As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
“The word aseity is from the Latin “a se” meaning “from oneself.” This is not to say that God is “self-made,” or that He created Himself, but it relates to God’s self-sufficiency…. We need to be reminded of God’s aseity because we are often guilty of using our own characteristics and experiences as the template for understanding the attributes of God.” - Ref21
Review of An Introduction to John Owen: A Christian Vision for Every Stage of Life by Crawford Gribben, Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020, 190 pages, pbk.
Crawford Gribben is a professor at Queen’s University in Belfast and is well known as a scholar of Puritanism, specializing on eschatology. He has written a previous book on John Owen which has garnered him much praise.
One example where a New Testament writer views an Old Testament prophetic passage as needing to be fulfilled literally in the future is Paul’s use of Isaiah 59:20-21 in Romans 11:26-27:
and so all Israel will be saved; just as it is written,
“The Deliverer will come from Zion,
He will remove ungodliness from Jacob.”
27 “This is My covenant with them,
When I take away their sins.”
The other pastor and I recently finished teaching through the Book of Judges. We each alternate teaching Sunday School and the morning sermon; switching back and forth each week. It fell to me to teach Judges 19.
I don’t teach narrative verse by verse. Instead, I usually teach the passage by crafting several questions from the text that seem to get to the heart of the matter. I’ll discuss one of those questions here.
What’s gone so wrong in Judges 19?
“This paper will carefully examine the relevant affirmations and denials in those documents [1978-99 Council on Biblical Inerrancy] to expose the ambiguous wording that opened the door for these old-earth views.
“My point isn’t that Dreher is wrong to warn against cultural currents that may sweep us into soft totalitarianism. I only wish he had explored how this tendency toward soft totalitarianism could wind up being as much a feature of a nationalist surge from the far right as it could the elitist ‘top down’ from the far left.” - TGC
Read Part 1.
Perhaps what Adam and Even saw and heard in the Garden was no mere snake but a serpent-like creature belonging to a higher order than the ordinary “beasts of the field.” Several considerations lend support to this view.
Genesis 3:1 introduces a new character into the Eden narrative and signals a shift in the plot. He is introduced as “the serpent.” Initially, the reader may picture nothing more than a legless reptile (suborder: serpentes). The Hebrew term נחש is generally used to refer to a type of a reptile, usually a legless reptile such as a snake (Num 21:6; Deut 8:15; Ps 58:4; Prov 23:32; Isa 65:25; Jer 8:17; Amos 5:19; Mic 7:17). But additional information in the account suggests that this entity is more than a mere snake. This creature talks with the humans and entices them to sin (3:1–5).
Reposted from The Cripplegate.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been preparing a review of Latasha Morrison’s Be the Bridge book and Bible study materials. In so doing, I’ve been reading her recommended resources, and have been struck by how central the following claim is to this genre of “racial reconciliation” material: “members of a group have the responsibility to confess and seek reconciliation on behalf of that group for sins that those members themselves may not have even personally committed.”
Discussion