J. I. Packer Week – 2

Now, do you see what I have been driving at all this time?  I want to arrange a marriage.  I want our systematic theology to be practised as an element of our spirituality, and I want our spirituality to be viewed as an implicate and expression of our systematic theology, just as ethics is already [...]

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J. I. Packer Week – 1

Do not dismiss the doctrine of the Trinity as so much useless lumber for the mind.  If the place of any of the three persons is misconceived or denied, the gospel falls.  Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, and those liberal Protestants for whom the personal deity of the Son and the Spirit is suspect, can never [...]

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For the Lord’s Day (37)

I perceived that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it.  God has done it so that people fear before Him.  (Ecclesiastes 3:14)

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A Letter from Spurgeon

My Dear Brother,
Amid the labour of an enormous correspondence, I yet find a moment to acknowledge your note.  I bless God that I have sounded an alarm in Zion, for I find the sound has gone forth.  You may conceive my position, a young man under 21 preaching on that occasion to all the ministers [...]

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Secularized Thinking

A civilization which has secularized all its thinking presupposes that man has no supernatural affiliation.  It assumes that, in so far as things go wrong with him, in so far as he falls short of achieving what is desirable and worthwhile, that is not a matter of failure in obligation or obedience to supernatural authority.  [...]

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On the “Christian Mind”

Were there a living Christian mind, the sense of the hard, factual objectivity of Christian doctrine would be widespread, and people would no more find themselves defending, individually and in isolation, the doctrine of the Virgin Birth than they would find themselves defending, individually and in isolation, the second law of thermodynamics.  It is only [...]

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On the Crucifixion

In self-sacrifice, in laying down his life for another’s well-being, man surpasses God in goodness and love, the creature surpasses the Creator.  That is the absurdity that stares David in the face.  And, he cannot accept that a God who excels man so vastly in every other respect will be inferior to man in this [...]

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John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”

No doubt, all evil-doing creatures inhabit imaginary worlds.  Perhaps it is only on the basis of a falsely conceived self inhabiting a falsely posited personal environment that evil can be plotted and executed.  Certainly, Beelzebub is, at first, quick to enter the imaginary world fabricated by his former superior.  He, too, reflects backward on the [...]

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On the Sinfulness of Sin

If God be so incomparable, that there is none on earth, none in heaven comparable to Him, it may inform us of the great venom and malignity of sin, because it is an injury so great, so glorious, so incomparable a being.  The higher and better any object is, the baser and the worse is [...]

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For the Lord’s Day (36)

The king’s heart is like channels of water in the hand of the Lord; He turns it wherever He wishes.
Every man’s way is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the hearts.
To do righteousness and justice is desired by the Lord rather than sacrifice.
Haughty eyes and a proud heart, the lamp of the [...]

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