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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Jacob Olupona ( African Religions , 118-9) tells the remarkable story of Rev. Sunday Adelaja and the Word of Faith Bible Church of Kiev: “Adelaja, a Nigerian, initially and somewhat to his dismay found himself in Belarus (then part of the Soviet Union) on a scholarship to study journalism. While…
Karin Neutel's A Cosmopolitan Ideal is a detailed contextual study of Paul's declaration that in Christ there is no more Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. “Contextual” here means that Neutel examines the use of these and similar contrasts in Greco-Roman and Jewish texts of the first…
F. S. Naiden is making a career in classics by unsettling settled academic opinion about ancient religion and ritual. He did it in the 2012 Smoke Signals for the Gods , which reintroduced the gods into modern accounts of Greek sacrifice. Earlier (I'm reading Naiden in reverse order!), in Ancient…
Modernism was born in Vienna at the turning point from the 19th to the 20th century. On most accounts, the climate of fin de siecle Vienna was dark and brooding breeding ground for modernist nightmares. Without denying that dimension of Viennese modernism, Kevin Karnes argues in A Kingdom Not of…
In his monograph on The Throne Motif in the Book of Revelation (228-9), Lazlo Gallusz lays out a helpful macro-outline of Revelation, which shows the alternation of temple scenes and visions: Temple scene 1, 1:9-20 (Jesus among lampstands) Vision 1, 2:1-3:22 Temple scene 2, 4:1-5:14 (heavenly temple) Vision 2, 6:1-8:1…
In his very short introduction to African Religions , Jacob Olupona summarizes the creation-and-fall myth of the Basari of Northern Togo and Ghana: “A creator god named Unumbotte who makes man, a snake, and an antelope; he then places them on unrefined earth with one tree. Unumbotte gives them seeds…
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