“Though Realtor Mom likes Wal-Mart, it’s the price club that really gets her heart racing, because price clubs are Wal-mart on acid. Here you can get laundry detergent in 41-pound tubs, 30-pound bags of frozen Tater Tots, frozen waffles in 60-serving boxes, and packages of 1,500 Q-tips, which is 3,000 actual swabs since there’s cotton …
Flesh That Reveals the Father
“The majesty of biblical poetry always lifts our thoughts up. Biblical poetic expression is incarnational, which means that there is a body of ‘flesh,’ but it is a body which reveals the Father. Idolatrous poetic expression reveals nothing from above, and spends its energy in rearranging matter down here below. Idolatrous images of the divine …
Wealth Thrown Away
“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) Growing Dominion, Part 84 “Much food is in the tillage of the poor: but there is that is destroyed for want of judgment” (Prov. 13:23). The point of this proverb is that the poor frequently have far more wealth available to them than …
Freedom? What Freedom?
Most Christians do not have a problem in acknowledging God’s sovereign control over every aspect of the physical creation. Not a sparrow falls to the ground apart from the Father, and He know the numbers of atoms that make up the planet Jupiter. We will consequently spend our time here considering the two areas that …
Cloth Ratios
“[In] America today the average square yardage of boyswear grows and grows, while the square inches in the girls’ outfits shrinks and shrinks. The boys carry so much fabric they look like skateboarding Bedouins, and the girls look like preppy prostitutes.” [David Brooks, On Paradise Drive (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 56]
A Theological Tin Ear
“Human language is necessarily inadequate whenever men speak about God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. But there is creaturely inadequacy, a holy limitation, revealed in virtually every word of Scripture, and then there is an impudent inadequancy. The thing which differentiates the two is not the element of anthropomorphic images (which are …
Foods of the World
“The rule in these pedestrian-friendly town centers is ‘Fight a way, gain a restaurant.’ You’ll find Afghan eateries, Vietnamese restaurants, Lebanese diners, Japanese sushi bars alongside dining options from Haiti, Cambodia, India, Mongolia, and Moscow. And this is not to even mention the Cosi-style casual dining spots offering shiitake mushroom panini sandwiches or the gourmet …
Imagination Succeeds When It Staggers
“When a biblical vision of the living God is given to us, human imagination staggers, and human reason lies prostrate on the floor. Isaiah is undone, a man of unclean lips, and Moses is hidden in the cleft of the rock so that he will not be dissolved. In the revelation of Himself to us, …
Applications from Hebrews
As we conclude the book of Hebrews, the writer ends his letter with a potpourri of ethical admonitions and instruction. A common theme is “living in a certain way,” but the subject matter changes radically from passage to passage. “Let brotherly love continue . . .” (Heb. 13:1-25). We begin with friends,strangers and prisoners. These …
Sunday Morning Daylight Savings Snafu
As you perhaps know, everybody should have set their clocks ahead so that they could arrive at worship on time. This we did, and after services some of my kids (and their kids) came by our house after church for some of our usual eating and fellowship. They arrived here before we did, and were …