Growing In Grace

In the Old Testament we get an unfolding vision of God and His attributes through the stories of the people that He called. First we see that He is the creator that made man in His image, giving man the commission as the 'king priest' of the garden, ruling and subduing creation while expanding the borders of the Garden. Adam failed to crush the serpent and so he was removed from the Garden temple sanctuary. God repeated Adam's commission to his children, choosing Abram to be the father of a new nation (a corporate Adam) that would once again be commissioned to be a nation of priests.  Eventually God gave them the Holy Land (a new Garden for corporate Adam) and called them to grow it's boarders. Just as the Garden had been the place where man "walked with God" experiencing God's presence, the land of Israel was home to the tabernacle which was where the presence of God rested. The purpose of these stories in their fullness is to teach us that God is incre...

I am sure that many of you will recognize the title of this post as being spoken by Cotton's Parrot in the "Pirates Of The Caribbean." Whatever your take on the movie may have been, this is a deeply theological statement and one that I want to unpack from Scripture. I believe that this is one of the most misunderstood Biblical teachings, and the implications of misunderstanding this teaching are huge for our understanding of the gospel. Ephesians 2:1a&4-6 says, "And you were dead in your sins and trespasses ... But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses made us alive together with Christ - by grace you have been saved - and raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. The Apostle Paul spells out for us just how bad a state we were in - we were dead. To be sure this is not to say that we were "mostly dead" but completely and totally de...

The Westminster Shorter Catechism opens with the famous question, "What is the chief end of man?" To which the answer is, "Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever." If this is true, and I believe that it certainly is, then all sin is stealing God's glory. We sin whenever we fail to give God the glory that He is due by not obeying and loving Him supremely. There are a number of very distinct examples of glory thieves in the Bible such as Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar. Pharaoh was seen as godlike in Egypt and he was furious at the demands of Yahweh's servant Moses that Pharaoh was to obey this greater authority. The children's movie account of the Exodus "The Prince of Egypt" portrays Pharaoh's self love so well when Pharaoh says, "I am the morning and the evening star." Pharaoh exulted in his power and position, but God was unrelenting in His demonstration of His sovereign power and Pharaoh's hardness of...