Temptation and the garden

Life, Sola Panel

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All our temptations are garden temptations.

I don’t usually talk much about gardening when I lead Bible studies, but recently during our study on Genesis 3, I asked, “What does the Garden of Eden show us about God?”

The answer? God is abundantly generous. He didn’t give Adam and Eve a dry loaf and a cup of water; he gave them a beautiful garden brimming with varied, wonderful fruitful plants to eat and enjoy (Gen 2:9).

And what was God’s word to the people he’d made? “Eat! Eat freely from every tree in the garden!”1 There was only one tree they weren’t to eat from, and that was “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 2:16-17). In other words, the only thing they weren’t to do was to rip God’s authority away from him, and decide good and evil for themselves.

But that’s not the way Eve saw it.

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Biblical tolerance

Life

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A biblical word for ‘tolerance’ is ‘patience’. Within the Bible, patience is not just ‘passively waiting’, but ‘enduring suffering without retaliation’. (more…)

The life and lessons of J Gresham Machen: Carl Trueman talks to Peter Hastie

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Dr Carl Trueman is Dean of the Faculty at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, and teaches as a professor of historical theology and church history. He is married to Catriona, who is originally from the island of Lewis, off the west coast of Scotland. They have two sons, John and Peter, aged 11 and 13. Carl was brought up in a very supportive but non-religious home, and was converted to Christ at a Billy Graham rally at the age of 17.

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God, the universe and all that: Part 4

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In the fourth instalment of a five-part series, we uncover the answer to the riddle. (Read parts 1, 2, and 3.)

We’ve been looking at Psalm 8, and we’ve seen the puzzle it presents us with. On the one hand, we are nothing compared to the majestic God who created the universe. On the other hand, God tells us that we are important—that we are created for a purpose in this world. (more…)

God, the universe and all that: Part 3

Thought, Sola Panel

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In the third instalment of a five-part series, we discover humans are significant in the universe after all. (Read parts 1 and 2.)

We’ve been looking at Psalm 8 and have discovered that stargazing should make us wonder why God the creator should have anything to do with us. (more…)

Kids@church/Click: Some great material for your children’s Sunday School

Review, Sola Panel

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I teach Sunday School for children regularly, but I don’t always have the time and energy to write my own lessons. So last year I found myself in the market for Sunday School material.

Thanks to a friend trawling through the shelves at a Christian bookshop, what I discovered was kids@church, put out by Youthworks in conjunction with CEP. (In Britain, it’s published as Click by The Good Book Company). I suspect that lots of churches in Sydney are familiar with this material, but many other churches aren’t.

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God, the universe and all that: Part 2

Thought, Sola Panel

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In the second instalment of a five-part series, we contemplate the extent of our significance in the universe.(Read part 1.)

We’ve been looking at Psalm 8, and we’ve discovered that stargazing helps us to see how insignificant we really are.

Just think about the size of space for a moment. Imagine you could get into the fastest jet on earth (last time I checked, this was the SR-71 Blackbird). Its official speed record is almost 2,500 miles per hour. Now imagine you could speed it up 100 times to 250,000 miles per hour. Then imagine that you could take it on a trip to space. It would take you an hour to get to the moon—that’s pretty reasonable! It would take you eight days to get to Mars, the closest planet to Earth. It would take you four months to get to the planet Saturn (remember, we’re travelling 100 times faster than the fastest jet ever built). It would take you a year and a half to get to the planet Pluto at the edge of our solar system. To get to the closest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, it would take you 12,000 years. To get to the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy, it would take you 80 million years. To the next closest galaxy, Andromeda, it would take you seven billion years. To get to the edge of the visible universe, it would take you 40 million million years. And they think that the size of the non-visible universe is vastly huger than this: that would take you a million million million million, etc. years.

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Stark treatment of the Crusades

Life

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Revisionist history is probably as common as it is unethical. There are lessons to learn from the past, but if the past is distorted for the sake of present-day lessons, then it is no longer serving honest inquiry, but has become propaganda.

The destruction of the World Trade Centre by Muslim terrorists has spawned in the West a new fear of Islam, as well as a new desire to understand Islam. At the same time (and rather strangely and illogically), it has spawned new attacks upon Christianity. For example, the event in New York motivated Christopher Hitchens, one of the ‘new atheists’, to speak against religion as a damaging force in the world. So what began with some Muslim extremists was generalized to all religion, and then (it seems) particularized by a renewed and increased attack upon Christianity. Go figure.

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God, the universe and all that: Part 1

Thought, Sola Panel

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Note: this is the first instalment of a five-part series.

I’m a fan of space. I don’t actually know much about the details of astronomy or cosmology or astrophysics; I just think that the space is really cool.

If there are any real scientists reading this, I want to say thanks. I know that most of your work involves boring and tedious searching, collating and number crunching. Thanks for doing all that stuff so that I can see those fantastic pictures of nebulas on the internet and wonder at it all.

For example, I’m a fan of millisecond pulsars. A gigantic star, millions of light years away, explodes in a huge supernova. It creates a fireball ten million billion billion times bigger than Hiroshima. In its ashes, it leaves behind a neutron star made of dense atomic nuclei, squashed together at a density 10 trillion times greater than steel. A teaspoon full of neutron star weighs about the same as Sydney Harbour. Sometimes this neutron star will steal stuff from a nearby star and start spinning. Some neutron stars spin hundreds of times a second—a whole star rotating as fast as an idling car engine. Many of these super-dense, revving stars send out pulses of electromagnetic radiation, milliseconds apart. And we might be able to use these millisecond pulsars as standard cosmological clocks to help us detect gravitational waves, explore space-time bending, and understand more about the tiniest particles in the universe.

But apart from the wow factor, what’s the point of learning about space?

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Countercultural rebellion

Life, Thought

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Carl Trueman is the Academic Dean and Professor of Historical Theology and Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, as well as a Consulting Editor for Themelios. Paul Grimmond caught up with Carl when he was in Australia in 2009.

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