All of God’s Word is of course profitable and applicable to our lives. But this psalm is particularly relevant to our contemporary condition, and is worth our careful attention. The great Puritan writer William Gurnall once said that just as one tap can drain a whole cask of wine, so one promise can obtain for …
Present or Absent?
For centuries, Christians have debated the “real presence” of the Lord Jesus in the Supper. Too often it is not noted that the alternative position is necessarily a belief in His real absence. This of course is silly, and so this should cause us to reflect. All orthodox Christians believe in the real presence—the debate …
Call It Regeneration
In order to take all baptized covenant members as participants in Christ in the “strong sense,” we would have to distinguish what is objectively given in Christ, and not what is subjectively done with those objective benefits. Perseverance would, on this reading, be what was subjectively done with what God has objectively given. In this …
A Different Father
In fact, biblically speaking, “nature” is not captured by a static Hellenistic definition, but rather something that is revealed through the process of generation. The nature of the father is found in the nature of the son. In order to acquire a different nature, I must acquire a different father.
According to Nature
Our interest in such passages should not have to do with the wickedness as such, but rather has to do with the divine “paternity suit” that follows on the basis of it. If some covenant members are children of the devil and others are not (as the quotation from 1 John indicates), then there must …
Quarrels and Worship
Have you quarreled with anyone this week? If you did, was it for the cause of righteousness, or was it merely because you wanted your own way on something? If it was the latter, as it probably was, was the quarrel worth it? Did the quarrel bring you closer to God, establish you in His …
Every Weekly Easter
Father and God, Lord and Master, we thank You now for yet another Lord’s Day. You have given us life and light and grace, and we rejoice before You in Your great kindness. You have given us new life, when we as a people were lost in sin, and You have restored us to Your …
Theological Spam
My spam filter catches hundreds of invitations a day — invitations to check out these mortgage rates, these crazy chicks, these unbelievable cell phone offers, and more. One nagging question concerns why these companies go to all this effort. Does anybody actually get their mortgage this way? And the answer has to be yes. Otherwise, …
Regeneration and Fatherhood
On all questions regarding regeneration, the basic question is: who’s your daddy? Outside the covenant, the devil is father. For the elect, God is our Father. But for the reprobate covenant member, God is his Father in a real covenantal sense, but in another tangible way, the devil is still his father. This is fully …
Regeneration Is . . .
Regeneration means being transformed from the seed of the serpent to the seed of the woman. This cannot simply be equated with baptism (or circumcision in the Old Testament) because most of the “broods of vipers” identified for us in the Bible were covenant members.