“We should make sure that we grant to unbelievers the dignity of explaining and demonstrating to us what it is they are doing. The widespread practice of body modification and multilation is a religious phenonenon of the first order of magnitude. Anyone who maintains otherwise is simply not listening. The irony is that the many …
Jumping to Conclusions
We all understand what the phrase “jumping to conclusions” means. But we sometimes do not appreciate what the alternative–reserving judgment–actually means. As we live together in covenant community, it is essential that we master the art of “not jumping,” even if the conclusion looks to us like a safe landing place. This is particularly the …
Renewing Covenant
We are here in a service of covenant renewal. We know that this covenant contains blessings for obedience and chastisements for disobedience. We also know that all of us stumble and are disobedient at times, and so we wonder what is the good of renewing a covenant that we constantly break. The glorious news is …
A Wedding Banquet
The Lord’s Table is a wedding feast, and unless we understand our relationship to Jesus Christ as our Bridegroom, and ourselves collectively as His chosen Bride, we will not understand what is happening here. The book of 1 Corinthians has a great deal in it about the relationship of the two sexes, and we too …
Marriage As Manifest Glory XXX
INTRODUCTION: Having looked at what headship is not, and what it really is according to Scripture, we now need to take a look at what submission is not. In this fallen world, glorious things are slandered and caricatured first, and sometimes the defenders of such things find themselves defending the caricature, and not the reality. …
He Who Says A, Must Say B
Bear with me a moment. I would like to sketch the outlines of an argument showing how a denial of Calvinism will lead (over time) to the canons of political correctness. But before doing that, allow me to define both terms. By Calvinism I mean the doctrine of God’s exhaustive sovereignty. By political correctness, I …
Faithfulness Covers
As we labor to learn how to speak as Christians, we have to take care to learn our lessons from Scripture. This is because sin is always defined by God, and not by our own instincts. We must always define sins of the tongue according to the Word. Scripture says that a “talebearer revealeth secrets: …
As Bad As That?
“We were not trying to maintain that slavery in itself was a positive good, like food, air, or sunlight. Our central interest was in defending the integrity and applicability of the Scriptures to our current cultural controversies, and we affirmed that Christians who apologize for what the Bible teaches on slavery will soon be apologizing …
Proverbial Generalizations
“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) Growing Dominion, Part 58 The book of Proverbs is filled with a number of divinely inspired generalizations. This means that it contains true statements that describe how God generally governs the world. For example, laziness is generally rewarded with lean times, and industry …
A Short List
“The study of history is largely a study of sinning, and usually the sinning is on a grand scale involving armies, navies, courtesans, synods, backstabbing, running for Congress, and more” (Black and Tan, p. 10).