Plenty of people are zealous for God, but their zeal is based on bad information. They actually don’t know God at all. This is Israel’s problem.

In Romans 9 to 11, the apostle Paul segues from his theological musings about salvation to a question no Christian can ignore—what about Israel? He spends most of Romans 9 defending God from accusations of failure (9:6-13), unjustness and cruelty (9:14-18), and unfairness (9:19-21). God dispenses mercy and hardness of heart as He sees fit (Rom 9:14, 18). The clay has no right to object to the potter’s decision (Rom 9:20-21).

“Along with the breathtaking boasts and cheap-shot slander, the sense of panic will heighten as we’re told, once again, that this is the most important election of our lifetimes.” - TGC

“Ankeny (Iowa) Baptist Church hosted Back on Track, a two-day conference for seventh- through twelfth-graders…. In a Q and A the final morning, he answered students’ questions about defending their faith.” - GARBC

“After a great outcry against this attempted purging of an aspect of our American history, the park service relented” - Real Clear Religion

“The story of Acts 29’s trajectory will feel familiar to many of us outside of the network as well. Indeed it may serve as a small-scale model for much of the evangelical fracturing that began around 2015 and has continued through to the present.” - Mere Orthodoxy

To me, one of the strangest oddities of the year of 2020 was the call for safety in the face of COVID-19.

“Stay safe,” we were cautioned. Here in Wisconsin, our governor even issued an order titled “Safer at Home.”

This seemed to me to be an extraordinary choice of wording—because COVID-19 results from a virus. I’m sure that experts disagree on the best methodologies for warding off infection from a virus. But one thing that you certainly cannot do to escape it is to stay safe. Your only hope is to stay healthy.

“My preference is to read the poem as a series of metaphors for death—together with its individual, communal, and cosmic implications—drawn from the created order, domestic life, commerce, and warfare.” - DBTS Blog

“This is the second consecutive year North Korea has been named the world’s worst country to be a Christian ….Others in the top 10 include Somalia (2), Libya (3), Eritrea (4) Yemen (5), Nigeria (6), Pakistan(7), Sudan(8), Iran (9).” - Baptist Paper

Related:

“For the last 20 years, Mattingly has been best known as editor of GetReligion.org — a website dedicated to promoting and critiquing religion coverage in the mainstream media.” - RNS

“13% of U.S. adults say they have become less spiritual over time, while 33% say they have become less religious.” - Pew

“Christian confidence, at its heart, is a response to the Word of God. It is confidence that what God has said, He will do.” - Ligonier

(Editor’s note: Written in 2018, but doesn’t seem to have lost any relevance!)

Many of my Christian friends are angry. Or afraid. Or both. At least, that’s the way it looks in their posts on social media.

And that’s too bad, for several reasons—

Gog and Magog: do you know what modern nations would correspond to this? Or are they symbolical? Or nations we cannot identify? Perhaps Ezekiel refers to literal nations, while Revelation’s use of those terms is symbolical of nations rebelling against God? Here are the texts, your comments are welcome.

“Charles Spurgeon said, ‘By perseverance, the snail reached the ark.’ This beautiful art illustrating Spurgeon’s words was created by Eden Kell” - Randy Alcorn

“while Christians should rightly stand up … there is a segment within the conservative movement that has proven susceptible to conflating their Christian and American identities.” - CPost

“Christians can be guilty of making pithy statements of a theological nature that require a lot of explanation for the phrase to be accurate. If an explanation is not offered, we are sometimes demanding a lot of the reader to put all the pieces together.” - Ref21

“Today… the gospel remains the only lens through which my fellow Gen Zers will be able to see everything else. It’s where they can discover stable identities in a world of counterfeit “concepts of existence,” and it’s the power of God unto salvation.” - TGC

“Dawkins and [Ayaan Hirsi] Ali will be discussing her conversion at the upcoming Dissident Dialogues festival in New York City in May. Dawkins’s admission that there may be something for him to learn about religion is uncharacteristically humble.” - Daily Citizen

Read the series.

A Premillennial Reading of Hebrews (1)

“are these new evangelicals or not evangelicals?… one would be hard pressed to identify which section of David Bebbington’s Evangelicalism Quadrilateral (conversionism, biblicism, activism, crucicentrism) has room for the Proud Non-Churchgoers.” - WORLD

“The first question is, should a president be immune from criminal prosecution? The answer to that has to be yes and no. And I think it’s going to be very difficult for a court to say exactly how yes and exactly how no” - Mohler

“The College does not permit the statement of preferred personal pronouns by employees when conducting College business, when on a platform where they are publicly identified as College employees, and/or when using the College brand in print or digital media” - Baptist Paper

“Our culture has moved on, and sidelined this movement. So why did the movement fall apart? Why did it lose its appeal?” - Common Good

“In those three words, I’ve found a powerful prescription to fight the cynicism and discouragement I often feel in personal evangelism. Paul knew, no matter the present opposition, God’s gospel would find an audience.” - 9 Marks

Review: ‘Christianity and New Religious Movements’ by Derek Cooper - TGC

An early look at ‘Dispensationalism Revisited: A 21st Century Restatement’ - P&D

“Biblical forgiveness is a gift to the offender. We release another person’s debts for their sake and for Christ’s sake.” - CLeaders

“This week marks the anniversary of when Puritans in Massachusetts held a day of fasting and repentance for their involvement in the Salem witch trials.” - CPost

“In Pew’s study… 47 percent of said King left a ‘very positive’ impact on the nation, but only 38 percent said their own views on racial equality were influenced by King’s legacy a ‘great deal or a fair amount.’” - BPNews

There are at least five reasons that progressive dispensational (PD) represents a departure from a normative hermeneutic (literal grammatical historical) and reading of the Bible. The first two pertain to methodology in arriving at conclusions, and the latter three have to do with theological conclusions which are not exegetically derived.

The Complementary Hermeneutic Is a Departure from Fixed Meaning

Blaising and Bock recognize that methodology is definitive in the formation of PD, and acknowledge that PD is the result of a methodological departure from the hermeneutic of classical and revised dispensational thought, as they observe that,