Many are (Hebrews 11:25), as we all know by lots of personal experience. Rather, it means that pleasure is the whistle-blower of the heart. Pleasure is our heart’s way of telling us where our treasure really lies (Matthew 6:21). One of my... Continue Reading
3 Things You May Not Know About the Sermon on the Mount
The sermon is wisdom from the Father, inviting us through faith to re-orient our values, vision, and habits from the ways of external righteousness to whole-heartedness toward God.
When we understand the sermon in the cultural context of the first-century Mediterranean world, we can discern as much continuity as there is difference. This is a good thing. Jesus wasn’t speaking Mars-based gibberish, but revealing God’s kingdom to real people in real cultures. It has been a great joy for me to devote... Continue Reading
Beauty as Scripture’s Theme
God commits the stewardship of the world to his image-bearers, essentially charging them to bring more order and beauty to the world, and so glorify him (Gen. 1:28).
In Jesus Christ comes the glory of God made manifest (John 1:14–18; Heb. 1:3). He is not merely made in God’s image as man, but he is God’s image, being fully God. He calls men to repentance and belief in him, so that the image of God in them may be restored, beyond even the glory... Continue Reading
Divine Sovereignty, Evil, Mystery, and “Calvinism” (2)
the so-called Five Points were a reply by the Reformed churches of Europe and the British Isles to a particular challenge on a limited number of doctrines.
Some might know about the so-called “Five Points of Calvinism,” TULIP (total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, and perseverance of the saints) but relatively few seem to know that the TULIP acrostic was a late 19th-century invention and that the five points were really the Five Heads of Doctrine or the five Canons, rulings, of... Continue Reading
Moving Toward the Goal of History
This purpose of history is both personal and cosmic.
The biblical view of linear-progressive history does not say that history moves in a steady incline, moving toward some evolutionary climax; rather, it indicates a movement of history that looks more like a corporate chart displaying troughs and peaks while in the long term moving in an upward direction. The most important part of this... Continue Reading
A Note of Caution on the Use of Romans 1
It is dangerously easy for the effect toward which orthodox or traditionalists use this passage to be the opposite of what God intends.
When we read Romans, we hear it in solidarity with the original audience. It is a letter to Christians about the gospel. After his greetings and other introductory matters, the Apostle Paul sets the trajectory and agenda for the remainder of the letter in verses 16 and 17—the apparently foolish gospel which is the power of God... Continue Reading
A Most Mischievous and Ill-Informed Half Truth
The Reformers maintained the classical doctrine of God.
We first need to take account of how and why the Reformers did reaffirm the classical position. When this is done, the assertion that the Reformers held unreflectively to an unreformed doctrine of God appears at best to be only a half-truth — and a mischievous and ill-informed one at that. Etienne Gilson once commented that to be... Continue Reading