Read It Here

Launching Gateway Seminary Northern Colorado

In August, Overland Church will become the Northern Colorado teaching site for Gateway Seminary. This year, we are offering six hours of classes—Christian Theology I and II—with plans to expand to 6–12 hours next year.

We even got a brief shoutout at the Southern Baptist Convention in the Gateway presentation.

We already have a group of bright students ready to start their seminary journey with us, but there's still time to join! If you know anyone in Northern Colorado or southeast Wyoming who might be interested, direct them to gatewaynoco.com or, even better, have them reach out to me directly.

The Rocky Mountain Theology Conference

I want to help spark theological hunger in our region by bringing in top-notch scholars annually to Fort Collins. This year, we're kicking off the Rocky Mountain Theology Conference, sponsored by Gateway Seminary, by focusing on my favorite theological discipline—Biblical Theology—and hosting one of my favorite biblical theologians, Dr. Mitch Chase of Southern Seminary.

We have about 180 seats available for the conference, so if you plan to be there on November 7–8, grab your early bird ticket for just $30. Prices go up after July 31! Register at rockymountaintheology.com

Preorder the NIV Timeline Bible

In December, Zondervan Bibles will release the NIV Timeline Bible. This study Bible continues the legacy of the late John Kohlenberger, who created many excellent Bible reference tools, including the abridged Expositor’s Bible Commentary.

In this new study Bible, we've continued Dr. Kohlenberger's chronological arrangement of the biblical text with a running timeline at the bottom of each page. I also added an additional reference tool: I've highlighted eleven genres throughout the biblical text to show how the Bible is both a work of history and literature. Plus, I wrote an introductory article on genre to help readers understand its importance in the biblical text.

It's already available for preorder on Amazon and Christian Books. Order one now so you'll be ready to read through the Bible in this unique way in 2026!

Come Say Hello!

I'd love to connect with online friends this fall! You can find me at the Colorado Baptist General Convention in Pagosa Springs in October, or at the Evangelical Theological Society in Boston in November. In the meantime, I'll be working on my first Old Testament paper for ETS, titled "Of Great Trees, Kingdoms, and Imposters: Reading the Abimelech Narrative of Judges 9 as Foil to the Abrahamic Promise in Genesis."

The promises and obligations of the Noahic Covenant in Genesis 8:21–9:11 form a chiasm—the ancient organizational structure that forms the Greek letter chi or our “X” through elements that parallel each other (ABCCBA).

While some have maintained that the point of emphasis in a chiasm is the center, I believe there are actually two points of emphasis—the center and the edges. While putting an element at the center certainly does highlight that element, the edges also give a level of emphasis since the edge element is the first and last thing you hear.

Here is the organization of the Noahic Covenant:

• A 8:21–22, Promise: Never again curse the earth/strike down every living creature.

  • B 9:1, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.

    • C 9:2–4, Animals for food, but no eating blood.

    • C' 9:5–6, No shedding human blood. Life for life.

  • B' 9:7, Be fruitful and multiply and increase on the earth.

• A' 9:8–11, Promise: Never again a flood to destroy the earth/all flesh.

While studying this during Holy Week, it struck me how each of these three elements are preparatory or prerequisites for penal substitutionary atonement. Without the Noahic Covenant, there can be no cross of redemption.

The Promise: Never again.

Tom Schreiner calls the Noahic Covenant a “covenant of preservation.” This certainly is the promise highlighted by the edge “A” elements of the chiasm. Twice God repeats the promise to “never again” destroy the earth and all life like he did in the flood. This promise will endure “while the earth remains” (8:22) and is an “everlasting covenant” (9:16).

God’s promise to Noah as the covenant head of all humanity and creation gives the space necessary for God’s plan of redemption to be accomplished. Without this promise of mercy, God’s justice would repeatedly overwhelm creation just as it did during the flood. Instead, God promises to withhold his justice and to hang up his war bow in the sky.

Common grace is a necessary prerequisite for special grace. Common grace is the grace of God that is poured out upon all people and all of creation that enables both life on the earth and the temporary blessings of this life. When Paul speaks to the Areopagus, he is on firm Scriptural footing when he claims that God “gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25). This is common grace that flows forth from the Noahic Covenant.

But he is also referencing this covenant when he claims,

“The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:30–31).

When we understand the Noahic background to Paul’s argument, we can easily avoid any universalist interpretation of God overlooking the times of ignorance. Far from claiming that the ignorant pagans received eternal life, Paul is simply claiming that they did not receive the universal Deluge-like destruction they deserved. God preserved the world rather than putting the flood on endless repeat. Why? So that he could send his Son to redeem humanity. So that he could command “all people everywhere to repent.” So that he could fix a day for the final judgment.

Obligation 1: Be fruitful and multiply.

While the promises of the Noahic Covenant preserve creation and humanity for the purpose of full redemption and judgment, the first obligation for humanity in the covenant (element “B” in the chiasm) repeats the initial commands to humanity at creation in Genesis 1:28.

Along with the specific terminology of “establishing a covenant” (hēqîm běrît; Gen 6:18; 9:9–17) rather than “making/cutting a covenant” (kārat běrît), the repetition of “be fruitful and multiply, etc.” clarify that the Noahic Covenant is a reaffirmation of the pre-existing Covenant with Creation rather than a new covenant. Noah is a new Adam. The world after the flood is a new creation, and God takes this moment to reaffirm his relationship with creation and humanity through the new covenant head, Noah.

We cannot understate the theological significance of this reaffirmation. On this side of the fall, we are still created in the image of God. We are still made as sons and priest-kings, and we still have the obligation to relate to God and to rule the world as his image-bearers.

Despite sin, human life is still valuable. Despite the curse, creation is still valuable. God, therefore, will not simply destroy the world. Because of the ontological value he has placed within his creation, he will set forth to redeem it, and while we will in this age fail ultimately to fill the earth and subdue it under the rule of God, one day, through the work of redemption, we will be enabled to fully function according to our ontological design as God’s image.

Obligation 2: Respect blood.

At the center of the chiasm are two commands that are unified through establishing a respect for blood. While animals are given to humanity for food, God commands that we not eat their blood. This foreshadows the further development of this command in the Sinai Covenant (e.g., Deut 12:16–25). Eventually, we will be brought to understand that we must not eat or drink blood because

“the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life” (Lev 17:11).

Respect for blood, even animal blood, is necessary for reverently understanding the meaning of atoning sacrifices. When reading Acts, it is easy to find the conclusions of the Jerusalem Council confusing. Why do they say that the Gentiles must be taught to abstain “from what has been strangled, and from blood” (Acts 15:20)? Because the prohibition on eating blood originates in the Noahic Covenant rather than the Sinai Covenant, all of humanity is obligated to keep it for all time.

We might ask, “So what? Is it a really a big deal to eat blood?” According to both Genesis and Acts, the answer is “yes.” Abstaining from blood creates within us a reverence for and understanding of penal substitutionary atonement.

The other element of such respect for blood is the necessity of justice over the spilling of human blood. Whoever spills human blood—whether man or beast—must pay the penalty of having their own blood spilled. This is the first iteration of the principle of Lex Talionis, the necessity of the punishment fitting the crime.

Lex Talionis is most famously formulated in the Sinai Covenant:

“Your eye shall not pity. It shall be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” (Deut 19:21).

