God isn’t always easy to trust. I don’t just mean in the daily lives of living out of faith. I mean even based on what we know of Him, it can be tough to trust Him to be good. Prime example: This is what the LORD of Hosts says: ‘I witnessed what the Amalekites did …
Continue reading "When God Doesn’t Seem Good: Living with Tough Texts in the Bible"
Not everything in your Bible may have come from the Bible. “What do you mean, Caleb?” you ask. Well, the Bible has a very long history. It was written over a period of more than 1000 years, and was passed on for nearly 2000 since its completion. The timeframes for when some of the books of the …
Continue reading "John 7:53-8:11 (Are Today’s Bibles Reliable?)"
My last post on whether or not you could lose your salvation was a bit of a mess. Well, that was mainly because I didn’t know exactly where I was going with it. Since then, I’ve gone through a bit of a paradigm shift. So now I want to approach it differently. My contention: it …
Continue reading "Secure Because Jesus (Can You Lose Your Salvation? Part 2)"
I really have two different audiences for this blog. One of them is people who are very interested in theology, philosophy, and nerd stuff. The other is everyone else, especially those Christians I know doing daily life without needing lots of technical blahs. For a long time there has been a necessary tension between writing for …
Continue reading "The Nicene Noggin"
[This whole post is a follow-up of two earlier posts. First was I’m Not 100% Certain I’m Going to Heaven (And That’s Okay) and the second was Clark Is Certain He is Going to Heaven. Make sure to read them if you haven’t!] Some time ago, I argued against the possibility of true, epistemic certainty of …
Continue reading "Salvation and Certainty Revisited"
I absolutely love this song, as it perfectly encapsulates the call and person of Jesus Christ.
As much as I read and write about theology and Christian living, I find myself in a place of wishing I could live up to half of what I find in Scripture. Every time I find a truth about the Holy Spirit, I feel woefully unable to walk in step with Him more. When I perceive the wondrous …
Continue reading "The Real Problem"
It isn’t enough to say that Jesus died to pay the price for our sins. While it is a true statement, it is only part of the picture. So I want to revisit a basic question: What did Jesus intend to accomplish (and, since He rose again, we can confidently say that He did accomplish) in His death? …
Continue reading "What Did Jesus’ Death Do, Exactly?"
I was just reading last night Francis Chan’s book Forgotten God. At one point he comments on the ease of doing church in our own strength to draw a crowd as opposed to a truly Spirit-filled gathering of believers. He questions how many of our churches are actually like the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18 …
Continue reading "Francis Chan: Is Your Church Like Elijah or Baal’s Prophets?"