 The author of Hebrews is unknown, and the content of the book can be hard to comprehend, especially from your first reading. It really is a text you need to move slowly through, where you can look back to the Old Testament quotations to try and better understand the illustrations the author provides. Today we will look at a small excerpt from Chapter 2 that has some amazing statements about Christ and His people.
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 One of the most difficult verses in all of Scripture to interpret is James 2:24, “You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.” We see here that James appears to be claiming that our justification in the eyes of God is determined by works, and not merely by faith alone.
James’ statement appears to say the opposite of Paul in Romans 3:28, “For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law.” Here, Paul clearly teaches that our justification in the eyes of God is determined solely on faith. How do we reconcile these two verses?  In a recent article, I made the case that faith is an act of obedience to the command of God to believe in the Son (Obedient Faith: Redefining Success for Christians). We see this in 1st John 3:23-24 (NASB1995), "23 This is His commandment, that we believe in the name of His Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, just as He commanded us. 24 The one who keeps His commandments abides in Him, and He in him. We know by this that He abides in us, by the Spirit whom He has given us." But what gives us the power to follow this command in obedient faith to believe in the name of His Son Jesus Christ?
 When we think of what it means to be successful, we often think of meeting certain family, financial, and career milestones. We want to graduate college, get a great job, fund a retirement portfolio, and invest our money in the meantime anywhere we can to maximize our ROI. We usually want to do all the things that are expected of us, and that usually arises from the level of success that we observed in the family we were born into. If we came from parents who had a healthy marriage and kids, substantial wealth, master’s or doctoral degrees, we usually will try to achieve those same things (although few people acknowledge where their aspirations come from). And there’s nothing wrong with any of those aspirations. Education, family, career, these are wholesome and meaningful endeavors. But do they define success from a biblical perspective?
 Throughout the Bible, we find numerous commands to protect and honor three vulnerable groups of people: (1) the stranger, (2) the fatherless, and (3) the widow. This is especially prevalent in the Old Testament but is certainly echoed throughout the entire Bible. I believe this consistency is important and has a significant New Testament application to believers. Let us begin by taking a look at Deuteronomy 24:19-21 (KJV):
 One of the most interesting (and terrifying) topics in the Bible is the Book of Life. If someone’s name is written in the book, they will go to heaven for eternity, and if their name is not written in the book, they will be thrown into the lake of fire. Beyond just this truth, there is also the yearning of prophets to have people’s names blotted out of the book, and even threats by God for people’s names to be wiped out. The major questions to answer in forming a biblical understanding of this topic are the following: (1) when were names written in the Book of Life, (2) whose names were written in the Book of Life, and (3) will believers names (or anyone's names) be blotted out?
 To give Christians a helpful framework for understanding evolution (beyond the general definition that evolution means change over time), I think it’s important to breakdown evolution into two major categories: microevolution (small changes) and macroevolution (large changes), and to share a simple way to assess whether macroevolution is reasonable using the concept of entropy.
The 139th Psalm describes the creation of the human body by God and how very much God loves us and thinks about us every day.
I recently received a very negative comment from an atheist on my YouTube video. The title of the video was “The Question No Atheist Can Answer”. Of course, I was talking about the Moral Law, and how purely from a naturalistic worldview, there can be no objective foundation for morals. I could tell from the tone (and the language) of the comment that I had really rubbed this person the wrong way. I mean they were really mad. So, I went back and watched the video to see how I had presented myself. I realized that I came across like a snarky, know-it-all. I was a noisy gong and a clanging cymbal.
This is definitely a debated topic among Christians and has been for centuries. Some Christians enjoy the occasional drink, some overindulge and fall into drunkenness, and some completely abstain from the substance, feeling convicted that partaking in any way whatsoever is sinful.
Clearly, if it is sinful to have a glass of wine, then it should be avoided, and we should hold our brethren accountable for sinning when they partake in drinking. But, if it is not sinful to drink alcohol in moderation, then we need not condemn our brethren who enjoy the occasional glass of wine for good pleasure; in fact, we would be in the wrong for doing so. |
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