God: the Triune Jehovah, Father, Son and Spirit; three Persons working together in sovereign wisdom, power and love to achieve the salvation of a chosen people, the Father electing, the Son fulfilling the Father’s will by redeeming, the Spirit executing the purpose of Father and Son by renewing. Saves: does everything, first to last, that […]
Author Archives: Edwin Smith
The appointed time
The death of Christ is envisaged as forming a pivotal point in history with God’s righteousness demonstrated there having effect for both the past and the future. kairos here denotes not just a moment in time or the passage of time, but time pregnant with significance—the appointed time, the time of opportunity, whose decisions and […]
“To what end does he bother to speak to us?”
The truly staggering answer which the Bible gives to this question is that God’s purpose in revelation is to make friends with us. It was to this end that He created us rational beings, bearing his image, able to think and hear and speak and love; He wanted there to be genuine personal affection and friendship, […]
The most significant means to the most significant end
Someone asked me recently, after learning I was a Bible teacher, if I was a God-worshiper or a Bible-worshipper. The question didn’t come as a complete surprise. When you spend as much time as I do asking people to care about knowing their Bibles, someone is bound to ask if you have lost sight of […]
How Patience Promotes Learning
We love “aha” moments—those moments when something that has confused us suddenly makes sense. What we sometimes overlook about “aha moments” is that they occur after a significant period of feeling lost. Could it be that those periods of feeling lost were actually preparing us for the understanding that was eventually going to come? Could […]
Joy Springs Forth
We had crepe myrtles planted in our yard last November. They've been bare sticks in the ground throughout the past few months. Every day for a month I've gone outside to see if anything has changed on those branches. And then today, like a leafy whisper, buds finally emerged on the trees.
What Science Can’t Do
A couple great testimonies by men at the top of their respective scientific fields who also happen to believe in things like bodily resurrection. Ian Hutchinson, professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT: “We really believe in the bodily resurrection of the first century Jew known as Jesus of Nazareth. My Christian colleagues at MIT […]
Month of Moving halfway point
via Instagram
Stories are for putting darkness in its place
Overwhelmingly, in my own family and far beyond, the stories that land with the greatest impact are those where darkness, loss, and danger (emotional or physical) is a reality. But the goal isn’t to steer kids into stories of darkness and violence because those are the stories that grip readers. The goal is to put […]
“The wages of smug is Trump.”
The smug style, at bottom, is a failure of empathy. Further: It is a failure to believe that empathy has any value at all. It is the notion that anybody worthy of liberal time and attention and respect must capitulate, immediately, to the Good Facts. If they don’t (and they won’t, no matter how much […]