The Days of Creation and Exodus 20:11

Justin Taylor has caused quite a stir with his post on “Biblical Reasons to Doubt the Creation Days Were 24-Hour Periods.” The decisive factor for me is how earlier biblical statements are interpreted by later ones, so Exodus 20:11 is BeastMode (a.k.a. Marshawn Lynch) on the goal line in this argument. Re-reading the Van Pelt quote JT gives on …

The Days of Creation and Death Before the Fall

What follows is my response to Gavin Ortlund‘s response to Douglas Wilson. Check them out for context on this conversation that plunges right in mid-stream. Gavin tries to deal with death before the fall, but I don’t think we can retroject onto the pre-fall situation what “must” have been the case given the way things …

Read the Bible: Kindle Reading Plan

Chris Dendy came up with the idea for the God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment Bible Reading Plan, and Lindsey Jacobs designed it. The plan pairs daily Bible readings with relevant sections from God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment, and you can read more about it here. A number of folks requested that the plan be made available …

My Favorite Books of 2014

Surveying the list of books I read this year, these jumped out at me as the most significant. These are books I intend to revisit, the kind of books that need to be known not merely read. In no particular order: D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths The best one stop resource for everything you want …

Deuteronomy Section of GGSTJ Online

The section on Deuteronomy from God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology has been excerpted and published in the latest issue of The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology (SBJT). If you’re considering doing the GGSTJ Bible Reading Plan and want to sample the book, click on over and check it out. This is an excellent issue …

Review of Timothy Stone’s Book on the Five Small Scrolls

A version of this review was published in the most recent issue of Themelios. — Timothy J. Stone, The Compilational History of the Megilloth. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 2. Reihe 59. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. 258pp. Paper. $94. What is the Megilloth and what difference does the history of its compilation make? The Megilloth are the “five …

SBTS Publications in 2014

Here are some ideas for Christmas and/or birthday gifts for the pastor, theologian, missionary, evangelist, seminarian, or teacher/student of the Bible in your life. Last year I posted a list of books from the SBTS Faculty in 2013, and I’m following it up with this list of books from the SBTS Faculty in 2014. I …

Read the Bible

Are you planning to read through the Bible in a year? Have you felt lost in the vast architecture and artistry of the Bible’s massive spaces and intricate designs? One of my motivations in writing God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology was to provide a resource people could use alongside their daily Bible …

Andrew Peterson: My Love Has Gone Across the Sea

Andrew Peterson’s The Monster in the Hollows has this lovely lyric embedded within the wider story: My love has gone across the sea To find a country far and fair He sailed into the gilded west And lo, my heart will never rest Until my love returns to me Or I set out to find him there. …

Idiot’s Guides: The Bible

Before we had kids, my sweet wife and I got a dog. I knew I didn’t know anything about how to train a dog, so I bought Dogs for Dummies, and set to work. The book was entertaining, brief, and insightful. It advocated concentrated, reinforced, rewarding (as in, give the dog treats when he does what …

Is This What You Mean by “Church Growth”?

“to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer …

God Created Man . . . Male and Female

Louis Markos makes an important point against the use of gender-neutral language in Bible translations: Over the last several decades, this postmodern deconstruction of masculinity and femininity has, I believe, been fostered by the widespread acceptance of gender-neutral language. Many recent Bible translations (NRSV, NLT, CEV, NIV 2011) have adopted such language, despite the fact that …

Rob Plummer’s Daily Dose of Greek

My esteemed colleague Dr. Rob Plummer writes: For years, I watched many of our formerly zealous Greek students slowly apostatizing from the language they once loved. Partial solution….. www.dailydoseofgreek.com. On October 1, I will start a daily email service, delivering a link to a free 2-minute video of me reading/translating from the GNT. I’ve made these videos …

Sexual Complementarity in Genesis 1:27

Human sexuality is hotly disputed today, with many now contending that “gender” is a set of learned behaviors that have no intrinsic basis in a person’s sex. The idea is that being born with male body parts doesn’t require a male to obey Paul’s command to “act like men” (1 Cor 16:13), just as being born with …

The World Is Whispering

This poem comes at the moving conclusion of Andrew Peterson’s fourth and final book in the Wingfeather Saga, The Warden and the Wolf King: The world is whispering–listen child!– The world is telling a tale. When the seafoam froths in the water wild Or the fendril flies in the gale, When the sky is mad with the …

What’s the Point of the Millennium?

Mike Wittmer, a fellow premillennialist, once asked me what the millennium does. Why is it there? As I was pondering the Big Story of the Bible in preparation to preach an overview kind of sermon recently, the thought began to take shape in my head that the millennium provides another point of contact–a typological point …