Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"Vanity of vanities", says the Preacher. "All is vanity". Life, we are told in the book of Ecclesiastes, is a repetitious, wearisome cycle; all that is and all that will be has already been. There is nothing new under the sun. What is crooked cannot be made straight, what is…
The Bible tells us that when God created the earth, He set up three zones of life. The first was the world itself. The second was the holy land of Eden. And the third was the Garden in Eden, God’s sanctuary. God told Adam and Eve that every tree was…
In our survey of Biblical chronology we have arrived at the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which provide chronological information for the period after the return from exile, the Restoration Period of Old Testament history. The question we begin to address in this essay is whether the Artaxerxes of these…
These verses from the Sermon on the Mount are generally taken in connection with Jesus’ earlier statement concerning adultery in the heart (vv. 27-28); the eye and the hand have obvious relevance to the sin of adultery. At the same time, most commentators admit that the principle of avoiding occasions…
17. The eye that mocks a father, And despises to obey a mother, The ravens of the valley will pick it out, And the young eagles will eat it. 18. There are three things that are too wonderful for me, Four that I do not understand: 19. The way of…
The modern Church in America and virtually everywhere else is ideology-centered, not geographical. This is because various Churches believe different things and have different customs of worship and sacraments. The ideological Church has gradually developed from the time of the Reformation, because accuracy of doctrine has become more important to…
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Responding to my earlier post on memory, Wes Callihan writes: “We can’t always go back to the physical surroundings; that’s the problem. We can, however, go back in our imaginations and it seems that that was what the classical art of memory (the ‘palace of memory’) was all about. A…
INTRODUCTION Nowhere in the Bible do we find as many references to demons as in the gospels. When Jesus arrives, Satan begins an all-out assault, and this provokes the great conflict at the center of history: Satan and his demons against the Spirit-filled son of David. THE TEXT “Then one…
Matthew 12:8: For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. The Sabbath is an institution, a rule, a commandment, a marker of time, a social practice that distinguishes Jews from Gentiles. It is also a basic structure of human history. The creation week begins with the creation of…
Jesus knows how to confront. He issues a series of eight woes against the Pharisees and scribes, and they are very severe. When He is challenged, He often raises the stakes instead of qualifying himself. He knows what it’s like to attack and not back down. In our sermon text,…
Stephen Kern suggestively notes that Bergson, Proust, and Freud, who all “insisted that the past was an essential source of the full life,” had Jewish backgrounds, and he doesn’t think this an accident: “Both Judaism and Christianity share a reverence for the past and argue their validity partly from tradition.…
I rush out of my library, resolutely intending to tell something to my wife in the next room. When I get there, my intention is gone. I go back to the library, and find the memory of what I wanted to say, undulating lightly in the air. Augustine wanted to…
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