While Jesus will famously correct an individualized interpretation of this that justifies revenge in personal relationships (Matt 5:38–42), the principle of Lex Talionis itself is never abdicated or altered. In fact, it is the very basis of God’s establishment of human government and one of the ways that God preserves the world from judgment and restrains human sin (Rom 13:1–7).

The Noahic Covenant establishes God’s standard of justice that is ultimately satisfied at the cross. What is the penalty for our sin? Our life. “The wages of sin is death” (Rom 3:23). For our justification, a life must be substituted for our life. Justice must be satisfied.

While many would like to walk back from penal substitutionary atonement and claim that it is crude and primitive, to do so would require one to abandon the entirety of the biblical storyline, and in fact, that is what we see. When someone abandons penal substitutionary atonement, they abandon the Bible.

In the same way, missionaries have often been taught that penal substitutionary atonement is a Western concept based on our culture’s obsession with justice while other cultures might better resonate with atonement analogies based on honor/shame or power/fear. (See my friend Aubrey’s teaching against this misguided contextualization.) The Noahic Covenant, however, affirms that penal substitutionary atonement is a global message because it is founded upon a global and everlasting covenant.

On the cross, we see how God, having preserved the world for millennia on the basis of his covenant promise to Noah, finally satisfies the cry for justice—a life for a life, the spilling of blood for atonement—and redeems humanity and creation so that humanity will finally be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Without God’s covenant with Noah, there can be no new covenant in the blood of Christ.

When people first read Genesis, they often take it as a random collection of significant stories from the lives of the patriarchs. Yet, there is nothing random about it. From my perspective, one of the most fascinating elements of Genesis is the typological nature of Abraham’s life. His life points back to Adam and points forward to the history of Israel and ultimately to the true Israel himself, Jesus Christ.

Genesis details Abraham’s life from chapters 12–25. In Genesis 16–25, the focus of the narrative becomes Isaac’s birth and the passing of the promise to him as the true heir of Abraham. However, Genesis 12–15 is a carefully compacted telling of Abraham’s adoption by Yahweh, leading from the initial promises in chapter 12 to the formalization of the covenant in chapter 15.

In this compact story of Abraham, Moses tells the story of Israel, which is the story of all of the world from creation to new creation.

A Command and Garden Fellowship (Gen 12:1–9)

In 12:1, Yahweh speaks to Abram by issuing him a command and a promise. Abram is only the third person we’ve read about in Genesis to receive this sort of revelation from God. God first issues commands and promises to Adam, and then he does the same to Noah, who is clearly a second Adam. The address of God to Abram identifies Abram as the Seed of the Woman, a new Adam through whom salvation will come (Gen 3:15).

God’s speech is followed by garden fellowship that echoes Eden. Abram travels to the very center of the promised land, and there in the midst of the sacred grove outside Shechem, Yahweh appears to Abram. In both his speech and his appearance, God is identifying Abram as the New Adam and Canaan as the New Eden where he will fellowship with his people. God is pointing back in order to point forward to the ultimate goal of redemption.

Famine, Egyptian Captivity, and Exodus (Gen 12:10–20)

Immediately, Moses shifts to a series of stories in which Abram lives out the entire history of Israel in advance. A famine forces Abram to seek refuge in Egypt. The same thing will happen at the end of Genesis in the life of Jacob and his sons.

After arriving in Egypt, Sarai is taken captive by Pharaoh just as the nation will be enslaved in the book of Exodus.

And how is Sarai delivered? Through “great plagues” (Gen 12:17). God miraculously delivers Sarai and Abram from Pharaoh, and the household sojourns back to the promised land.

Division of the Land (Gen 13)

After arriving in the promised land, Abram and his nephew Lot divide the land between themselves. This foreshadows the division of the land under Joshua. Also, like in the books of Joshua and Judges, the primary question of the narrative is whether or not God’s people will conform to the ways of the Canaanites. The story of Lot, which continues into chapters 18–19, show Lot’s gradual conformity to the Canaanite way of life while Abram remains devoted the Yahweh.

Exile by Mesopotamian Kings and Restoration (Gen 14)

The kings of Mesopotamia invade the valley of Sodom and Gomorrah and capture Lot and his family. They begin to transport Lot’s family to Mesopotamia (the land of Babylon), but Abram, acting like a king himself, fights and defeats the Mesopotamian kings. He then frees and restores his nephew.

Here is where the entire story of the Old Testament is heading: exile. The Babylonians will come and take the descendants of Abraham away to Babylon. This would not have been a foreign concept to Moses either since it is predicted precisely in Deuteronomy 30.

God will rescue and restore them through a kingly Servant (Isa 42-53), but the questions are when, how, and to what extent? Ultimately, the full return from exile will only come through Jesus Christ.

Cutting of the Covenant (Gen 15)

The covenant ceremony in Genesis 15 formalizes the relationship that Yahweh initiated with Abram in Genesis 12. Having surveyed the entire history of Israel (and the world) through the life of Abraham, Yahweh now confirms his promises to Abraham, which will result in the redemption of all of creation and the restoration of an Edenic universe.

Reading Genesis like the Apostles

Certainly, a lot more could and should be said about the typological nature of Abraham’s life, but perhaps this brief sketch is enough to make you alert to many of the things Moses (and God) were doing in the composition of Genesis. I’m convinced that the only way to read Genesis like the apostles is to read it as a unified whole that tells a typological history of the world and the patriarchs.

When Paul, for example, says that the promise to Abraham and his offspring was “that he would be heir of the world” (Rom 4:13), he is not adding to or expanding Genesis. He is interpreting Genesis as a unified whole. He is reading Abraham’s life as pointing back to Eden and pointing forward to the history of Israel and the redemption of creation, and this greater story is the authorial intent of the book of Genesis.

As a born and bred Kentuckian, I suppose my first awareness of the West came from Fieval. After immigrating to America, that little mouse did the most American thing possible. Fieval went west into the land of cowboys and six-shooters and Sheriff Wylie Burp.

I never actually went to the West until I was an adult, but my most extensive acquaintance with the West came during a month-long road trip in 2022. During this road trip, we spent extensive time in Colorado, Utah, Arizona, California, and New Mexico. Then beyond any expectation we had dreamed up, God called us to serve in Colorado.

While on that long road trip we spent many nights in America’s national parks, we also spent quite a few in both big cities and smaller towns. The big cities of the West—SoCal, Phoenix, Denver, Seattle—have been the primary target of church planting networks ever since church planting became cool in the early 2000s. The strategy is understandable. Many of these cities have grown massively over the past quarter of a century, and these already under-churched Western cities have become even less churched. Following the influence of Young Restless and Reformed leaders of the early 2000s like Tim Keller and Mark Driscoll, church planters have sought to prioritize cities because practically that’s where the people are and also because cities are centers of cultural influence.

However, what struck me during this road trip was the massive need in places you never hear about. After three weeks on the road and being exhausted from sleeping in a tent, we altered our plans and spent three nights in an AirBnB in a normal housing development in Carlsbad, New Mexico. While Carlsbad is well-known for its caves, the town only consists of about 30,000 people, mostly working in the oil industry and ranching. As we avoided the interstates and drove the two-lane highways through the West, we passed through dozens of similar towns filled with ranchers and oilers, many with a significant Hispanic population, and predictably largely Roman Catholic.

These towns don’t have the “cultural influence” of the big cities, and they don’t have the trendy coffee shops where recent seminary graduates feel at home. Yet, these towns often posses much greater influence than first meets the eye. Most of them are regional hubs—the only town with a high school and a Walmart for miles and miles. Beyond the 20-40,000 people who live there are another 50-70,000 people whose lives revolve around the town.

