Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
WHAT IS THE OT PRECURSOR OF THE NT OFFICE OF PASTOR? HOW DOES THE FORMER ILLUMINATE THE LATTER? The first problem to address is: how do we know that there is an office of pastor in the New Testament? 1 Perhaps the way the question is put may permit me…
[This essay was originally published in December, 1981, in The Biblical Educator , a publication of the Institute for Christian Economics, and again with slight revisions in Contra Mundum 7 (Spring, 1993). It is reprinted here as a supplement to my book Creation in Six Days .] In 1979, Dr.…
Anyone seeking to reverse the meaning of this promise needs to come to grips not only with the phrase "God was with the lad" later on, but also with Hagar’s response in 16:13. She worships Yahweh, putting her trust in Him and obeying Him. In fact, Hagar is at the…
Ishmael is the narrator of Melville’s fantasy-romance Moby Dick. Melville takes up the traditional view of Ishmael as a wayward son of Abraham, driven out solely because of the Divine "caprice" of election, an angry man with his hand raised against all other men. He is a fitting "anti-hero," or…
There were five cities at the center of the Canaanite culture in the circle of the Jordan, a place like the Garden of Eden, like the land of Egypt, before it became the Dead Sea at the destruction of the cities (Genesis 13:10). Genesis 14:2 tells us their names: Sodom,…
Meditations by James B. Jordan Genesis 19, the destruction of Sodom and the rescue of Lot, is part two of a story that begins in Genesis 18. These two chapters happen in one 24-hour period: noon and evening in Mamre, and midnight and daybreak in Sodom. God and two angels…
Showing page 244 of 309
Showing page 5 of 43
The word “number” (Greek, arithmos ) occurs ten times in Revelation, and the word occurs in climactic sections of the major sections of the book. It occurs first in 5:11, describing the “number” of the angels who join in worship, at the climax of the rippling expansion of praise from…
After the flood, the sons of Noah repopulated the earth. Shem’s first son was Elam (Genesis 10:22; cf. Genesis 14:1), the ancestor of the Elamite people that lived in the South of present-day Iran, with Susa as their capital. Elam is apparently the firstborn of the Shemites, displaced from that…
In his Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science , Richard Yeo further dispels the myth of the lone scientific genius. Early modern science made its advances because of collaboration among researchers. And they used the highest of contemporary high-tech to pass around their research - the notebook. It was…
Mehdi Hasan presents evidence in an article in the New Statesman that jihadists aren’t the most devout of Muslims. Often the opposite. “In 2008, a classified briefing note on radicalisation, prepared by MI5’s behavioural science unit, was leaked to the Guardian . It revealed that, ‘far from being religious zealots,…
Most ancient myths and philosophies, and not a few modern scientific and philosophical theories, posit or assume that matter is eternal. Does that matter? Yes. If matter is eternal, then creation can only be control, limitation, ordering. If matter is eternal, creativity can only be negative. If matter is eternal,…
It’s often suggested today that any argument or claim drawn from revelation is “sectarian.” In order to make a “universal” claim, we need to ground it in something more general than a particular revelation. Christians assume this as much as secularists. Many think we have to move from revelation to…
Showing page 543 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
