When Sin Turns Into An Affliction (Bunyan)

 Israel's complaining and grumbling began early on in the wilderness years. In fact, if my count is correct, they complained around 5 times in the first year or so after God rescued them from Egypt.  In one instance of their grumbling, God gave Israel what they whined for: meat to eat.  In fact, God said…

The Dimensions of Repentance in the OT (Boda)

 I enjoyed this book by Mark Boda called Return to Me: A Biblical Theology of Repentance.  As the title suggests, it is a summary of the Bible's teaching on repentance from Genesis to Revelation.  Each chapter is called something like this: "Repentance in the Torah," or "Repentance in the Latter Prophets," etc.  While studying 2 Chronicles…

Definite Atonement, the Gospel Call, and Rejecting Christ (Newton)

 In a sermon on John 1:29, John Newton discussed definite atonement and the free offer of the gospel.  He admitted there is mystery in this area of Scripture's teaching: "I am not disheartened by meeting with some things beyond the grasp of my scanty powers in a book which I believe to be inspired by…

They Came to Jesus and Burned Their Dark Magic Books

 Dark magic has been around for a long time.  When Israel was going into the Promised Land the LORD told his people not to dabble in the pagan occultic practices of the Canaanites (Dt. 18:9-14).  They were to avoid omens, fortunes, divination, spiritists, sorcery, psychic readings, and other sorts of dark magic.  The same goes…

Don’t Give Up On A Sinner! (Spencer)

I was recently reading part of A Pastor's Sketches again and I found a paragraph I had marked up quite a bit.  Turns out I had blogged on this already (May 2017), so I thought I'd post it again.  Here it is: Sometime around the middle of the 19th century a woman spoke to Rev. Ichabod…