This is not a post about how the missiological emphasis on cities was more of a strategy looking for a biblical justification than a direct application of biblical missiology, although I may write about that one day. Rather I simply want to share what struck me so deeply on that road trip and what I often think back to when driving the backroads of Northern Colorado (which I do quite often because my son Jude loves a good drive)—we need church planters and faithful pastors both in the growing cities and in the regional hub-towns without a hipster coffee shop. Now that I live in the West, it’s my hope that God uses me to see that need met.

As we launch Gateway Seminary’s Northern Colorado teaching site this August, we want to equip gospel ministers for the Mountain West in the Mountain West. If you’d like to join us, visit gatewaynoco.com for more information and to sign up for updates.

In July 2018, I made what I thought was the final major move of my life when my family of seven, along with our poodle, boarded an airplane to Malawi. I had spent years preparing to give my life away to train pastors and grow healthy churches in one of the least educated and poorest countries in the world. I had a vision to train men with a basic understanding of the Bible and theology, and to be able to preach the Bible in simple ways to their churches, whether they were located in the city near the college campus or under a tree in a remote mountain village.

For six years, I dedicated myself to that vision, and I thought it was my life’s work. I hadn’t pursued a PhD in biblical theology in order to teach at an American seminary. I had done it because I believed that even these men deserved the very best I could give them. I was giving myself to these men so that I could give them and their people God’s word. That was the work of my life, or so I thought.

So many of our stories have a transition point that begins with “But God had different plans.” And that is true of my story as well. I wanted to stay in Malawi the rest of my life, but God had different plans. In March 2024, our family boarded a plane to leave Malawi, and by June 2024, we found ourselves planted in a city that we never expected to live in: Fort Collins, Colorado.

In many ways, Northern Colorado is the exact opposite of Malawi. NoCo is affluent and highly educated. But just like Malawi, it is a place in need of trained pastors and church planters who can preach the true gospel by expositing the Bible. When my friend Zack Thurman, Lead Pastor of Overland Church, invited me to join him as the Associate Pastor of Discipleship and Mission, we were struck by the fact that while the context was highly different from Malawi, the task before me was the same.

At Overland Church, we want to invest in the kingdom, not just in Overland, and that means we want to share with our sister churches the resources and opportunities that God has blessed us with. Two such opportunities launching later this year are our partnership with Gateway Seminary and the Rocky Mountain Theology Conference.

Beginning in August, Overland Church will be the Northern Colorado teaching site of Gateway Seminary. This means that you will be able to equip men and women called to ministry and missions without sending them away from NoCo or having them settle for a less than ideal online program. They will be able to pursue master’s level training while continuing to serve your church and remaining in vital discipleship relationships. 

In August, we will have a soft launch of our teaching site by offering one course each semester, but in 2026, we hope to offer even more courses, allowing students to obtain up to 49% of their degree in NoCo while completing the remainder either in Denver at the Rocky Mountain Campus, online, or via remote access to one of Gateway’s other campuses. If you have someone who might be interested in this program, they can find more information at gatewaynoco.com, where they can sign up for updates or connect with me directly.

Beyond formal seminary training, we want to grow an appetite in our congregations for sound theology. That is why we are launching the Rocky Mountain Theology Conference at Overland on November 7-8, 2025. Our keynote speaker this year is Dr. Mitchell Chase, preaching pastor of Kosmosdale Baptist Church in Louisville, associate professor of biblical studies at Southern Seminary, and author of several books on biblical theology.

We hope you will encourage anyone interested in theology, and especially those who are discerning a call to ministry and missions, to join us at the Rocky Mountain Theology Conference and get a taste for deeper biblical and theological study. To find out more or to register, you can visit rockymountaintheology.com.

In conclusion, I want to say to the Longs Peak Baptist Association that it has been a pleasure getting to know many of you and thank you for welcoming our family into our new home in NoCo. I’d love to connect with each of you in a deeper way, especially if you have questions about how the programs at Overland Church could benefit and bless your church.

As we launch Gateway Seminary’s Northern Colorado teaching site this August, we want to equip gospel ministers for the Mountain West in the Mountain West. If you’d like to join us, visit gatewaynoco.com for more information and to sign up for updates.

“I heard someone say…”

When training pastors in Malawi over the past decade, I heard question after question framed with that phrase (or rather its equivalent in Chichewa):

“I heard someone say that Eve had relations with the serpent. Is that true?”

“I heard someone say that you don’t have the Holy Spirit if you don’t speak in tongues. Is that true?”

“I heard someone say that cancer is a demon. Is that true?”

Hearing so many questions framed in the same exact way struck me as incredibly revealing. These pastors were overwhelmed by the unfamiliar world they encountered in their Bibles, and some of them couldn’t even read their Bibles at all. Their Christianity had developed less from Scripture than from the teachings they had heard from others in their community, on the radio, or via Nigerian false-prophets on the television.

This reality, of course, is not unique to Malawi or even Sub-Saharan Africa. The issue is global. Two days ago, I was talking with a missionary to South Asia, and he expressed the same experience. But the reality isn’t even isolated to the Global South.

While we are incredibly privileged by our access to biblical resources and teaching in the United States, the same can often be true here as well. Many believers possess a willful ignorance of Scripture that makes them easy victims to low-quality or even false teaching. Even if we don’t bring prosperity preachers into the equation, some of the attractional methodologies of the seeker-sensitive movement, at least when it comes to preaching, have contributed to a vacuum of theological knowledge that will inevitably be filled by whatever is blowing in the wind. Sadly, with apologies to Bob Dylan, rarely is the answer found in the breeze.

In Malawi, I came to call this problem Hearsay Theology. People tend to form their doctrine by whatever they hear said. One of the goals of my life is to destroy Hearsay Theology by teaching biblical truth.

There are two key elements to developing the type of teaching that is needed to confront the problem of Hearsay Theology:

First, theology must be translated into comprehensible language for the average person. I love reading theologically dense texts, but most people will never do that. My hero in this regard is R.C. Sproul. One of the first theological books I ever read was The Holiness of God, and his ability to both bring theology down and people up remains exemplary.

Second, theology must have meaning for life. I don’t think there is any aspect of theological discourse that is truly abstract or ancillary to life. If A.W. Tozer was correct when he said, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us,” then even the most dense theological discourse has direct and urgent implications for my life. That said, sadly, we do not always teach theological truth as if that is the case. People need to feel theology as much or even more than they need to know it.

If we can teach theology in plain language and proclaim its vital connection to godly living, then I think we will be able to powerfully confront the Hearsay Theology around us.

Registration is now open for the Rocky Mountain Theology Conference this November 7–8 at Overland Church in Fort Collins, Colorado. Learn more at rockymountaintheology.com

Register

The pastor’s sermons were always interesting, to say the least, and quite a departure from the expositional preaching I had grown up with in my home church.

It was the eve of the Iraq War. I remember him some how getting the fact that we should invade from Jeremiah 49:19–22. The text talks about Bozrah, which he equated with Basrah, Iraq—one of the first cities on the invasion path. The lion in the passage was quite obviously the United Kingdom while the eagle was the United States. Thus, we should invade Iraq. Like I said, he was always very interesting.

On one particular Saturday when I put the cassette tape in the deck, I remember him reading either Romans 8 or Ephesians 1, and then spending the rest of his sermon saying,

“There’s no such thing as predestination! Don’t believe for a second that God predestined you! Predestination is not in the Bible! God gave you free will!”

