A Merciful and Faithful High Priest
Before knowing God, Jonathan Edwards had a fear of thunderstorms. “I used to be a person uncommonly terrified with thunder: and it used to strike me with terror, when I saw a thunderstorm rising.” But after his conversion, Edwards writes: “Now, on the contrary, [thunderstorms] rejoiced me. I felt God at the first appearance of a thunderstorm. And used to take the opportunity at such times, to fix myself to view the clouds, and see the lightnings play, and hear…
Perfect Through Suffering
In 1970, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, where he predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death—regardless of any mitigating efforts we might implement. The opening sentence reads: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” He went on to blame nearly every social problem upon the fact that we simply have too many people. His doomsday prediction was based upon a faulty hypothesis that overpopulation of the planet had reach unrecoverable proportions. Ehrlich’s…
Crowned With Glory And Honor
In “The Good of Nationalism Pt 2”, Bradford Littlejohn notes the temptation Christians had after the conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine: “In every age, Christians have been tempted to ‘immanentize the eschaton,’ translating the expectations of the eschatological kingdom of God into the midst of history. So it was for early Christians, dazed and delighted by the conversion of Constantine and the end of persecution: perhaps Christian Rome was to be the earthly political manifestation of the worldwide kingdom of…
Such A Great Salvation
In his book, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr writes about how the internet is changing our ability to think. “Neuroscientists and psychologists have discovered that, even as adults, our brains are very plastic. They’re very malleable, they adapt at the cellular level to whatever we happen to be doing. And so the more time we spend surfing, and skimming, and scanning … the more adept we become at that mode of thinking.” Wisdom is associated with deep concentration. Scholarly intellectuals, or any…
But You Remain
We can all get a bit nostalgic about returning to time when we didn’t have a care in the world. For many of us, that’s a time in childhood where we felt a sense of security. For some of us that time was a very brief window before the hardships of reality crept into our lives. An essential aspect of our reality is that we are in constant flux, alongside other creatures and creation that is constantly changing. We have…
The Scepter Of Uprightness
Perseverance is the final description applied to those who maintain their faith in Christ to the end of their lives. That faith will not remain in hearts that do not treasure Christ. That is why this sermon-letter opens (and continues) with numerous examples of the superiority of the Son. The author of Hebrews establishes Christ deity, and thus, his ultimate supremacy over all things like few other sections of Scripture (cf. Jn 1; Col 1). Last week we considered how the Son is superior…
Superior To Angels
“In Defense of Being Average”, Mark Manson encourages his readers to accept that they won’t be extraordinary at most things they do, if anything. He writes: “There are over 7.2 billion people on this planet, and really only about 1,000 of those have major worldwide influence at any given time. That leaves the other 7,199,999,000 +/- of us to come to terms with the limited scope of our lives and the fact that the vast majority of what we do…
The Atonement and Enthronement Of The Son
In his book, Rejoice and Tremble, Michael Reeves makes the following insightful comment: When people, through misunderstanding, become simply afraid of God, they will never entrust themselves to him but must turn elsewhere for their security. In fact, it is when people have this confused fear of God that they turn to other gods. Michael Reeves, Rejoice and Tremble One of the primary benefits of reading God’s Word and sitting under its preaching is that we might gain a sense of security.…
He Upholds The Universe
What is the area of your life that you feel you MUST control? How devastated are you when things don’t go according to your plan? Parents feel this pressure to protect every aspect of the life of their children to the point that their lives literally revolve around them. Fathers feel the the need to provide for their families to the point that their lives revolve around work. Single men and women get so preoccupied with finding a spouse that…