In order for a garden to not become a salad bar for hungry animals, it needs a fence around it to keep them out. In the same way, the boundaries of marriage are set up for its protection. If we don’t watch over the boundaries, something is sure to be stolen from us. Too often people carelessly plant seeds outside the boundaries, and what grows up attracts the attention of creatures that come to devour. They wait outside the garden, and if the fence falls into disrepair because it isn’t maintained, they find a way in through the weakest part. When we plant seeds of infidelity, we break down the boundaries and invite unwanted creatures of prey to come in.

The Power of a Praying Husband, p. 87.

This issue also draws attention to another dangerous trend I have observed in the local church:  the “non-Bible” Bible study.  Church bulletins frequently provide lists of weekly “Bible” studies focusing on books other than the Bible.  Yikes!  As good as they are, John Piper’s Desiring God or Ted Tripp’s Shepherding a Child’s Heart are not in my Bible’s table of contents.  They are not inspired, but instead are wonderfully perspired reflections on the God-breathed Word.  But they are still just dirt!

This connection between the creation of God’s image-bearers and the origin of God’s Word is truly a wonder-filled reality.  It is wonderful because we, as God’s people, share a connection with His Word.  We were made to go together.  And if God has made people from dirt, imagine what He has done with paper and ink, and nouns and pronouns.

“As I travel across the country, I am amazed at the number of intelligent, Jesus-loving, Bible-toting, ministry-minded young men who absolutely refuse to grow up and take a wife!  It is as though there was a new book of the Bible discovered (I call it 2 Hesitations) that reads, “Thou shalt not marry prior to graduate school, or at least until you have a middle-class income and a 401(k).”  The only thing worse is looking into the eyes of the scores of young women who ask me what they have to do to get these guys to man up and marry them.”

Voddie Baucham, Family Driven Faith (Wheaton, IL:  Crossway Books, 2007), 22

Buy this book on Amazon:  Family Driven Faith: Doing What It Takes to Raise Sons and Daughters Who Walk with God

Concordia : The Lutheran Confessions. Edited by Paul Timothy McCain. St. Louis, MO : Concordia Publishing House, 2005, xiii

Sinclair B. Ferguson, In Christ Alone (Orlando:  Reformation Trust Publishing, 2007), 18

A Low View of God

Many Christians-whether through their own ignorance or as a result of being poorly trained-downplay the holiness of God.  God’s name is maligned and blasphemed in the culture around us, and it seems that Christians have increasingly absorbed the world’s understanding of a God who is fun, who exists for our benefit, and who can be the butt of endless Jokes.

When believers do not understand God’s holiness and allow this doctrine to shape their faith, they cannot understand his hatred of all that is sinful and, thus, the need for discernment.  God’s holiness lies at the very heart of the need for discernment.  Our passion for God’s holiness, our desire to keep ourselves pure from sin, will motivate our practice of discernment.  The greater our understanding of God’s holiness, the greater will be our understanding of the importance of discerning truth from error.  We will desire to cast off all that is wrong so that we can be unsullied, unspoiled by sin.

The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment (Page 49-50)

Roughly two thousand years ago, Jesus was born in a dumpy, rural, hick town, not unlike those today where guys change their own oil, think pro wrestling is real, find women who chew tobacco sexy, and eat a lot of Hot Pockets with their uncle-daddy.  Jesus’ mom was a poor, unwed teenage girl who was mocked for claiming she conceived via the Holy Spirit.  Most people thought she concocted a crazy story to cover the “fact” she was knocking boots with some guy in the backseat of a car at the prom.  Jesus was adopted by a simple carpenter named Joseph and spent the first thirty years of his life in obscurity, swinging a hammer with his dad.

Around the age of thirty, Jesus began a public ministry that included preaching, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and befriending social misfits such as perverts, drunks, and thieves.  Jesus’ ministry spanned only three short years before he was put to death for declaring himself to be God.  He died by shameful crucifixion like tens of thousands of people before and after him.

Vintage Jesus (pages 11-12)

Power of the Demons Over the Demonised

Our next inquiry must be as to the character of the phenomenon thus designated.  In view of the fact that in St. Mark ix. 21, the demonised had been such ‘of a child,’ it is scarcely possible to ascribe it simply to moral causes.  Similarly, personal faith does not seem to have been a requisite condition of healing.  Again, as other diseases are mentioned without being attributed to demoniacal influence, and as all who were dumb, deaf, or paralysed would not have been described as ‘demonised,’ it is evident that all physical or even mental distempers of the same class were not ascribed to the same cause:  some might be natural, while others were demoniacal.  On the other hand, there were more or less violent symptons of disease in every demonised person, and these were greatly aggravated in the last paroxysm, when the demon quitted his habitation.  We have, therefore, to regard the phenomena described as caused by the influence of such ‘spirits,’ primarily, upon that which forms the nexus between body and mind, the nervous system, and as producing different physical effects, according to the part of the nervous system affected.  To this must be added a ceratain impersonality of consciousness, so that for the time the consciousness was not that of the demonised, but the demoniser, just as in certain mesmeric states the consciousness of the mesmerised is really that of the mesmeriser.  We might carry the analogy farther, and say, that the two states are exactly parallel–the demon or demons taking the place of the mesmeriser, only that the effects were more powerful and extensive, perhaps more enduring….

The Life & Times of Jesus the Messiah, Volume 1 by Alfred Edersheim( Chapter XIV)

You can find this classic work for a great value through Amazon or CBD.  You may also download the entire book in PDF format from www.archive.org:  [Volume 1], [Volume 2].

The City of Jerusalem

The city of Jerusalem plays a crucial but ambivalent role throughout Luke and Acts.  On the one hand, Jerusalem was the city of God, the great King–his presence dwelt there in his Temple.  God would accomplish salvation in Jerusalem and the Good News would go out from there (as recorded in Acts).  At the same time, Jerusalem symbolically represented God’s rebellious people Israel, who had persecuted God’s prophets in the past and were now rejecting his Son the Messiah.  This rejection would result in judgment against Jerusalem and its utter destruction by the Romans in AD 70 (12:33-35; 19:41-44; 21:20).

Jerusalem plays a key geographical role in the structure of Luke-Acts.  The Gospel narrative begins in the Temple at the heart of Jerusalem, the most sacred place in the world, and Jesus’ ministry culminated with his death and death and resurrection in Jerusalem.  All this confirms that salvation emerged from Israel, fulfilling the promises made to Israel in the OT.  The church then moved outward, taking the message of salvation from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8).

Study Notes on Luke 21:20-24 – NLT Study Bible, Page 1752

The Christian Consensus About Humanity

There are three essential Christian perspectives on human nature and existence that stand in stark contrast with most other anthropological viewpoints.  First, humans are both animal (physical beings that are part of nature) and spiritual (beings that transcend nature and physical existence).  Second, humans are God’s special creatures who possess the gift of God’s own image and likeness.  Third, humans are born “damaged goods” in the sense of inheriting a spiritual corruption that pervades every aspect of their being and leads inevitably to perosnal acts of disobedience to God (that is, they are all sinners even before they commit “sins”).  This third belief is known in Christian theology as “original sin” and “inherited depravity.”

The Mosaic of Christian Belief:  Twenty Centureies of Unity & Diveristy (Page 201)