He ranted like this for thirty minutes or more, all while ignoring the fact that the word “predestined” was in the biblical text he had just read.

It was like living in a parody sketch. I couldn’t believe the sermon I was listening to had really happened.

Several years later, I had a friend who was fired as a pastor of a rural Kentucky Baptist church. In a particularly tense business meeting during which various members were airing their complaints against the pastor, one man stood up and complained about my friend’s Calvinism. While my friend is in fact quite Calvinistic, he had not taught on election during his tenure because he knew the church was not ready to study such a potentially divisive topic.

When this enraged member brought up his objections to my friend’s Calvinist teachings, my friend pointed out that he had not in fact taught on the subject during his time in the church.

The church member countered back, “Yeah, but you read it once!”

At this point, my friend clarified, “Are you talking about the time I read Romans 8:28–29?” He proceeded to read the verses for clarity’s sake.

“Yes! That’s it. You read that before, and that’s Calvinist. We aren’t Calvinists!” countered the church member.

So my friend was removed as the pastor because he read verses in the Bible that members objected to.

I grew up in a church that was pejoratively called “Predestination Station” by some people in the community. After the time I first wrestled with them as a teenager, I’ve been quite comfortable with the doctrines of grace.

Nevertheless, let these stories be our reminder that you don’t have to be a Calvinist to believe in election and predestination. Both are biblical words that every Christian ought to believe in.

Christians are not separated by whether or not they believe in election. Election is in the Bible. We disagree rather on the nature and basis of election. Whether one believes in election conditioned upon God’s foreknowledge of a person’s faith, election of a corporate body rather than individuals, or unconditional election on the basis of God’s sovereign choice alone, if you believe in the Bible, you believe in election.

For those who don’t know, textual criticism is the discipline of biblical studies that seeks to ascertain and confirm the original text of the Bible by examining and comparing the various biblical manuscripts available to us. While it is one thing to learn to read Greek and Hebrew, it is quite another level to be able to read them in the handwritten copies.

Since January, I’ve been teaching a study group at Overland Church about “How We Got the Bible.” In God’s providence, this study group just so happened to launch a few weeks after Joe Rogan’s now famous interview with Wes Huff. It’s been interesting to see the topics of our study, like textual criticism and canonicity, become popular topics in the public square, at least for the blip that is the public attention span.

In the aftermath of Huff’s interview, a few friends have been featured on podcasts both clarifying and expanding claims that Huff made about the manuscripts of the Bible. I’m not brilliant, but I know several brilliant people. It’s my honor to share them with you.

Anthony Ferguson on the Great Isaiah Scroll

I met Anthony and his wife Kristen during doctoral entrance exams at Southern Seminary. Anthony became an expert in 1QIsaA, better known as the Great Isaiah Scroll of Qumran. He is now a pastor in Southern California, where he also teaches as an adjunct at California Baptist University and Gateway Seminary.

I love Anthony’s brilliant mind, displayed in this interview with Sean McDowell, but I love even more his heart. When I saw him at ETS in San Diego this year and we caught up about life and ministry, he stopped and prayed over me there in the convention hall. I will forever be thankful for friends like him.

Nelson Hsieh on Early Church Scribes

In PhD seminars, there are some guys that just stand out for their precision, careful research, and argumentation. Nelson was always one of those guys at Southern Seminary. Now Nelson works at Tyndale House, the biblical studies library in Cambridge.

This episode is part of a series from Tyndale House, and it would be worth your time to go back to episode one. But if you can only listen to one episode, I think episode four is the best.

John Meade on the Great Isaiah Scroll

I didn’t meet John Meade at Southern Seminary. I met him later in Phoenix, where he has taught at Phoenix Seminary over the past several years. John and his colleague Peter Gurry literally wrote the book on these topics or at least the book that I’m using in my study group at Overland—Scribes and Scripture.

When our family began the process of leaving Malawi, John and his wife Annie were an incredible blessing to us during a season that we thought we would be making our home in Phoenix. While the Lord had Fort Collins marked out for us instead, I’m still thankful for the kindness that John showed me as well as for his textual critic brilliance.

When I was a child in Kentucky, the state lottery was newly established and horse betting was a cultural tradition. But besides these two things, casinos were outlawed south of the Ohio River, video slot machines were unknown, and sports betting belonged to the world of the Italian mafia. As an avid baseball fan, I was steeped in the history of the Black Sox, who threw the 1919 World Series, and Pete Rose, whose star fell because of betting on his own sport.

Today, however, all that has changed. Every time I open up the ESPN app to check a score, I see odds and get offers to place my first bet on ESPN Bet, Fanatics, or a host of other gambling apps.

For sports-obsessed kids today, gambling is not portrayed as the curse that it was in my childhood. It is seen as part of the warp-and-woof of sports, part of the fun, and unfortunately many kids are growing up with dads—even Christian dads—whose consciences have been seared when it comes to betting.

With that in mind, I wanted to write down what I believe to be the five primary arguments against gambling from a biblical worldview. The truth is that we cannot open up the Bible to a specific chapter and verse and read, “Thou shalt not gamble.” Nevertheless, from the perspective of a biblical worldview it becomes clear that the practice violates our values and damages ourselves and our neighbors.

The Stewardship Argument

The first, and I think most significant, argument against gambling is that of stewardship. Gambling is poor stewardship of the limited resources God gives us. As Christians, our stance toward our limited resources ought to be summed up by Ephesians 4:28:

“Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.”

While addressed specifically to the thief, the instruction applies to all of us. We should do our work honestly with our own hands that we might have something to meet our own needs and to share with anyone in need.

We believe all that we have has come from God as a gift, even if the means of that gift is through our labor. God is the one who provides “seed to the sower and bread for food,” and therefore, we act from faith when we utilize his gifts to meet our needs and the needs of others through our church.

By contrast, we devalue God’s gift when we throw it away in gaming. Certainly, there are many other ways we could devalue the gift of God and waste money, and it is also true that in some areas Christians will differ as a matter of conscience about the good stewardship of money. For example, is it good stewardship to take an expensive vacation? Christians might answer that question differently for different reasons.

On the other hand, there is no good stewardship justification for gambling. It is taking money that God intended to meet our needs and the needs of others and throwing it away. Gambling is to take for granted God’s gifts and waste them for purposes he never intended.

The Wisdom Argument

Related to the stewardship argument is the wisdom argument. Gambling is not wise. Why is gambling unwise? Because the house always wins. The gambling industry, whether in Vegas, online, or in your state lottery, is built upon the premise that you will lose and they will win.

Of course, some people do win, but rarely do they win long term. The industry has hacked dopamine to keep you engaged. While you might win in the short-term, you will in the end lose. The house always wins.

As some have said, “Gambling is a tax on stupidity.” Proverbs speaks against all such “get rich quick” schemes:

“Wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it” (Prov 13:11).

“An inheritance gained hastily in the beginning will not be blessed in the end” (Prov 20:21).

“A faithful man will abound with blessings, but whoever hastens to be rich will not go unpunished” (Prov 28:20).

Wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord and understands that this is God’s world (Prov 1:7). The best way to live in the world is to live in accordance with the way God has designed it. God designed the world to generally reward production and perseverance. That is the way to wealth. People who try to hack God’s design and get rich quick will generally fail miserably.

