I’ll explain the title shortly. Promise. The next chapter in By Faith Alone is by Rick Phillips, and in it he tackles two different challenges to the Reformed doctrine of imputation. The first is on the part of contemporary Arminians, who say that God accepts our faith in lieu of righteousness, and the second is …
Everything But His Reason
Chesterton once commented that a madman is not someone who has lost his reason; he is a man who has lost everything but his reason. Once there was a man who was driven by emotional forces, largely invisible to him. He was deeply insecure, and so he went from one fractured relationship to another. He …
The Need to Banish Lying Tongues
Minister: Lift up your hearts! Congregation: We lift them up to the Lord! Of mercy and judgment I will sing; Unto You O Lord, I will always sing. I will walk in wisdom, in a perfect way. When will You come down to me? Within my house I will walk the same way, With a …
The Sabbath Cornerstone
As we seek to return to an observance of a Christian calendar, we need to be careful to avoid the mistake that our fathers made. In the course of the medieval period, the year filled up with so many saints days that they had the effect that barnacles have on a ship that at one …
The People Had a Mind to Work
One of the great blessings which was given to Nehemiah in the course of his life was blessing of a people ready for work. “So we built the wall, and the entire wall was joined together up to half its height, for the people had a mind to work” (Neh. 4:6). The gift of an …
The Wrong Line of Work
After a brief introduction and greetings, Paul raises the issue that is troubling him, and that is the fact that someone is troubling the Galatians. Not only this, but they are not being troubled on some secondary issue. The gospel itself is at stake. I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that …
Federal Vision Earthquake
The next chapter in By Faith Alone is by T. David Gordon, and it too is a critique of N.T. Wright. The bulk of the chapter is just fine. Gordon, like Venema, is not hyperventilating over this, and he brings Wright’s approach to biblical theology under scrutiny, and does so in a moderate and fair …
Age Before Duty
“The single most important fact about the early twenty-first century is the rapid aging of almost every developed nation other than the United States: Canada, Europe, and Japan are getting old fast, older than any functioning society has ever been and fast than any has ever aged. A society ages when its birth rate falls …
Dull Dogs
“The idea is to treat all the pupils as though they were equally intelligent. The standard of achievement is set to fit the average, which is fair-to-middling low. The result is a mediocrity which frets and frustrates the more able while it flatters the incompetent. This mediocrity is making Americans increasingly a set of dull …
Maybe They Can’t See for the Same Reasons We Couldn’t
“The temptation associated with this is forgetting what it was like not to be able to see. Everything is now so clear to us that anyone who does not immediately assent to what we see in the Word seems either theologically perverse or a chucklehead . . . (2 Tim. 2:24-25). . . [But] to …