Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I've pastored a very rural church for well over a decade. Our town has about 1,000 people and will never grow until Jesus returns. 38 people attend our worship on Sundays. Here's a quick list of what we’ve done to grow our church, and what I’ve done to survive pastorally.…
Thanks for sharing so honestly about your current crisis of creativity. I totally understand and relate to that; it’s happened many times in my musical life thus far, and I’ve begun to accept it as a normal rhythm of the creative process. I actually went through a serious dry spell…
The Broken Stones of Israel At Sinai, the tablets of the Law of Moses were broken and restored. The Old Testament is a history of “new covenants,” including that promised in Jeremiah and fulfilled in Zechariah. Ultimately, the vertical Oath and the horizontal Sanctions met in the death of Jesus…
Woe to the sinful nation. Woe to those who enlarge their estates and build their portfolios. Woe to the drunks. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil. Woe to the proud who are wise in their own eyes. Woe to Congressmen who pass unjust laws and to…
The interpretation of Romans 7:7-25 is notoriously difficult. Good scholars disagree on many aspects of the passage, but the central interpretative difficulty concerns the identity of the “I.” Is Paul referring to himself? Is Paul referring to himself pre- or post-conversion? Does the “I” refer to Adam? Is the “I”…
You board the Metra train at Arlington Heights station one afternoon, heading to downtown Chicago for some sight-seeing. As the train departs from the station, a man in jeans, a striped t-shirt, and a Kansas City Royals baseball cap enters your train car, and begins asking to see each passenger’s…
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An English visitor to the Netherlands in the 1650s, Owen Felltham, remarked that the Dutch were “in some sort Gods, for they set bounds to teh Sea; and when they list let it pass them. Even their dwellings is a miracle. They live lower than the fishes. In the very…
Richard Popkin ( The History of Scepticism ) writes of a crisis of skepticism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: “With the rediscovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of writings of the Greek Pyrrhonist Sextus Empiricus, the arguments and views of the Greek sceptics became part of the philosophical…
Erasmus and Luther eventually squared off regarding the freedom of the will, but in earlier letters Erasmus cautions against judging Luther too hastily or harshly and pushes the burden of proof on Luther’s opponents. Erasmus was, after all, a reforming Catholic. For instance: “I do not suppose myself learned enough…
Isaiah tells Israel to prepare for the coming of Yahweh by leveling mountains and raising valleys (40:3-5), and when Yahweh comes the mountains melt away (Psalm 97:5; Micah 1:4). But the angel of Yahweh tells Zechariah that the mountains will give way to Zerubabbel (Zechariah 4:7), a true son of…
A couple of notes on the first vision of Zechariah 5, and then translation. 1) Verse 3 is difficult to translate, and is somewhat surprising. The scroll represents, the angel says, the curse going throughout the land, but the effect of the curse in verse 3 is not negative and…
Some notes on Zechariah 4, with a rough translation following. 1) Structurally, the passage is most clearly organized around the exchanges between the interpreting angel and Zechariah. Most obvious is the parallel between verses 4-5 and 11-13; together with the angel’s response, these questions form a frame around a central…
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