The Greed Argument

While the stewardship and wisdom arguments focus on the practical problems with gambling, the greed argument gets to the heart, from which all sin flows. Even if someone tries to downplay gambling as a form of entertainment, we must still ask what is it about gambling that gives us pleasure? Isn’t it the thrill of making money? Isn’t it greed?

The best comparison would be with going to a strip club. Is a strip club entertainment? Yes. But what is it about this form of entertainment that gives pleasure? It is the thrill of lust. In light of this, the gambling is “just entertainment” perspective falls apart. Gambling is, in fact, commodified greed.

As is well-known and oft misquoted, Paul identifies greed or “the love of money” as “a root of all kinds of evils.” I think it is helpful to read this well-known verse in its context:

“But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs” (1 Tim 6:9–10).

Paul reiterates the teaching of Jesus: you will either serve God or mammon (Luke 16:13). The craving for money will draw you away from faith in Christ and bring pain into your life. It is a “senseless and harmful desire” that brings about “ruin and destruction.” Don’t feed greed in your life with gambling. Abstain and destroy it.

The Predation Argument

The final two arguments are big-picture, worldview-level arguments. First is the argument from predation. Gambling is a predatory industry. It preys on the weakest, poorest, and least educated people in society and falsely promises them a chance at a new life. Gambling is a scam that entices the poor to spend money they don’t have on something they don’t need rather than spending it on essential needs or saving it for the future.

This issue would be bad enough if it was only coming from the gambling industry, but what makes it even worse is when it becomes the activity of state government through the lottery. When the government, which was instituted by God as an “avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer” (Rom 13:4), consumes its most vulnerable citizens for profit, it becomes a partner in injustice rather than a punisher of injustice.

We should hope to see all predatory industries dismantled in society, from abortion to payday lending with its exorbitant interest rates to every form of gambling.

The Economic Argument

Finally, gambling is not an economically productive activity. Let me back up first and state that capitalism is a biblical concept. Sure, the term capitalism was not coined and the system was not identified until the Enlightenment, but the concepts of capitalism are embedded in the universe. While capitalism, like every human system, may be abused, the simple truth is that capitalism works because it was the way God designed the universe. God created a world where hard work is generally rewarded, and therefore, the Torah itself is quite concerned with private property rights and fair markets, while nevertheless ensuring a safety net for the poor.

But what about the communistic sharing of the Jerusalem Church in Acts, someone will object? That sharing was completely capitalistic because it was voluntary. Peter affirms that in his rebuke to Ananias who sold his property but lied about the price: “When it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal” (Acts 5:4)? Even when the church had all things in common in Acts, they did so voluntarily within the capitalistic concepts of private property.

Now back to gambling: In one sense, gambling has a capitalistic impulse. The industry’s argument is this: People want to gamble. If it is illegal, they will find ways to do it anyway. We might as well make money, provide jobs, and pay taxes within a legal framework.

At first glance, that seems like a sound argument. But there remains the question of production. What product does the gambling industry actually create? It creates addiction, poverty, and a vacuum sucking money out of the pockets of the vulnerable into the accounts of the wealthy.

True industry is industrious. It creates products of value that contribute to the good of society. Certainly, industry is not always altruistic. Capitalism takes this into account. But even industry engaged in for base reasons like greed ought to provide for society a product that benefits society. Gambling does not create wealth like industry does. It merely transfers it from the foolish to the clever.

It is for this reason that even in the most Libertarian states we outlaw certain forms of business. For example, the Ponzi scheme is outlawed across the country. We might object to this by arguing that people do make money from Ponzi schemes, but in the end, there is no real product that creates value. It is a scam. It is predation. It is merely a transfer of wealth from the victims to the scammer.

Gambling likewise does not produce value for the economy. It does not produce goods and services that can be traded for other goods and services and grow the economy. It siphons money away from streams of true production, and therefore is ultimately economically damaging.

Gambling is evil

For all the reasons above, we should not be afraid to call gambling both sinful and evil. It does not benefit ourselves, our families, or our neighbors in any way, and even if we can’t turn back the clock and make its various forms illegal again, we ought to socially stigmatize it in the same way we have done with tobacco. Something that is harmful and predatory ought to be hated by all men of goodwill.

We do not merely hold this truth as an apologetic for “traditional marriage;” we hold it because the creation of marriage stands as an essential act in the drama of Scripture.

The climax of creation is not merely the creation of humanity in God’s image, but the creation of humanity as male and female. While we get the big picture version of God’s creation of marriage in Genesis 1, we get the instant replay in Genesis 2. God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him” (Gen 2:18). And that is exactly what the LORD God did. “And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed” (Gen 2:25).

As the Bible begins with a marriage, it also ends with a marriage—the marriage of Christ and his people and their entering into their eternal home (Rev 19–22). And just in case we might assume that marriage merely illustrates the relation of Christ and his people, Paul makes clear to us that the relationship is actually the other way around. Human marriage was created as a type of the eternal covenant relationship between God and his people (Eph 5:32).

Everything I have written thus far should be Marriage 101. These are the truths every pastor should be sharing in premarital counseling and at every wedding they preach. However, today, I want to reflect on something I find quite remarkable—the fact that this Edenic institution was uniquely fitted by God for our lives in a fallen world.

Marriage takes us back to Eden

While marriage is not the only gift or calling given to humanity in these last days (1 Cor 7), we should not be ashamed to celebrate the unique beauty and incredible joy this gift and calling from God provides us. While marriage was instituted in Eden and has been marred by human sin, it nevertheless remains characteristically what it is—an Edenic institution.

First, we believe this because we believe that we continue to bear God’s image even in a sinful, fallen world. The image of God in man does not cease in Genesis 3. God reaffirms it to Noah in Genesis 9:6. Humanity continues to bear God’s image, even though that image is marred by sin, and marriage—being created male and female for multiplication—is, according to Genesis 1:27–28, a fundamental expression of our image bearing in this age.

Second, when Moses describes the creation of woman, he makes a universal application that he does not qualify on the basis of fallenness: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen 2:24). The creation of marriage has ongoing, unqualified significance in our sinful world.

Third, it is within marriage that we continue to experience nakedness without shame. In Eden, the man and his wife were both naked and not ashamed. While sin immediately tainted even this relationship (Gen 3:7), the truth remains that there is in this fallen world only one relationship where we can be naked without shame—the one between a husband and a wife.

Fourth, the descriptions of marital nakedness in Song of Solomon are intentionally Edenic. Song of Solomon confirms and expands the previous point. In the Song, the bride and groom rejoice rather than feel shame over one another’s nakedness. But more than this, the metaphors and symbols the man and woman use to describe one another’s bodies and even to describe their sexual desire echo Eden. I do not think we are meant to read these metaphors as merely appropriate to an agricultural society. The metaphors present the naked bodies of the book as idealized pleasure gardens, as echoes of Eden.

Yes, marriage is tainted by sin. In a fallen world, wives often seek to dominate rather than submit to their husbands, and husbands often seek to domineer or even abuse rather than lovingly serve and lead their wives (Gen 3:16), and in the end, every marriage ends because we return to the dust (Gen 3:19).

Nevertheless, marriage is still marriage. It is an Edenic institution through which we display the image of God and experience, when a marriage is submitted to God’s commands, the goodness of creation.

Marriage makes life east of Eden bearable

One of the most remarkable things about marriage then is that while God instituted it in paradise, it is uniquely fitted for the demands of a fallen world. If Adam needed “a helper fit for him” in his labors before the fall, how much more was he going to need a helper when the earth started bringing forth thorns and thistles and fighting against him?

