This next psalm, along with many other passages, teaches us how to understand the transience of our lives. “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” (Ps. 90:12). Some men ignore this truth. Some see it and despair. Others, blessed of God, see it and learn wisdom. The …
Relief and Buoyancy
“Relief and buoyancy are the characteristic notes . . . It follows that nearly every association which now clings to the word puritan has to be eliminated when we are thinking of the early Protestants. Whatever they were, they were not sour, gloomy, or severe; nor did their enemies bring any such charge against them …
First, Tune the Instrument
“The preacher’s first, and the most important task is to prepare himself, not his sermon” (Lloyd-Jones, Preachers and Preaching, p. 166).
An Attempt at Transcendence From Below
“Repentance requires transcendence, something Darwinian ideology denied. The monster in horror fiction is a function of this bind” (E. Michael Jones, Monsters from the Id, p. 127).
Frank the Baptist Nails It
I wanted to promote something said by my friend Frank Turk in the comments section of a previous post. Frank is one of those baptists, and, as such, he sees the intramural presbyterian dust-up much more clearly than some of the participants do. Here is Frank, with one of the best observations that this whole …
Sinner With a Backbone
This is a striking psalm, and is listed among the penitential psalms. It begins with virtually the same words as Psalm 6, the first of the penitential psalms. But the repentance shown by David here is quite distinct from what many Christians call repentance, and this is something we really need to deal with. The …
And the Foundation of Their Art
“We want, above all, to know what it felt like to be an early Protestant. One thing is certain. It felt very unlike being a ‘puritan’ such as we meet in nineteenth-century fiction. . . In the mind of a Tyndale or Luther, as in the mind of St. Paul himself, this theology was by …
And the Name of the Disease is Sin
“The symptoms may vary tremendously from case to case, but the business of the preacher is not to medicate symptoms, it is to to treat the disease” (Lloyd-Jones, Preachers and Preaching, p. 134).
Actually the Muslims Were the Ones on a Crusade
“While the Europeans occupied themselves with hysterical speculative eschatology, the Ottomans expanded their conquests. Sultan Selim called for a renewed Ji’had and added Greece, Macedonia, and the Balkans to his empire. His son, Suleiman, swept into Belgrade in 1521, expelled the Templars from Rhodes in 1522, and conquered Hungary in 1526. Then in 1529 he …
A Sexual Haunting
“As syphilis spread all over Europe, the horror at its unprecedented virulence spread with it. It was the sexual version of the black plague. As the descriptions of the doctors who first diagnosed the disease make clear, the advent of syphilis had much to do with the iconography of horror. The horrible faces in horror …