arts and culture on Adam

Pastor: O Lord, we are in over our heads. So many are the sins that we’ve committed this past week, and they condemn us in your presence. Only because you love us with a never-ending, unbreaking, alwa...

Adam was a gardener, and God, who made him, sees that half of all good gardening is done upon the knees.

According to professor and author Adam Alter, the average phone usage among adults rose from eighteen minutes per day in 2008 to two hours and forty-eight minutes per day in 2015. This isn’t because w...

There is an integrity to creation that depends on humans seeing themselves as properly placed within a network of creation and God. The drama shows us that neither God nor the creation itself can tole...

What is the very first thing God said to humanity after he created Adam and Eve and placed them in the garden of Eden? “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden” (Gen. 2:16). God’s first words a...

Some of my favorite heroes have a dual identity: Clark Kent is Superman; Bruce Wayne is Batman; Peter Parker is Spider-Man. The list goes on and on. You and I also have a dual identity, though, unlike...

In Understanding Genesis Nahum Sarna explodes the myth that in the story of Cain and Abel represents a biblical preference for the shepherd over the tiller of the soil. He points out that “there is no...

The custody of the garden was given in charge to Adam, to show that we possess the things which God has committed to our hands, on the condition that, being content with the frugal and moderate use of...

Let us begin with a question. Do you really know how to enjoy the world? Do you know how to enjoy yourself? One of the greatest parables in the New Testament has to do with the search for enjoyment an...

We all know children sometimes ask difficult questions. One day a young girl asked her parents where human beings come from. “Well,” the mother said, “God created Adam and Eve and Adam and Eve had chi...

I recently found, hidden in plain sight, the secret formula for writing a bestselling book. Yes, you read that right. My discovery created a surge of power that I could hardly handle. It felt like lea...

Last year I joined the growing ranks of people who have made the return to music on vinyl. There is much debate in my family as to whether I’m a hipster or will soon be eating dinner at 4 p.m. and wea...

Religion has always been woven into American politics. John Quincy Adams liked to read the Bible in the mornings and would plunge naked into the Potomac for a swim before attending his weekly Sunday c...

Somehow I stumbled upon a book that initially looked promising, called Time Warrior. It must have been well reviewed on Amazon, or maybe it was the endorsement on the back from Jay Adams (different Ja...

While we are now surrounded by a never-ending number of pixels with our smartphones, there once was a time where the process of developing photographs took something much more significant than pointin...

To walk with Jesus is to walk with a slow, unhurried pace. Hurry is the death of prayer and only impedes and spoils our work. It never advances it.

“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

In the beginning, the universe was created. This has been widely regarded as a bad move. (for contrast, and humor)

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.

"Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws."

All earthly cities are vulnerable. Men build them and men destroy them. At the same time there is the City of God which men did not build and cannot destroy and which is everlasting.

That free will was demonstrated in the placing of temptation before man with the command not to eat of the fruit of the tree which would give him a knowledge of good and evil, with the disturbing mora...

Nahum Sarna writes in Understanding Genesis: Perhaps nowhere is the contrast between the mythological and the Israelite conceptions more striking and more illuminating than in their respective descr...

They say that in Martin Luther’s class on Genesis, a smart aleck student asked, “Dr. Luther, since you know so much about the book of Genesis, tell us: what was God doing all that time before God crea...

Gracious God, sometimes I am so caught up in my failures, in all the ways I am not like you, that I neglect the deeper truth, the earlier truth of Genesis 1. You have made me, as a human being, in you...

God created [mankind] and therefore only God can reveal to us our identity and function. Without this biblical revelation, we are lost in a maze of confusion.

There is a tendency among readers and scholars of Genesis 2:16-17 to focus on the prohibition of verse 17: “but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.” …I want to pause to cons...

Original Sin has great marketing potential.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty. Darkness was on the surface of the deep. And God’s Spirit was hovering over the surface of the waters. In ...