To God, of course, the fall of humanity into sin was no surprise. In fact, he had created marriage intentionally to express not only his creative design but his redemptive plan in Christ. Marriage was designed for redemption as much as it was designed for creation.

I think we experience this when we bear the burdens of this fallen world together in marriage. We all re-experience both creation and the fall in our marriages, and we can all find new joy when we experience redemption in our marriages.

Every wedding is a reenactment of Eden. The cynical and jaded will often seek to rain on the occasion with snarky comments about “when the honeymoon is over,” but it is good and right for the starry eyed lovers to look upon each other as flawless and upon their impending lives as a grand, untainted adventure. Some claim that young love is temporary insanity, but I think it is better to think of it as reenactment of the age of innocence. The fall will happen later.

And yes, the fall can happen quite suddenly when we realize the earthliness and even sinfulness of our spouse and also of ourselves. The challenge of marriage is that it requires two sinful and selfish humans to live as one by putting the other sinful and selfish human before themselves.

But even beyond our own sinfulness, there is the circumstances of the fallen world. None of us know what we will face when we stand before family and friends as a new Adam and Eve. The first Adam and Eve journeyed east from Eden where they would encounter the death of one son and their alienation from another, and these are only the sorrows that we read about. How much more suffering did they face in nine centuries?

Then, of course, was the final blow. One of them had to bury the other. The text of Genesis does not speak to this beyond the simple phrase, “And he died” (Gen 5:5). But we should not forget what this truth meant for the glorious marriage we witnessed in Genesis 2. He died, and she died. We do not know which died first, but we do know that one did and the other was then again alone beside the grave of their beloved.

Paul speaks of “this light momentary affliction” (2 Cor 4:17), and the power of that phrase is in the fact that our affliction rarely ever feels light or momentary. Instead, our suffering too often feels unbearable and unending. It is only by comparison to “an eternal weight of glory” that our current suffering appears light and momentary.

While God has given us other gifts to help us bear such affliction faithfully, marriage continues to be one of the most important of these gifts. For those of us who are married, God has given us a partner in the task of shouldering the burdens of sorrow east of Eden. We do not walk in exile alone.

In the wasteland outside the garden, Adam and Eve could look into one another’s eyes and be transported back within the gates of paradise. They could look into one another’s eyes and remember that in spite of everything they had lost, God had still given them one another. Surely their burdens were made lighter by sharing them.

Yes, there are so many marriages, even in our churches today, that themselves add to the burdens of this world, but when we allow our marriages to be redeemed by grace and shaped anew into the pattern of love given at creation, then we too experience Eden in a fallen world.

Our mimicking of pop culture was inevitably cheesy, but, hey, we had fun doing it. Beyond the cheese factor, I think it was largely harmless, although much less evangelistically effective than we sometimes hoped.

I think the primary problem with the mimic culture of Y2K youth groups was the subconscious messaging that our goal ought to be normalization. Yes, we had “Jesus Freak,” but we also wanted the world to realize that we weren’t that weird. We weren’t that different from them.

Andrew Walls’ Two Principles

The great historian of Christian missions in the last century, Andrew Walls, identified two sometimes contrary principles in Christianity.

First is the indigenizing principle. The message of the gospel is that Christ receives us as we are. The Apostles, following the Spirit’s leadership, made one of the most important decisions of Christian history when they decided that Gentiles did not need to Judaize to become followers of Christ. We remain who we are when we come to Christ—human beings, conditioned and enculturated by specific times and places.

Second is the pilgrim principle. Even as the message of the gospel takes us as we are, it also separates us from the world. We become pilgrims or exiles in a world that is not our home. Our values become different from the values of our unbelieving neighbors. While we remain in the world, we no longer belong to the world.

Living out both the indigenizing principle and the pilgrim principle simultaneously, in one sense, is the entire battle of progressive sanctification. Yet, we often fail by emphasizing one principle more than the other. If we neglect the indigenizing principle, then we will become “holier than thou” legalists who seem phony to the world around us. On the other hand, if we neglect the pilgrim principle, we risk creating an odd mimic culture that really doesn’t offer the world anything unique and we seem phony to the world around us.

We need the pilgrim principle

While everyone individually and ecclesiastically has their own unique struggles, I think that on the whole we as Evangelical Christians are still recovering from our Y2K mimic culture. Perhaps I’m just speaking for those of us Millennials who lived it, but I think there remains a subconscious emphasis on the “normalness” of Christianity.

But Christianity is not worshiping a generic God, loving your neighbor, and becoming a better person. Christianity is weird.

If you heard the message of Christianity as if for the first time, it would likely sound as strange to you as the cult of Zorp, the Lizard God.

We believe that a Judean man from the first century is in fact the Creator of the Universe, and even though he was executed by the Romans as a rebel against Caesar, he is alive. He is seated at this moment at the right hand of God the Father and will return at any moment to judge the world and renew creation.

Worshiping the Donkey God

That message was weird in the first century, and it remains weird in the twenty-first century. The first artistic depiction of Christ’s crucifixion speaks to this, the Alexamenos graffito found in Rome. In this crude sketch on the walls, made in the second century, the “artist” depicts Jesus on the cross with the head of a donkey and writes below the picture, “Alexamenos worships his god.” (See above.)

The artist mocks Alexamenos’ worship of Christ because of the weirdness of a Roman worshiping a crucified Jew, and if Christianity was not the foundational truth of reality, then the artist would have been right to do so. The story is ludicrous, unless it is real.

While there has recently been a conservative movement in the West to acknowledge once again the centrality of Christianity to Western culture, bolstered by interesting voices like Tom Holland and Jordan Peterson, we must remember that ultimately what has made Christianity attractive for over twenty centuries is not its “normalness” but its weirdness.

Only when we wholeheartedly embrace the uniqueness of the Christian message do we have anything to offer the world.

But what is weirder are many of the interpretations offered by critical scholars. It is commonly recognized that the Hebrew word for “foot”, regel, can be used as a euphemism for male genitalia, although the only strong usage in my opinion is Isaiah 7:20. Other instances like Exodus 4:25 and Isaiah 6:2 could simply mean “feet” rather than something else.

Ruth, however, utilizes a unique word, margelot, which comes from the rgl root but more literally means “place of the feet.” This word itself could be seen as the author’s attempt to clarify that he does not intend any euphemistic meaning that could be implied by “feet.”

Nevertheless, critical scholars cannot resist finding something more in Ruth’s action.

Biblical Conspiracy Theorists

Critical scholars often act like biblical conspiracy theorists. The entire discipline of critical (most readers should think “liberal”) scholarship is founded upon the premise that the biblical text is dishonest. It is not the word of God. Rather it is a deceptive form of propaganda intended to legitimize those in power. Therefore, they approach the deceptive text with the goal of seeing past the text to hypothetical sources. Those in power ransacked these sources to create the current propagandized forms of biblical books, but with our superior, scholarly skills, we can peel back the layers and find the hidden messages.

When scholars begin with this kind of stance toward the text, it is no wonder they automatically assume the Bible does not mean what it means. They are the academic equivalent of flat earthers. “Don’t believe what you’ve been told. Throw out common sense and instead listen to us thread together the ‘facts’ in a way that will show you that what you thought you knew isn’t true.”

Don’t get me wrong. There are some helpful critical scholars, and we can learn some things from them. But it is essential to remember that those of us who begin from a position of faith in the God of the text are not starting from the same place as critical scholarship, and this largely explains our vastly different conclusions. We are not merely debating historical or literary data. We have fundamentally different approaches to the text itself.

