My wife and I spent some time at the beach recently. What we saw there wasn’t a surprise — it’s what beaches look like now. But on the drive home I found myself thinking about something that doesn’t get said enough in church. What used to stay at the beach isn’t staying there anymore. So…
Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:17 — “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.” Most Christians love that verse. They should. It describes something real — a radical change in identity, standing, and direction that happens the moment someone is genuinely…
Psalm 82 is one of the strangest passages in the Bible to read cold. God is standing in an assembly, surrounded by other divine beings he calls elohim, and he is pronouncing judgment on them for failing in their responsibilities. The divine council in the Bible is that framework — the structure the biblical writers…
Most Christians know the Bible mentions angels. Far fewer know it also describes a specific category of heavenly being the text calls Watchers — beings who appear in a king’s dream and connect directly to one of the most debated passages in all of Scripture. Getting the watchers in the Bible right matters because the…
The phrase “sons of God” appears in the Bible in ways that confuse people — partly because it means different things depending on where you find it, and partly because popular theology has blurred the distinctions without explaining them. In the Old Testament, sons of God in the Bible refers consistently to heavenly beings —…
The Nephilim in the Bible appear in four verses in Genesis 6 and one verse in Numbers 13. That’s it. Five verses total, and they have generated more speculation, more bad theology, and more movie plots than almost any other passage in Scripture. Most of the popular treatment of the Nephilim runs in one of…
There is a version of this debate that goes on in universities and academic journals, and it sounds very different from the one happening in churches. In the academic version, the pro-life position is presented as a modern Christian invention — a case of reading into Scripture something that isn’t there, driven by politics rather…
When does life begin? According to the Bible, the answer is not complicated — though people work hard to make it so. The question matters because everything in the abortion debate turns on it. If life begins at conception, the unborn are persons bearing God’s image and the prohibition on murder applies to them. If…
The Bible does not use the word abortion. That fact gets cited constantly by people who want to argue that Scripture has nothing to say on the subject. It is a bad argument, and here’s why. The Bible also does not use the words Trinity, homosexuality, or pornography — yet no serious biblical scholar concludes…
The perseverance of the saints is one of the most misunderstood doctrines in Reformed theology — and one of the most personally significant. Most people either confuse it with “once saved always saved” — which sounds like a blank check for sin — or they reject it entirely because they’ve seen people who professed faith…