Category: Books and Culture

“By faith, Rahab betrayed her homeland (Jos. 2:25). By faith, Ruth abandoned her people (Ruth 1:16). By faith Jeremiah demoralized the patriots, undermining the war effort (Jer. 38:4). By faith Jehoida committed treason (2 Kings 11:14-15). By faith Jonathan disobeyed his faith the king (1 Sam. 19:2). By faith David ran away from the anointed authority (1 Sam. 19:12). They did all this because of their ultimate loyalties, not their proximate loyalties. Be adults in your thinking, and not children.”

American Milk and Honey, p. xiv

“Paul was willing to go to Hell for his kinsmen (Rom. 9:3), but was well aware that they were the ones who were so ardent about killing him (Acts 23:20).”

American Milk and Honey, p. xiv

“There are two kinds of idols. One must be demolished entirely, ground into powder at the brook Kidron, and used to desecrate the graves of the people (2 Kings 23:5-7). There is to be no quarter given to this kind of idol—for example, a statue of Tash in your backyard, to which neighborhood puppies and kittens are sacrificed. That is not the sort of thing that can be gradually opposed. But there is another kind of idol, where natural and good gifts from our Heavenly Father have assumed a wrongful place in the heart loyalties of an individual. He might be greedy for money, which is idolatry (Col. 3:5), and yet after repentance he must still purchase things. He might love his father and mother in such a way as to keep him from becoming a disciple of Christ (Matt. 10:37; cf. Luke 14:26), and yet true repentance does not mean that he needs to shoot his father and mother, and bury them in a desecrated graveyard at the brook Kidron. Rather, it means demoting them from the god shelf of his heart, and honoring them in the proper way more than he ever did in his life before.”

American Milk and Honey, pp. xii-xiii

“A man who is married to a woman can betray her, but a man who never met her cannot do so . . . In other words, we say that all adulterers were never really married. But of course this means that they are not really adulterers . . . In other words, we have two positions: the first is that husbands cannot commit adultery, and the second is that adulterers are not husbands, and hence not adulterers. What never seems to occur to anyone is the duty of fighting our fellow Christians to the last ditch—as Athanasius did with Arius.”

“Reformed” Is Not Enough, pp. 195-196

“But it appears that as soon as we are stopped from rummaging around in our own hearts, we have an immediate yearning to rummage around in someone else’s. We either doubt our own salvation with anguish or we doubt someone else’s with satisfaction.”

“Reformed” Is Not Enough, p. 192