What then of Boaz’s feet? Two lines of evidence flow from the context of Ruth itself, and rather than following the critical stance to “not believe the text,” I suggest it makes much more sense to trust a text that gives every sign of being a unified production, and which the people of God have always recognized as the word of God himself.

The Wisdom of Ruth and Boaz

The first line of evidence is the motif of “worth.” The entire book emphasizes the integrity of both Ruth and Boaz. Boaz is introduced to us as “a worthy man” (Ruth 2:1). The phrase could mean that he was “a man of great wealth” (NASB), but since the same word, chayil, is used of Ruth in 3:11, the emphasis most certainly is not on his wealth but his strength of character.

In their initial meeting, Boaz admonishes Ruth’s wisdom, which is displayed in her sacrificial care for Naomi (Ruth 2:11–12). In turn, Boaz utilizes his authority to protect Ruth from the dangers a young woman would face in the countryside and instructs his servants to intentionally drop barley for her to glean, demonstrating mercy and kindness (Ruth 2:14–16, 21–22).

When Ruth makes her proposal in chapter 3, Boaz accepts it because she is “a worthy woman” (eshet chayil; Ruth 3:11). In chapter 4, the town elders bless both Ruth and Boaz wishing for them to achieve worth (chayil; Ruth 4:11–12), and the women of the town tell Naomi that Ruth is better than seven sons (Ruth 4:15).

Some of the earliest readers of the book also saw the worthy character of Ruth and Boaz as a central theme of the book, and this is why Ruth often follows Proverbs in the Hebrew ordering of the Old Testament. Ruth, in particular, is seen as an example of the Proverbs 31 woman, who is also eshet chayil, a “worthy woman” or an “excellent wife” (Prov 31:10). The excellent wife depicted by King Lemuel’s mother is an embodiment of Lady Wisdom in Proverbs 1–3. Lady Wisdom then stands in contrast with the forbidden woman and adulteress of Proverbs 5–7.

The author would not destroy the entire portrait he is painting of this couple in a single episode. Proverbs, along with the rest of the entire Old Testament, view chastity as wisdom.

For this reason, the author takes pains to testify to their chastity on the threshing floor. Boaz is careful to instruct, “Let it not be known that the woman came to the threshing floor” (Ruth 3:14). He does not say this in order to hide what happened but rather to protect himself and Ruth from even the appearance of impropriety. Nothing immoral happened at the threshing floor, but if gossips knew they had been there together, they would’ve said that something immoral had happened.

Is the point of the book that Ruth is rewarded for fornication? Some critical commentators think so. But this runs against the entire testimony of Scripture and of Ruth itself. If Ruth and Boaz slept together on the threshing floor, then they would not be the examples of wisdom that they are.

Ruth’s Explanation

The second line of evidence is Ruth’s actual explanation of her action. Uncovering a man’s feet and lying down at them was not a normal thing women did in 12th century BC Bethlehem. There is no cultural significance that is hidden to us today. Even Boaz is startled when he wakes up to Ruth at his feet (Ruth 3:8).

Since both we the readers and Boaz himself do not understand the significance of Ruth’s action, we must rely on Ruth’s explanation of her action in verse 10: “Spread your wings over your servant, for you are a redeemer.” While the ESV's rendering of “your wings” is an accurate literal translation, it fails to communicate to us the idiom that Ruth is employing. The NIV gets it right when it says, “Spread the corner of your garment over me, since you are a guardian-redeemer of our family.”

Ruth is not comparing Boaz to a bird or a mother hen. Rather she is asking to be wrapped in Boaz’s garment, but they both understand that she is not asking to be wrapped in his cloak immediately and literally. Her request is symbolic. Ezekiel 16:8 clarifies the expression for us:

When I passed by you again and saw you, behold, you were at the age for love, and I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness; I made my vow to you and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Lord GOD, and you became mine.

In Ezekiel, it is Israel that God spreads the corner of his garment over. The expression is the image of the intimacy and protection of the marriage covenant. Yes, Israel is portrayed as naked, but the nakedness of Israel in Ezekiel 16 signifies Israel’s poverty, not its availability.

Boaz had already described Ruth’s membership in God’s covenant with Israel with the same expression (Ruth 2:12). Now Ruth asks Boaz to initiate the covenant of marriage with her, bringing her within the corners of his cloak and giving her intimacy and protection from her poverty.

With this explanation, we can understand Ruth’s action as a visual aid for her appeal. By pulling the cloak that was covering him back and lying at his feet, Ruth put herself in the position to be covered by Boaz’s cloak. She is visually demonstrating her impoverished need and Boaz’s ability to meet her need and protect her.

While not a perfect comparison, I suppose it carries similar significance to a man getting down on one knee to propose. The gesture is a physical act symbolizing the respect, loyalty, service, and love being offered to the potential bride. It is a picture of the sacrificial love that a husband ought to give in marriage.

It’s not really about Boaz’s feet. It’s about his cloak. Ruth asks to be brought into the protection of Boaz’s garment by lying down at the place of his feet. By uncovering his feet and lying down, Ruth, a worthy woman, signifies to Boaz, a worthy man, that her mourning is over and that she needs and desires his intimacy and protection in a levirate marriage.

That is one of those “preacher lines” that I’m sure I’ve heard dozens of times whenever the preacher wants to redirect the congregation away from the modern expectation that God is all “warm and fuzzies.”

Or at least, it is a line that I know you could find somewhere back in my sermon archives!

But it is also a line that is wrong, at least in the way it is framed. Yes, God is a God of love, and yes, God is a God of justice, which necessarily expresses itself in wrath against sinners. The problem with the statement, however, is the three-letter word “but.”

The contrasting conjunction “but” signifies that we think of the attributes of love and justice as opposites, as two sides of God’s character that are opposed to each other. As two parts of God competing with one another. That framing is a theological miscalculation.

God is not made of parts.

The doctrine of divine simplicity, in accordance with its name, is a rather simple doctrine to understand. Divine simplicity teaches us that God is not made up of parts. He is a simple—whole, complete—being.

There are three major aspects to this doctrine: uncreatedness, indestructibility, and wholeness. The fact that God is not made of parts flows from the truth that God is not created. He has no beginning. If God was made of part this and part that, then there is something—the parts—that preexists God, and God in some sense would have been created from the parts that make him up.

The opposite of creation is destruction, and if God is uncreated and simple, then it is also true that he is indestructible. Whatever device you are reading this on was assembled from thousands of tiny parts in a factory on the other side of the world. What must you do to destroy it? Disassemble the parts. So too if God was assembled from various parts, then he could also be disassembled. God could be destroyed.

But for our purposes, it is the third aspect of this doctrine that is most relevant: wholeness. If God is simple and not made of parts, then he is whole, complete, or indivisible. God’s attributes are not various parts of God. They are descriptions of the whole and simple character of God. Therefore, when we talk about each individual attribute, we are talking about the same thing—the unified and simple character of God.

Let’s make this a little more concrete by going back to love and justice. These are not two parts of God’s character. They are two descriptions of the indivisible character of God. Far from competing, they complement one another. God’s love is a just love, and God’s justice is a loving justice. Love and justice, in God, are not two different things. They are two words for the same Reality, who is God himself.

Is this in the Bible?

I can already hear someone saying that this sounds like a lot of Greek philosophy imposed on the Bible. Where can we find this in the Bible?

