Image credit: RAH
The Character of Virtue
The first part of a brief consideration of virtue in scripture
Put simply, Peter’s description in 2 Peter 1:3-8 makes for a traceable account of the Christian life. It helps us understand how faith remains an enduring feature of the Christian identity, just as it was prerequisite to the woman’s health in Luke 8:43-46. Faith is highlighted—not merely for the fact that faith is commanded to men, but for reason that only faith may take account of God’s ongoing work.
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The Character of a Prophet’s Speech as Divine Testimony
The unnamed prophet of Joshua 6 recalls the words of Joshua, revealing a need for Israel’s savior
In both cases, the word fear is used in connection to Israel’s disposition: Israel was to fear the LORD and not fear the gods of the Amorites.
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The Scripture’s Account of Gideon: Preliminary Considerations
The narrative of scripture as a bulwark against moralism
It is true that [the preacher] must highlight the historical and practical significance that describes and prescribes human obligation; but most fundamentally, he must speak to those revelatory features of scripture that highlight the character and work of God.
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The Time & Space Between Faith & Love
Acknowledging the rule & power of God in the church by its expressions of love
This is how redemption mimics the original creation: What begins in the act of God as an instance of creation—a man’s new birth, much as a germinated seed—also blooms and then blossoms again among the other flowers in a field of perennials.
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Awareness & our Earliest and Natural Obligations of Love
The obligations in family predict their display in the church
Awareness, then, eventually and increasingly admits to the world as it is, that we might act within it as we are required. From its vantage point is a near horizon, from which rises the light of our obligations and the evening of their refusals.
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Redemption: The Purchase of a Postscript
Noting the persistence of God’s will in the nature of redemption
Our ways, which are reflective and cursory, contrast to the way that God declares his purposes in promises, and then binds himself to their fulfillment in action. Both their initiation and their performance proceed upon the unchanging character of God.
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Redemption: Renegotiating the Value of Creation
What Israel’s Exodus tells us about redemption
If Israel would be delivered from Egypt at all, it would be at God’s initiative. Israel’s new life, then, must wholly subsist in the kind and quality of life that God gave Israel through his intervention on Israel’s behalf and, after the fact, no other definition of life could exist for her.
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