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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The church’s stance with regard to civil order is neatly articulated in Romans, provided we read chapters 12-13 together. Romans 13 makes it clear that God has given rulers the sword, and that they are to use it for just vengeance. They bear the sword to punish evildoers and to…
D espite its claims to the contrary, Patrick Deneen writes in a 2014 piece in The American Conservative , “liberalism was never about ‘limited' government” or curbing absolutism. Rather, liberalism is about “the pursuit and exercise of potentially limitless power toward seemingly ‘limited' ends of securing Rights.” The limitation on…
I n David's final speech (1 Chronicles 29), he offers a fivefold praise of God's perfections (v. 11): Yours is . . . 1. Greatness ( gedolah ) 2. Power ( giburah , related to gibbor , “mighty man”) 3. Glory 4. Victory 5. Majesty He adds an expansive note…
P atrick Murray's essay in Culmination of Capital lays out sixfold aim of Marx's Capital : to present and examine in the form of a systematic dialectic the social forms constitutive of the capitalist order, beginning with the (generalized) commodity; to expose capitalist society, in its enlightened secularism, to be…
I n the Divine Institutes , Lactantius takes on Plato's endorsement of common property. He makes a grudging admission that it might be “supported so long as it appears to refer only to money.” After all, “everyone should be wise enough to despise money!” (translation from From Irenaeus to Grotius…
“W e dismiss what philosophers take to be the fundamental exercise of justice,” writes Ambrose in his Christianized Ciceronian treatise de officiis (translation, F rom Irenaeus to Grotius , 84-5). According to Ambrose's summary, philosophical justice takes as “the primary criterion . . . that we do no harm except…
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