INTRODUCTION:The troubles that David went through on the way to his promised throne were many. But this meant that before he assumed the rule of God’s people, he had seen that many answers to prayer, that many deliverances. David was not dropped on his throne from Heaven, rather he was delivered out of tribulation, as …
How Forgiveness is Like Water
Sin begins with the imagination. In order to work ourselves loose from the world as God made it, we have to imagine that it is a different kind of place than it is. John Bunyan once wisely said that the sinful soul “entertains the sin by its imagination.” He adds that “sin thus attacks at …
Feeding On, Eating With
The ancient prophets looked forward to the time of the Messiah, and one of the ways they did this was through the imagery of the messianic banquet. Isaiah in particular describes the mountain of the Lord, on which the best wine would be served, and the table would be covered with the best meat (Is. …
Callused or Tender
Father, we ask You to forgive our trespasses, and we ask You to convict our nation of those trespasses so that we might confess them fully and heartily. We confess on behalf of our people that we have assumed that a bad memory is the same thing as a clean conscience, and that a callused …
Theology That Comes Out of Halter Tops
In the Introduction to Republocrat, Carl Trueman gives us the thesis of his book straight up front — “that conservative Christianity does not require conservative politics or conservative cultural agendas” (p. xix). When Trueman moved from the UK to the United States, he records that he “suddenly found” himself “to be a man of the …
We Are All Vegans Now
I am finally resuming my hiatus-ridden review of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Let’s all hope that I quit getting distracted. Chapter Seven is on the “Fast Food Meal,” in which Pollan demonstrates that he is a fine writer, fluid with prose that is easy on the eyes. I often think he is just crazy nuts, but …
The Choir Celestial
Some time a while ago I was interviewed for the now-deceased Wittenberg Door. But when that magazine went and joined the choir celestial, the interview never ran. Recently, George Halitzka, the fine fellow who conducted the interview, found it on his computer, and asked if he could run it on his web site. I said …
More Than Just Male
“In order to be sexually responsive, a wife needs to respect, on a fundamental level, the comprehensive masculinity of her husband. He must be a man, and not just a male. If he is aroused in the bedroom, that arousal must not make her resentment boil over — ‘Why can he not be aroused to …
And Are Reckoned Crazy in the Meantime
“Men who are in advance of their age are abused for principles which in due time become accepted” (Spurgeon, Eccentric Preachers, 117).
No Competition
“Clearly a man who enjoys this kind of immense pleasure with his wife will have great difficulty turning elsewhere. A man sitting down to a steak dinner is unlikely to excuse himself in order to go eat some Ding Dongs he has stashed away in the closet. But a man facing yet another dinner of …