We arrive at some of the most important chapters in my eschatological journey. The two whole chapters Storms devotes to the Olivet Discourse are incredibly good.
Book Review: Give Me Children or I Shall Die by Laurel W. Koepf-Taylor
“The necessity of children for communal survival in the ancient world stand in contrast with the compulsory restriction of children’s value to the emotional realm that has come to dominate modern Western culture.” (154)
Book Review: Christian Pipe Smoking An Introduction to Holy Incense by Uri Brito & Joffre Swait
Perhaps some will even "discover that pipe smoking, for all intents and purposes, is a form of prayer" (17).
Only the Trinity Will Work
"Deep Comedy," according to Leithart, is something that can only be achieved in and through the Christian worldview. What is "deep comedy?" it is the world that the Bible says that we inhabit. The Bible, through the communication of the Trinitarian God, teaches that creation (the world we inhabit) need not be a perpetually decaying world.
Road Trip 2014
Road trips are certainly not glamorous. They are not particularly comfortable. Only those stout of heart, quick of clemency, and iron of stomach undertake such travels. Well, those people and then us.
The Irony in Images
The rendered unto Caesar the Image of God, Jesus Christ.
The pursuit of peace apart from Jesus (the Prince of Peace) or His gospel (the gospel of peace) is doomed to failure because it (the pursuit of peace apart from Christ), just like the Galatian Judiazers, is based on works of the law which cannot bring true peace.
Far from disparaging the commands of God by ignoring them (like many reformed/pietists) or calling people to earn their salvation through adherence to a moral code (like Moral Therapeutic Deists), Smith shows that the purpose of the law is to subvert any claim on autonomy and direct the community of the church into a lifestyle that is aimed at the way the world is truly suppose to be; aimed at the Kingdom.
Book Review: Deviant Calvinism by Oliver Crisp
In the end, Deviant Calvinism isn’t that deviant at all. Whether or not it is Scripturally deviant remains an entirely other matter.
Addressing the Amillennial Alternative: Chapters 5-6
As I continue walking through Sam Storms' Kingdom Come, I continue to wish this book had been written sooner.
A Modernity Moment in Hosea 4
6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.
Because you have rejected knowledge,
I also will reject you from being My priest.
Since you have forgotten the law of your God,
I also will forget your children. - Hosea 4:6
A Good Man is Hard to Find
Am I saying only good men will take out the trash - because it is such a stinky chore? Well, yes, but no.
Cultic Dependence on Exile
Parents/grandparents and familial units need to treat Christian enculturation as essential to survival even though we know God has promised the church victory.
Book Review: Sheerluck Holmes and the Case of the Missing Friend by Karen Poth
The illustrations are spectacular. With 32 pages of simple and short sentences, the illustrations stand out and effectually drive the story for the child reader.
Book Review: Starting Missional Churches (editors Mark Branson & Nicholas Warnes)
Starting Missional Churches is a pressing and convicting volume on the future of the church and its planting procedures.
When you think about the fact that bats are blind and use sonar to navigate the night skies looking for bugs; or the fact that caterpillars hang from tomato plants in your back yard for a few weeks in order to turn in to butterflies; or the fact that the ring I gave my wife when I asked her to marry me was at one point a lump of black coal; these all seem like stories you could tell a kid before they go to sleep at night. Wilson gets at the fact that they are all stories; God's stories for us.
Contextual Uncleanness & God's Covenant in Ezekiel 36
17 “Son of man, when the house of Israel was living in their own land, they defiled it by their ways and their deeds; their way before Me was like the uncleanness of a woman in her impurity. 18 Therefore I poured out My wrath on them for the blood which they had shed on the land, because they had defiled it with their idols. - Ezekiel 36:16-18
In our Adamic nature we are prone to chafe under our limits (for this was how Satan tempted our parents in the garden: "You will be like God"), however, when we rest in the sovereignty of God we find that we can not only accept our role as limited creatures but actually rejoice therein!
Most Influential Fiction Books
Contrary to popular belief, my theological paradigm shifts were not solely the result of theological reading. Fictional reading has a profound impact on the reader's worldview and subsequently their hermeneutic and theology.
A responsive & corporate liturgy takes the focus away from the individual and paradoxically strengthens the individual. Conversely, a liturgy that caters to the individual ironically isolates the individual in the experience they are having.