Salvation

S tephen Marshall (1594-1655) argued that infants of believers should be baptized because 1) they are within the covenant of grace and belong to the kingdom of Christ, 2) they are made partakers of the inward grace of baptism. In a previous article , I attempted to explain his second argument but...

I n the previous two articles (see 1 , 2 ), we have considered one argument for and one objection to infant baptism from the writings of Stephen Marshall (1594-1655). We are now going to turn our attention to a benefit of infant baptism. There are several avenues we could explore in this regard,...

Faithful preachers and teachers in the Church have always looked for effective ways to communicate their points. The acronym TULIP, of course, is a device meant to communicate the core of the doctrine of human salvation. Like all pedagogical devices, it is not meant to explain everything that could...

Exuberant over an experience, an oh-so-sweet manifestation of divine providence, you delightedly seek to give God praise in telling your story. “It was such a ‘God thing’,” you proclaim. As you see it, God wove together an otherwise inexplicable combination of events to deliver a wonderful—even...

What is the “total” in “total depravity”? When we speak of total depravity, we do not mean that every person is as quantitatively bad as they could possibly be. We do not mean that every person has committed every possible sin or that every person does all the heinousness of a Stalin or Hitler. We...

I have been calling attention to the Puritans’ high view of good works in a number of past posts. If I could read my readers’ minds, quite a tale could be told. Undoubtedly, reactions would range from disbelief to delight to disgust. Then I got to thinkin’ that it might be helpful to know the...

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...

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...

Heaven has been splashed all over the headlines of the secular press this past week. It was, of course, because of the unexpected death of David Bowie and the way he choreographed his own departure from this world. The news of Bowie’s death came as a shock, not least because no-one apart from a...

For over three centuries Christians have delighted in Pilgrim’s Progress , the spiritual allegory of the journey of Christian from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. This literary work has become a classic in the truest sense, treasured both for its literary qualities and its spiritual...