thought exercise on Revelation

Before I knew God, I knew nature. I knew the feeling of warmth from the sun on my skin. The crunch of leaves on the sidewalk. The sparkle of the fresh powder snow. It was not until I was a teenager th...

On this earth, then, in our deserts, God personally reveals and names himself. When he does so, his pleasure floods our senses, his beauty engulfs us, and our God-misconceptions are devastated. He mov...

Karl Barth wrote that, “God is always a mystery. Revelation is always revelation in the full sense of the word or it is not revelation” ( CD  I.8.2). God’s revelation, to Barth, always exists in a dia...

What we need to realize, however, is that there is no such thing as autonomous or “self-grounding” knowledge. All systems of interpretation and all claims to true knowledge are ultimately grounded out...

Story is the primary way in which the revelation of God is given to us. The Holy Spirit’s literary genre of choice is story. Story isn’t a simple or naive form of speech from which we graduate to the ...

In a sermon on Revelation 21:5-7, which includes the auspicious phrase, “Behold I make all things new”, Eugene Peterson connects and contrasts the experience the energy or mood of the New Year with ou...

When we begin reading the book of Revelation, we are first confused and then disappointed. We are confused by an author who talks of angels and dragons, men eating books and giant insects eating men, ...

Thomas Aquinas, the famous medieval theologian, created one of the greatest intellectual achievements of Western civilization in his Summa Theologica. It’s a massive work: thirty-eight treatises, thre...

C.S. Lewis wrote an essay…called “The Seeing Eye,” and in it he argued that if there were a God, we would not relate to him the way a person on the first story of a house relates to a person on the se...

If God wanted to remain silent about His existence, He wouldn’t have bothered creating the stars; He wouldn’t have made the Milky Way, or Betelgeuse. In fact, He wouldn’t have made the majestic Rocky ...

In 1961 the Russians put the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin. Nikita Khrushchev was the Russian premier, and he said that when Gagarin went into space, the cosmonaut discovered that there was no Go...

Some time ago, I read about the work of a Wycliffe Bible translator in a remote village in Papua New Guinea. When the opening chapters of Genesis were first translated into the native language, the at...

In his book “Where Is God When It Hurts?”, author Philip Yancey shares an unfortunate, yet central dynamic related to how Americans respond to pain: we do everything possible to avoid it. That means p...

Light flies. If you don’t believe me, go outside tonight, crank up the family car, and try to race the beam streaming from the headlights to the end of the driveway. Light is fast—really fast—travelin...

One of my daughters has been singing a song about Jesus that contains the line “Jesus was a story-tellin’ man.” When I first heard that line it seemed a bit flip, as so many contemporary Christian son...

In the second century before Christ the great rival to Roman power in the Mediterranean world was Carthage, the Phoenician city-state located on the north African coast. It had been founded in 822 B.C...

I absolutely love Marvel movies. I’m talking about Thor, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Black Widow, Guardians of the Galaxy. All of them. In Ragnarok , Thor, the Norse god, played by the incredibly good-...

Many have heard of the polymath and famous atheist Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), whose career as a public intellectual touched on a variety of disciplines, including philosophy (he is considered one o...

At Trafalgar Square in the city of London stands a statue of Lord Nelson. Resting atop a tall pillar, it towers too high for passersby to distinguish his features. For this reason, about forty years a...

Arthur Conan Doyle, the ingenious creator of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, once found great humor in a practical joke he played on 12 famous friends. Each of these men was virtuous and highly respect...

After many years of highly successful ministry, Dwight Lyman Moody had an experience of which he himself said, I cannot describe it, I seldom refer to it, it is almost too sacred an experience to name...

In Romans 8:18, Paul describes the future of those who persevere in the faith: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us....

At the last Judgment Christ will say to us, "Come, you also! Come, drunkards! Come, weaklings! Come, children of shame!" And He will say to us: "Vile beings, you who are in the image of...

It is characteristic of any great work of literature to have in its ending something that brings a sense of harmony to the whole. Like the finale of a symphony, or the confetti at the end of a nationa...

One day when George MacDonald, the great Scottish preacher and writer, was talking with his son, the conversation turned to heaven and the prophets’ version of the end of all things. “It seems too goo...

The story goes about a young man (or woman!) with dreams of growing a small church nestled in rural Oklahoma. Despite his relentless efforts, the church continued to teeter on the edge of extinction a...

In some popular conceptions of the afterlife, God’s love gets reduced to unconditional affirmation. But in truth, God’s love is always a holy love and his heaven is an entirely holy place. Heaven is f...

Like a scene straight out of Gladiator, Polycarp was dragged into the Roman Colosseum. Discipled by the apostle John himself, the aged bishop faithfully and selflessly led the church at Smyrna through...

That which distinguishes Christianity has not been stolen. For what makes Christianity absolutely distinct is the identity of our God. Which God we worship: that is the article of faith that stands be...

Paul’s term for the return of Jesus is called the parousia. Parousia was used to describe an imperial visit by a king to a city. People would send a delegation outside the city gates to greet the dign...