Meet the Puritans

Paul commands us, “Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?” (2 Cor. 13:5). It is a responsibility of great importance for the people of God to be assured that there is a true and...

Following up on Patrick Ramsey's excellent post on the biblical phrase, "Do this and live," I'd like to delve in the helpful comments of the Puritan exegete, Matthew Poole (1624-1679). Poole wrote two commentaries on Scripture. His popular work was his Annotations upon the Holy Bible , which we...

A concise and catchy way of articulating the covenant of works or works righteousness, is to use a phrase that is found on the lips of both Moses and Christ: "do this and live" (Lev. 18:5; Luke 10:28). Whoever keeps God’s commandments perfectly in his own strength (“do this”) will earn the right to...

The story goes that there was an astronomer, a biologist, a cosmologist, a geologist, and a physicist who climbed the highest mountain in the world in order to collaborate on determining the origin of life. The astronomer measured the distance to the stars, the biologist examined the smallest life...

We at Meet the Puritans desire to introduce you to the Puritans and their writings. In an earlier post by Mark Jones, he asked, “But, who were the ‘Puritans’?” Here, I want to supplement his answer by turning to John Geree (c. 1601-1649), a self-proclaimed Puritan describing Puritanism. Geree, who...

Dr. Derek Cooper is Associate Professor of World Christian History at Biblical Seminary (Hatfield, PA). He has the distinct honor of writing the only PhD thesis on the seventeenth-century Puritan, Thomas Manton. He also wrote a popular book on Manton: Thomas Manton: A Guided Tour of the Life and...

Continuing through the neglected Puritan Thomas Manton's (1620–1677) " Christ's Temptation and Transfiguration Practically Explained and Improved in Several Sermons” ( Works 1:258–336), we come to sermon 4 , which deals with Matthew 4:7 (click here for sermon 1 , sermon 2 , and sermon 3 ). This...

“Where God does not find a mouth to speak, you must not find an ear to hear, nor a heart to believe.” We are at the fourth of our reading the Puritan Paperback, Sermons of the Great Ejection . This title is a collection of nine sermons recalls one of the great turning points in English Christianity...

Discerning readers of this short series on "Concerning Ministerial Qualifications" may be wondering whether James Durham missed the foundational qualification the New Testament outlines for ministry. After all where does Paul begin in outlining the qualifications for elders? He begins with...

The Reformed doctrine of predestination is “an opiate of the flesh and the devil, and is a stronghold of Satan where he lies in wait for all people, wounds most of them, and fatally pierces many of them with the arrows of both despair and self-assurance.” This doctrine “makes God the author of sin...