A Point I Never Noticed in the Lord’s Prayer
I’ve prayed the Lord’s Prayer throughout my life both verbatim and, more often, as a template. I’ve also sung it many times in a great men’s quartet arrangement of the Malotte setting. But I never noticed a simple point about the first line that numbers of commentators are bringing out as I study the passage for a Bible Truths revision: “Our Father which art in heaven” juxtaposes two ways of looking at God. We address God intimately as Father, but we immediately recognize his infinite...
News Flash: D.A. Carson Makes an Insightful Point!
Carson comments on Matthew 6:7, in which Jesus warns kingdom pray-ers, “Use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do.” His point is that his disciples should avoid meaningless, repetitive prayers offered under the misconception that mere length will make prayers efficacious. Such thoughtless babble can occur in liturgical and extemporaneous prayers alike. This is true for me, at least. It is so easy to fall into established patterns (especially at meal times, I find); so I try by God’s grace to...
An Apt Comment from R.T. France on Matthew 6
Each major section of Matthew 6 (the second of the three chapters relating the Sermon on the Mount) contrasts earthly and heavenly rewards. The unregenerate are known for their pursuit of earthly treasures and earthly rewards. Kingdom citizens are notable for their trust in God to provide earthly needs and their pursuit of God’s heavenly treasures. The Father who sees in secret will reward those who give, pray, and fast for His eyes only. It rubs a good Protestant the wrong way to think that...
Head, Heart, and Compatibilism
I just picked up a review copy of John Piper's Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God, because his views on the relationship between thinking and feeling have some bearing on my preparation for the dissertation defense. As always with Piper, I was struck by how attentively he listens to the biblical text and asks questions that naturally arise from the text. The relationship between head and heart is one of those questions, one Piper tackles often in this book. In one section, Piper...
A Typographic Proposal for e-Books
This post uses Greek, but I promise that those who don't even know a little βιτ of Greek will still understand it if they try! This is what part of the entry for ἐλπίς (hope) looks like in the Logos version of BDAG (the standard Greek lexicon for NT studies): Those highlights I added, and the page number toward the bottom is extra, but basically you have a thick paragraph full of tiered information. You have a sense—the generic hope, expectation, or prospect for something. Then you have...