Introduction: Conservatives have taken to calling the cultural disintegration that we see happening all around us by the name of clown world. This is apt enough, but given the vindictive and ...
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Hellbent in Creepy Clown World
Like the Merchants of Babylon
Some friends have drawn my attention to a piece that N.T. Wright wrote for Time on the coronavirus here. Another friend of mine has already replied to him here, and just like my friend I agree that the article was better than the headline, which was gobsmackingly bad. But the article itself was still a …
On Dodging the Flaming Hailstones
Introduction: So I think it would be fair to say that I have been pounding away at Trump for lo these many months. Now that the primary season is over, and each major party is now stuck with its nominee, people are starting to coalesce (or not) behind somebody. I mentioned yesterday that Wayne Grudem …
Jerusalem Had a Wall
So what can we learn about our controversy over illegal immigration from what the Bible tells us about the gift of tongues? Obvious question, right? “Brethren, be not children in understanding: howbeit in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men. In the law it is written, With men of other tongues and other …
Hellfire and Damnation
I want to begin by acknowledging that the metaphors of damnation that we find in Scripture are quite possibly not literal descriptions — where the worm does not die, where the fire is not quenched, where it is an outer darkness, where there is a lake of fire, and so on. But before assuming that …
Zero Sum Compassion
Lord willing, this will be the second of four posts. In the last of them I want to restate and expand an apology that I offered to Thabiti in the course of our exchanges. Because I would like that apology to do as much good and make as much sense as it possibly can, I …
Fools and Blind
In the long aftermath of the Newtown tragedy, one of the things that has become apparent in the midst of all the recriminations is we do not know how divine judgment works. We do not yet know how God operates, and we do not see how diseased our culture has actually become. We are not …
911 Ten Years After
This coming Lord’s Day is the tenth anniversary of the horrific attack on the Twin Towers in New York. Here is a link to a sermon I preached in the immediate aftermath.
Seven Reasons Why We Can’t Water Down the Lake of Fire
John Piper and I have been writing about a possible way in which my recent video response to Rob Bell’s universalism could be troubling. Near the end of the clip I echo a theological point made by C.S. Lewis about the nature of damnation, and how Hell is in some way “chosen” by all its …
Rule of Thumb
“God never tries a nation or a people generally with trials which deliver them into the hands of their enemies unless it be for their sins” (Thomas Watson, Jerusalem’s Glory, p. 72).