What Is Brotherly Love?
The bond that exists between earthly siblings gives shape and form to the language of Scripture, where God commands believers to “love one another with brotherly affection” (Rom. 12:10).
The New Testament is full of references to “brotherly love.” In many places in which the Apostles expound on Christian living in the church, this paradigmatic phrase surfaces. The Apostle Paul explained the instinctive nature of brotherly love when he wrote to the members of the church in Thessalonica: “Concerning brotherly love you have no need for anyone... Continue Reading
What Is Baptism?
The practice of “baptism,” whatever it is, must have been something that was familiar to Matthew’s Jewish audience in the first century.
When Jesus commands His followers to go and make disciples in Matthew 28:18–20, He instructs them to baptize those disciples in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But He nowhere explains what He means by baptism, and we nowhere read that the disciples were confused by what He was saying. If we... Continue Reading
Christ Puts a Comma Where the World Puts a Period
We all slip up in our speech at times, but the Bible often uses pointed oxymorons to drive home a point.
The Bible often takes words that don’t go together, and puts them together to grab our attention and help us see the point more clearly. For example, Paul writes “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live” in Galatians 2:20. The Gospels tell of the “Virgin birth” and Jesus says that “the first shall be last.” All... Continue Reading
Filled With All the Fullness of God
The profundity of the statement is clearly of such a character that it would be presumptuous to imagine that we can fathom its depths.
Characteristically the Apostle has expressed his prayer in Ephesians 3 with an extreme economy of language and for this reason it is more than ordinarily necessary to consider the words in the fuller context of the whole Scriptures and especially of Paul’s other epistles. When we do this it becomes clear that there are at... Continue Reading
What Will They Do When I’m Gone?
What will happen to my children if something happens to me?
We can plan, and we should plan, for such eventualities, both spiritually and materially. I have life insurance for myself and my wife; we are working on finding guardians for our children should both of us die. Our financial plans are in place, more or less. Material planning is so very important. It is not,... Continue Reading
What Really Happened on the Cross? Part 1
Sacrifice and Propitiation
We’re likely familiar with the events of the crucifixion, but the significance of those events is so boundless that it will be the theme of the saints’ praise for eternity (Rev 4–5). Despite this, there has been, historically, and there is, today, great confusion concerning this central and essential doctrine of the Christian faith. We... Continue Reading
Our Good Opinion of Ourselves
The fault at the root of all our other faults, so it appears to us, is that our attitude to ourselves is wrong.
Read the Diary of a M’Cheyne or the Confessions of an Augustine and you meet a man whose attitude to himself is disconcertingly different from that which you meet with typically in others. These great Christians viewed themselves with a sharply critical eye. They distrusted their every thought, motive and imagination. They each kept guard over themselves as a gaoler watches... Continue Reading
The Book of Job
The book of Job deals with questions of wisdom in the context of a narrative dealing with Job’s profound anguish and excruciating pain.
At the heart of the message of the book of Job is the wisdom with respect to answering the question as to how God is involved in the problem of human suffering. In every generation protests arise saying that if God is good, then there should be no pain, no suffering or death in this... Continue Reading
The Wall
The wall in question is, of course, the wall [or walls] of Jerusalem.
One entire book of the Old Testament, Nehemiah, is constructed around this wall in more ways than one. The book of Psalms also makes reference to it in a number of places. Positively in Psalm 48, where the city of God is seen to be ‘in good shape’ spiritually, as well as structurally in terms... Continue Reading
What Does Paul Mean When He Says ‘Let a Woman Learn Quietly?’
God intends a certain order in the husband-wife relationship. The order of creation establishes the husband as leader in the first marriage and in all marriages to follow.
This verse is one of the most controversial texts in all of the NT, mainly because there is such a difference of opinion over what it is that Paul is disallowing. The literature on this verse is voluminous, and adjudicating all the competing interpretations would be beyond the scope of this commentary.(4) Nevertheless, we can... Continue Reading