During the past few weeks, I published a series of 14 brief articles, applying the Bible’s Ten Commandments to personal, social, and cultural issues in the United States of America. The series is entitled, “Ten Words for a Broken Society.” It begins with three introductory posts, continues with ten articles addressing the Ten Commandments respectively, [ Read More ]
During the winter of 2003, I was drugged and robbed when abroad on an overseas trip. I had never undergone such a thing, and never before had I experienced the subsequent cocktail of anger, fear, and indignation. That is because God created a world in which individuals have a right to their own body, heart, [ Read More ]
“Sex outside of marriage,” Woody Allen once said, “is a pretty empty experience. But as far as empty experiences go, it’s a pretty good one.” The famous comedian’s joke might be good for a chuckle but, in the end, his quip isn’t quite right. God designed sex for marriage and sex outside of marriage is [ Read More ]
What a happy, life-altering, exhausting, and intimidating thing it is to be a parent. There are moments of undeniable joy and laughter—holding your newborn, hearing him laugh for the first time, singing to her, teaching him to walk, experiencing her first words. Who doesn’t have fond memories of their child saying, “I love you mommy” [ Read More ]
When my children were toddlers, I learned the value of rules and their enforcement. A toddler’s abilities, we might say, far outstrip their wisdom. Much of what they are “free” to do could harm them. For example, I found myself saying “No, Riley, you may not climb on top of the glass-topped coffee table and [ Read More ]
Imagine if a woman’s husband found out that his wife routinely told her friends, “I like to see my husband as a 6’2” Antonio Banderas who lifts weights, whose perfect idea of date night is perusing the aisles at TJ Maxx, who drinks froufrou smoothies made out of strawberry, and who delights in talking about [ Read More ]
3 “You shall have no other gods before Me. (Ex. 20:3) The first commandment is absolutely foundational, utterly basic, to individual and societal flourishing. The truly good life starts with accepting this command as the rule of life. In Israel’s day, the nations were thoroughly committed polytheists. They viewed their own gods as finite and [ Read More ]
When a President sets forth a new mandate for a nation or when a military commander articulates the rules of engagement for a war, it is vitally important to listen to their prefatory remarks. Thus, it is even more significant when the Creator of the universe makes prefatory remarks before enumerating the basic moral laws [ Read More ]
Given that America’s public square seems like the combination of a war, a carnival, and a B-rated Hollywood movie, perhaps now is the time for American Christians to work even harder to convince ourselves and our fellow citizens of the value of God’s transcendent moral law. Specifically, we should focus on the moral law as [ Read More ]
It’s not as if we hadn’t been warned. During the middle of the twentieth century, the great theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned that Europeans and Americans lived in “a world come of age,” by which he meant a world in which they had learned to manage life without reference to God, and that this experiment in [ Read More ]