Minister: Lift up your hearts! Congregation: We lift them up to the Lord! God is known through Judah’ hills, His Name is great in Israel. Salem holds His dwelling place, His tent of praise on Zion’s mount. He breaks the arrows and the bows, The shields and swords, all battle gear. Our God is greater …
Read All About It
One of the characteristics of modern assumptions about the Bible is that in the Old Testament God dealt with His people in more physical or earthy ways, and that in the New Testament His promises and deliverances are of a more spiritual (meaning ethereal) nature. Thus, we don’t expect God to actually deliver us from …
Our Tree of Life
When God created Adam and Eve, and placed them in the Garden, He also provided them with food. Not only did He provide them with their daily food, hanging from the branches of all the trees in the Garden, He also provided them with sacramental food, the food that was fruit of the Tree of …
The Table Fences In
Do not presume for a moment that in this meal the Lord Jesus Christ is a hapless victim. He became a victim, once for all, at a particular point in history. But God vindicated Him, raising Him from the dead, and He was ushered before the Ancient of Days, and was a given a throne …
The Rest That Works
We are discovering that celebration is hard work. We are in the middle of a great season of personal and corporate celebrations—graduations from high school, from college, weddings, and so forth. This is a time of great joy, and joy naturally calls us to work so that we might give fuller expression to that joy. …
The Ten Words
So we now come to the Ten Commandments. As with everything, context should govern all our understanding, but this is especially important when we are considering the question of law. “And this is the law which Moses set before the children of Israel . . .” (Dt. 4:44-5:33). We have to understand the grace of …
Artistic Responsibility?
“In the highest aesthetic circles one now hears nothing about the artist’s duty to us. It is all about our duty to him. He owes us nothing: we owe him ‘recognition,’ even though he has never paid the slightest attention to our tastes, interests, or habits. If we don’t give it to him, our name …
Aesthetic Relativism
“Among conservative believers we at least have a concept of resistance to relativism in the areas of truth and ethics. We reject the idea that something can be true on Tuesday but false on Friday. We also reject the notion that sins in the first part of the week gradually lose their sinfulness by the …
A Brother Thing
“We instinctively tend to regard the fraternal relationship as an affectionate one; yet the mythological, historical, and literary examples that spring to mind tell a different story: Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Eteocles and Plyneices, Romulus and Remus, Richard the Lionhearted and John Lackland. The proliferation of enemy brothers in Greek myth and in …
Sabbath Kindness Again
God and Father, we thank You for Your Sabbath kindness to us. You have shown that kindness to us over and over again, and so we continue to thank You for it. We are thankful for the food, for the wine, for the fellowship around this table, and for all the hard work that went …