Richard Baxter felt the unwanted invasion of deep heartache that only death can deliver when his beloved wife Margaret passed away. He described his experience as being “under the power of melting grief.” J.I. Packer noted in his book A…
John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ is a polemical work, designed to show, among other things, that the doctrine of universal redemption is unscriptural and destructive of the Gospel. There are many, therefore, to whom it…
Introduction In the movie The Princess Bride, Westley has to leave his fiancé Buttercup in order to make his fortune. Buttercup is worried that she will never see him again. Westley reassures her: “This is true love-you think this happens…
“Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” So wrote the eighteenth century poet, Alexander Pope. Platitude? Yes, but true for all that. I have to confess the lines (from An Essay on Man) come to mind frequently at dinner when…
If it’s true, as the ancient Tertullian said, that “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church,” much seed has been sown on Turkish soil, from the 2nd-century martyrdom of Polycarp to the massacre of Christian Armenians in…
Dropping into church on Good Friday you’d think we were celebrating the death of God. Of course, God cannot die. Of course God cannot die, but there is a sense in which you’d be on to something. Why is a…
I have always taken comfort from the fact that if Peter could find some of Paul’s saying as hard (2 Peter 3:15-16), so can I. One hard saying in the Apostle Paul’s writing is his remark in 1 Cor. 15:29…
The pivot of history is the life of Jesus Christ; the capstone is His resurrection. To take His resurrection seriously we need good witnesses to His death. Some opponents claim that Jesus’ followers fabricated the resurrection out of wishful thinking.…
1773 didn’t start well for William Cowper. In spite of seemingly comfortable circumstances, he felt pressured by both hurtful local gossip and well-meaning friendly advice into making a decision he was just not able to make. He had been…
A great blind spot which afflicts anyone who limits their reading of Calvin to The Institutes is how thoroughly engrossed the Reformer was in missions work across Europe. Calvin was no austere academic always at his desk with his nose…
