Genesis 3:, Romans 3:23, Psalm 51:, Luke 15:11-32, Hebrews 10:17, 1 John 1:9
The genius of the biblical revelation is that it refuses to deny the dark side of things, but forgives failure and integrates falling to achieve its only promised wholeness.
The biblical narrative begins and ends at home. From the Garden of Eden to the New Jerusalem we are hardwired for place and for permanence, for rest and refuge, for presence and protection. We long fo...
What genre of literature is the Bible? How we answer this question will ultimately determine not just how we read scripture, but how it will ultimately shape our lives. One Sunday school teacher, teac...
John 1:3, Psalm 104:24, Genesis 2:2-3, Genesis 1:27, Genesis 1:31
The Jews were not the only religious people in the ancient world. There were others, such as the Akkadians, Egyptians, and Phoenicians, and they had their own creation stories. When one compares the ...
It’s wrong to shame someone!” the student asserted, with clear pain in her eyes. Just to be clear, I hadn’t done anything, but she seemed to be talking about some personal experience. “Is it always wr...
It’s wrong to shame someone!” the student asserted, with clear pain in her eyes. Just to be clear, I hadn’t done anything, but she seemed to be talking about some personal experience. “Is it always wr...
That is, there is no concept of a “natural” world in ancient Near Eastern thinking. The dichotomy between natural and supernatural is a relatively recent one. Deity pervaded the ancient world. Nothin...
Judges 16:1-31, Job 1:6-22, 2 Samuel 13:1-22, Matthew 14:1-12, Luke 23:13-25, Psalm 22:1-31
The Old Testament portrays the world as it is, no holds barred. In its pages you will find passionate stories of love and hate, blood-chilling stories of rape and dismemberment, matter-of-fact account...
The Hebrew cosmology represents a revolutionary break with the contemporary world, a parting of the spiritual ways that involved the undermining of the entire prevailing mythological world-view... The...
I believe that it is the paradox between serving a healing God and the persistence of illness and even death that ultimately lies behind most theological debates about divine healing in the Church. ...
Mythology by its nature seeks to explain how the world works and how it came to work that way, and therefore includes a culture’s “theory of origins.” We sometimes label certain literature as “myth” b...
Having a Christian worldview means being utterly convinced that biblical principles are not only true but also work better in the grit and grime of the real world.
The [Mesopotamian ancient texts] serve as sources of information for us to formulate the shape of each culture’s ways of thinking. In most areas there is more similarity between Israel and its neighbo...
In modern Western culture we place a high value on work, which is fine, but one of the philosophical assumptions that can come with such values is that we assume that we own what we earn or buy. From ...
At this point in the discussion some will remark that the Old Testament says a good deal about being prosperous and even occasionally speaks about wealth, but not about money per se. That is the case ...
If cosmic geography is culturally descriptive rather than revealed truth, it takes its place among many other biblical examples of culturally relative notions. For example, in the ancient world, peopl...
Genesis 18:25, Leviticus 19:2, Deuteronomy 34:2, Romans 1:18-20, James 1:17
This capriciousness of the gods is diametrically opposed to the biblical view. The God of Creation is not at all morally indifferent. On the contrary, morality and ethics constitute the very essence o...
The cosmology of the ancient world was dramatically different from the way that we think of ours. Scholar John Walton writes in The Lost World of Genesis One , “Old world cosmic geography is based on...
Introduction During my time in seminary (and the year after I graduated) I spent a lot of time at a church in southern New Jersey. It’s actually how I met Scott Bullock, TPW board member and creator...
Ancient Lens What’s the historical context? Background Structure This Psalm of David is unique. “It is the only hymn in the Old Testament composed completely as a direct address to God.” [1] It e...
If “evolution” is…elevated to the status of a world-view of the way things are, then there is direct conflict with biblical faith. But if “evolution” remains at the level of scientific biological hypo...
Updated for 2026. January 19, 2026 is Martin Luther King Jr. Day— the only U.S. national holiday commemorating a pastor. Under his leadership, non-violent civil rights advocacy achieved leaps f...
A Multi-faceted Church Who loses by the church and parachurch’s lack of unity and cooperation? Absolutely everyone : congregations, ministry organizations, ministry leaders, individual believers . ....
In the great drama of redemption, all arrows point down, not up. To say this more plainly, at no point in the biblical panorama is redemption a matter of our rising up to achieve a higher condition ou...
In 1884, an English schoolmaster named Edwin Abbott Abbott wrote a story about a two-dimensional world called Flatland, inhabited by various shapes (circles, squares, etc.). In Flatland, there is heig...
In this short excerpt, pastor and author Austin Fischer summarizes the late 19th century book Flatland as an analogy for the often-one-dimensional faith that exists our time: tIn 1884, an English sc...
In 1947, budding theologian Carl F. H. Henry wrote a short book titled The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. In it he surveys the American fundamentalist movement’s engagement with the most ...
Ecclesiastes 7:10, Colossians 2:8, Matthew 9:17, 1 Thessalonians 5:21, Romans 12:2, Mark 7:8-9, Isaiah 43:19
It’s funny how sometimes members of the church can associate anything new with “heresy.” We often make the mistake of confusing technological innovations or scientific discoveries for changes to the g...