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
The Importance of What We Do in Secret
Six times in the Sermon on the Mount, alluding to three distinct exercises, Jesus employs the term secret.
The Sermon on the Mount is addressing the issue of authenticity. Just how genuine is our relationship with the Lord Jesus? It is altogether possible to practice an outward display of piety—to “talk the talk”—without demonstrating any inner reality of godliness. This is true of every professing Christian, and it is especially true of those... Continue Reading
Incomprehensible but Knowable: Special Revelation
“The Lord spoke to Moses face to face, just as a man speaks to his friend” (Exodus 33:11).
God’s incomprehensibility is the doctrine that says while thoughts about God in the mind of man can be true and accurate, they can never be complete. This requires God to reveal himself to us and to do so in a way that we can understand what He has chosen to reveal. In fact, Presbyterians confess... Continue Reading