Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In our first essay in this series ( part 1 ), we saw that Proverbs 30 opens with a puzzle, a cryptic sentence that challenges the reader to search out a matter in order to gain understanding. "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory…
The story of Hezekiah’s illness and recovery is familiar to every child who has attended Sunday School. Informed that he would die, faithful King Hezekiah pleaded in tears for a longer life. God heard his prayers and saw his tears, and promised fifteen more years. As a sign that He…
1. The Blessed Hope "Looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus." Titus 2:13 I was recently asked how I as a postmillennialist would preach on "The Blessed Hope." This is often a sticky question, because postmillennialists believe that…
1. Jeroboam and Ahab After Solomon died, the people came to his son, King Rehoboam, and asked for tax relief. Rehoboam refused to give it, and indeed told the people that he was going to tax them even more severely than his father had. At that point, with the blessing…
One aspect of truth is unity. It was Truth Incarnate who prayed for the unity of His people in John 17, which certainly makes unity a priority for them as well. In one sense, we know by faith that the Church is always invisibly unified in Christ, but there is…
Mr. Paul Miller of Vancouver writes that he is not persuaded by my remarks on Luke 4 on " The Son of Joseph ." He calls attention to Mark 6:1-6, where Jesus came "to His own part of the country," taught in the synagogue, and astonished many. The people said,…
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In his study of The Concept of Purity at Qumran and in the Letters of Paul , Michael Newton argues that Paul transfers the logic and patterns of purity and cult from the temple to the new temple-community, the church. Relying mainly on Corinthians, Newton writes: “By describing the Christian…
A hermeneutical rule of thumb I share with students: Chapter 2 comes after chapter 1. It has many applications, as in “Chapter 18 comes after chapter 17.” Make the observation, then ask, Why? Why is that story there , after this one and before that one? The story of Sodom…
After describing the heroes of faith from creation to Jericho with some leisure, Hebrews 11 closes with a rapid-fire survey of everything from the judges on (vv. 32-38). It's a nicely constructed passage. First, six individuals are named, followed by a general reference to “prophets”: Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David,…
In a 1991 article in the Tyndale Bulletin , Edwin Judge reviews the symbolic resonances of the phrase “mark of the beast,” but notes, rightly that “the visions of Revelation keep disconcertingly coming down to earth” (158). So he looks for historical evidence of a mark imposed by Roman authorities…
In an essay on atonement in the Jewish Studies Quarterly from the early 1990s, Mary Douglas explains “the social origins of ideas about defilement in general”: Living in a community, people find themselves wanting to keep apart from some dissimilar others and to be included within sets of similars. To…
“The ambition of the liberal political philosopher,” writes Paul Kahn ( Putting Liberalism in its Place , 120), is to find that set of arguments that is so compelling that every individual, not corrupted by the illogic of interest, would necessarily affirm those reasons as his own.” Because it assumes…
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