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…
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Christianity Today had this about rumors that Gorbachev was a Christian: Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made clear this past weekend that he is an atheist after European news agencies last week claimed that he had confirmed his Christian faith during a visit to the tomb of St Francis of…
In a JSOT lecture, published in a 1989 issue of JSOT, James Barr probes Brevard Childs’s claim that “a fundamental characteristic of the critical movement was its total commitment to the literal sense of the text.” Not so, Barr argues. On the contrary, the whole impetus behind biblical scholarship since…
A couple of thoughtful observations from members at Trinity Reformed Church on Lent and penitential seasons: Hannah Grieser suggests that there is an analogy between the Lord’s Day liturgy and the church year; the church year is the Lord’s Day writ large. Since we have a penitential moment in our…
Daniel and his three associates each had two names - a Jewish and a Babylonian. Jim Jordan points out in his recent commentary that the Jewish names are used when the men pray and the Babylonian names when they advise the king. They apparently have no moral qualms about this…
Again, a Frame move, this time from Aquinas: If “the divine will is perfectly efficacious, it follows not only that things are done, which God wills to be done, but also that they are done in the way that He wills. Now God wills some things to be done necessarily,…
Obvious enough, but here goes: God must be outside time, Lord of time, to be within all time. If he was within time as creatures are within time, He could not be present at all times. As John Frame likes to say, our theology should be done in “because of”…
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