In the 1st century, one heresy that crept into the church was Docetism. According to this teaching, Jesus only appeared to have a physical body. Thus there was no problem with His deity but a rejection of His humanity. This fit in well with the Gnostic idea that the physical and material was evil, and the metaphysical and immaterial was good. But the implications for the gospel are dire.

The Gospel declares us to be perfect. Our performance is over and graded, and now we perform because we desire to — we have new hearts. We can now relax in Christ as we labor to keep his good Law. We can enjoy his sovereign grace while we partner with the Holy Spirit to work out our salvation. The world and... Continue Reading

Do you see? Do you see that Isaiah is giving the answer to Tamar’s question? Do you see those for whom Jesus came? He came into this world in the womb of another virgin daughter of Israel. He came for all who have been broken, bowed, and afflicted. He came for those who have been abused, raped, and humbled. He calls to the broken-hearted, those with no strength, and those who have been the victims of every Amnon of this present world. His gospel is for the weak, the downtrodden – those who mourn.

We understand peace like no one else. We have experienced the greatest reconciliation this world has ever seen and it happened in our very own hearts. So, we must be known as peacemakers. Sometimes we think that reconciliation with people we have fought with is impossible, but God has enabled us through our experience of reconciliation to be able to do the impossible.

While there was some new information and it's encouraging that Drs. Ware and Grudem have changed their minds on eternal generation, the talks indicated no fundamental change on ESS/EFS/ERAS. In fact, Drs. Ware and Grudem doubled down in their insistence on ESS/EFS/ERAS and continued to accuse those who deny ESS/EFS/ERAS of being wrong on both the Trinity and the Bible.

“The New Testament mentions equality once or twice, but when it comes to social relationships, it is far more interested in concepts like oneness, commonness, partnership, union, and joint-inheritance. If you make all those passages about equality, you flatten their meaning.”   An Anglican man rang me out of the blue the other day to... Continue Reading

“In Scripture, memory has a similar formative power. The Bible depicts believers as being formed by their response to the revelation of God, and the divine Creator and Redeemer exhibits His holy character by His faithful remembering of the people whom He has created and promised to redeem.”   Memory of the past—whether corporate or... Continue Reading

God compares his people to sheep. In ancient Palestine sheep “were totally dependent on shepherds for protection, grazing, watering, shelter and tending to injuries. In fact, sheep would not survive long without a shepherd. Sheep are not only dependent creatures; they are also singularly unintelligent, prone to wandering and unable to find their way to a sheepfold even when it is within sight”(Dictionary of Biblical Imagery). How we need a shepherd!

To those ruling elders, ministers, and concerned laity in the CRC, you established your boundary when you stood before God and the church and promised to uphold, teach, and defend the Word of God as confessed by the churches. If church discipline is your line (not a bad one, since its is one of the three marks of the true church in Belgic art. 29) then why does it begin only at the ordination of homosexuals or homosexual marriage? Why does it not begin with the ordination of females to ministerial office?

At times, doctrinal error propagates due to incorrect use of words in argumentation. Watts proposes several errors. First, when words are vague, overly-flowery, or have no idea associated (e.g. “[A]s when the mystical divines talk of the prayer of silence, the supernatural and passive night of the soul, the vacuity of powers, the suspension of all thoughts,” 188). The risk here is an acceptable imprecision of theological ideas and doctrines or a precision, but upon the wrong truth, both of which are entrances to error.