Q: Why was Jesus sent to Earth?

Hi, Brian and Kimberly,
My apologies for taking so long to answer you.
Jesus told us that God’s motivation is love, and that his goal is to bring life to whoever believes in Jesus. John 3:16
Of course, the mainstream traditional teaching is that most people self-select themselves out of that opportunity, by choosing to reject Jesus. My [...]

A Calvinist pokes fun at Calvinist intolerance

Thanks, David Wayne, (JollyBlogger) for poking fun at your calvinist heritage of intolerance. I thank you, my wife thanks you, and the ashes of Michael Servetus thanks you. My comments are posted on David’s site.

Abraham Lincoln’s problem with orthodoxy

I’ve been a Civil War buff for years, and a Lincoln buff. I’ve never read anything that would indicate what my evangelical brothers would call “saving faith” in Lincoln’s life. A few who knew Lincoln claimed him to have such faith. Some of Lincoln’s own words are laced with religious language. His mission in life [...]

Terrifically Salvific

The shallowness of evangelicalism leaves it largely inequipped to deal with the difficult issues. If we are to be a people that brings hope to the hopeless, purpose to the purposeless and joy to those who know only sorrow, we must be prepared to give answers that are biblically-based and Scripturally-satisfying. To do this we [...]

The Fairness of a Father

One of the toughest lessons I had to learn as a father was trying to find ways of making consequences “fit”. To feel corrected rather than abused, a child must sense proportionality.
Punishment is a loving thing for a father to concern himself with, because if a father does not correct a child early and often, [...]

Yet more wrath?

I love the premise of “Desiring God” — that our chief end is to delight in God, enjoying Him forever. It can and should be “all joy” to know, and be loved by, the great and good God of the Universe. But when John Piper gets to describing what God is doing, and how the [...]

Father Provides

My son-in-law passed the first day of his new role in promising fashion. He stayed up with the baby to let Mom sleep. As with the human creation, night came first, and as in one of my favorite texts, there was a lot of weeping.
Like a good father, my son-in-law met the needs of his [...]

Why is God happy? My first response to John Piper

I am not the first to notice that Paul calls God the “happy God” twice in his epistles to Timothy. Many have commented on this extensively. One of the most prolific is John Piper, whose book Desiring God I am now reading.
In the link above, Pastor Piper states what he calls “the ultimate Biblical explanation [...]

Revised Genesis

I’m glad God didn’t have to revise his first chapter. But not knowing the end from the beginning, I’ve had to evolve in my blog creations. I’m an evolved person since I started blogging 6 years ago, and what I care about has shifted slightly as well.
So here’s what this blog is about. Why is [...]