You might think that we’d need to go to later eras in progressive revelation to find such a sophisticated understanding of God, but you would be wrong. Divine simplicity is so fundamental to the God of Israel that the Torah presents it as a matter of first importance.

First is the divine name itself: “I AM WHO I AM” (Exod 3:14). The divine name speaks to God’s self-existence. He is uncreated. It also speaks of his indestructibility, eternality, and immutability. When God chooses to identify himself to Moses, he chooses a name that communicates divine simplicity.

Second there is the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deut 6:4). The “one” in the Shema teaches Israel that Yahweh alone is their God. He is the only true God, and therefore, they must love him alone completely. But this is more than an expression of monotheism, since God’s singularity and simplicity go hand in hand. He is not like the gods of the nations who have their origin stories and who compete with one another. He alone is the true God, a God that is not made. He is utterly unique, uncreated, and unequaled. The LORD simply is God.

Finally, there is the great revelation of divine character in Exodus 34:

The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation (Exod 34:6-7).

At first glance, God’s revelation of himself as both merciful and just could undermine divine simplicity. Indeed, in the middle of the ESV translation is the word “but.” He is a God who forgives “but who will by no means clear the guilty.”

I won’t question here in detail whether the word “but” accurately translates the sense of the Hebrew conjunctive vav in Exodus 34:7, but I do think the NIV does better by translating it “yet.” Perhaps Eugene Peterson does it best in The Message with the word “still:” “…forgiving iniquity, rebellion, and sin. Still, he doesn’t ignore sin.”

But even apart from the translation issue, God’s revelation of himself to Moses speaks clearly to his simplicity. These are not two competing parts of God’s character as if we might get one or the other, never knowing which attribute he might express toward us.

Rather, God is saying that he is a justly merciful God, or a mercifully just God. He forgives sins while still punishing the guilty. God’s mercy will never express itself as injustice—merely sweeping sin under the rug. While to us this may seem at first glance like two different parts of God, in fact this is simply God.

God is a God of love and justice.

God does not have multiple personality disorder. His love does not compete with his justice. Or even more egregious of a misunderstanding: the wrath of the Father is not at war with the love of the Son, as if the members of the Trinity are at conflict with one another in the redemption of humanity.

God’s love is a just love, and his justice is a loving justice. How can God’s wrath be loving? David actually rejoices in the wrath of God:

And in your steadfast love you will cut off my enemies,
and you will destroy all the adversaries of my soul,
for I am your servant (Ps 143:12).

David recognizes the wrath of God against his enemies as an expression of God’s steadfast love toward him.

Likewise, Christ’s first coming and second coming do not oppose one another, as if he came first for love and will come again for justice. Both are expressions of the same unified character of the Godhead. In his first coming, Jesus displayed the love of God by becoming the sacrifice for our sins that satisfied God’s justice. In his second coming, Jesus will display the love of God by rescuing his people from a sinful world and satisfying God’s justice against every enemy.

Many people assume that humility means thinking badly of yourself. It requires us to deflect praise. When someone says, “You are really good at that,” the humble person should respond, “Thank you, but I’m not really that good. In comparison with so-and-so, I’m actually bad at it.”

It also requires us to dwell on our sinfulness and unworthiness. Paul is seen as the example of humility in 1 Timothy 1:15, where he calls himself the chief of sinners. To be humble, then requires us, according to the “thinking badly” definition, to define ourselves as “just an old sinner.”

But if humility was thinking badly of yourself, then Jesus would not have been capable of being humble. Thinking badly of himself would have required him to believe a lie about himself, which would have compromised the One who is himself “the Truth” (John 14:6).

Defining humility by Trinitarian Love

What then is humility? When studying the topic recently, I came up with the following definition, and I’d love to hear thoughts from readers as to how it could be improved:

Humility is to become so consumed into and defined by the love of the Trinity that your affections for God, neighbor, and self are rightly ordered and expressed.

Our definition of this virtue begins with Jesus, and what better place is there to start examining Jesus’ humility than Philippians 2:5–11?

In Philippians 2, Paul introduces Jesus as “in the form of God” and possessing “equality with God” (Phil 2:5–6). As the Second Person of the Trinity, God the Son lives within and is identified by the love of the Trinity. He is the One who is beloved and begotten by the Father and esteemed and empowered by the Spirit. Within the bonds of Trinitarian love, he is the Word, “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (Heb 1:3).

When we remember the Son’s identity within Trinitarian love, then we can rightly understand Paul when he says that the Son “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant” (Phil 2:7). The Son did not give up his divine nature or any of his divine attributes in the Incarnation, since to do so would mean to become less than God. Rather Paul says quite clearly what Christ did: He “emptied himself” by the addition of human nature to his divine nature. Yet, it is not merely the human nature that defines Christ’s humbling but the exact expression of his divine and human person—obedience to God and service to humanity, even to the most extreme degree, crucifixion (Phil 2:7–8).

In the incarnation, then, God the Son did not do anything other than fully express within creation and history who he had always been in eternity. Within eternal Trinitarian love, the Son is the one who is beloved and begotten by the Father and who reveals the Father in the power of the Spirit, and the best way to reveal the character of the Father was through becoming human and dying on the cross. On the cross, we do not see the Son becoming something he is not. Rather, we see him fully expressing who he is and thus fully expressing who God the Father is.

In the mission of the Son, we see his eternal relation of origin in the Trinity expressed most fully within creation in relation to his creatures. That is to say, what the Son did in history simply expressed who he had always been as the begotten of the Father. Scott Swain puts it this way:

“The Son’s mission, from his incarnation in the Virgin’s womb to his resurrection and enthronement at the Father’s right hand, thus manifests in time his begetting in eternity (Acts 13:30, 33; Rom 1:4). It is the temporal announcement of the eternal utterance reported in Psalm 2:7.”1

By fully knowing who he was within Trinitarian love, God the Son ordered rightly his love for God, neighbor, and self, and thus expressed that love fully. Jesus knew who he was and lived accordingly.

The same thing can be said about each person of the Trinity. Father, Son, and Spirit are all completely satisfied to be who they are in service to one another, which then overflowed into God’s acts of creation and redemption.

Being humble

What then of humility in us? We are enabled to become humble, first and foremost, by being brought into the fellowship of Trinitarian love by faith in Christ and fellowship in the Spirit.

When Peter commands all of us to clothe ourselves with humility because “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” (1 Pet 5:5; cf. Prov 3:34), he does it after spilling lots of ink instructing his readers who they are in relation to the Trinity. They are now “obedient children” who should be holy as God is holy (1 Pet 1:14). In chapter 2, they are both the “spiritual house” or temple where God dwells and the “holy priesthood” who serve God (1 Pet 2:5). They are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession…God’s people” (1 Pet 2:9–10). Even in chapter 5, he recaps, calling them the ones who have been “called..to his eternal glory in Christ” and those “who are in Christ” (1 Pet 5:10, 13).

Peter urges his readers to truly understand who they are. They have been brought into the fellowship of eternal Trinitarian love, and they should find themselves consumed into and defined by that love.

When we understand who we are within the love of the Trinity, then our affections should become rightly ordered and expressed. When we see ourselves as dearly loved by God, we can stop our striving, our worrying, and our proving, and we can simply be fully who we are out of love for God, love for neighbor, and even out of a rightly ordered love for ourselves.

I’ll conclude this brief thought on a personal note. The most humble people I’ve ever known have not been those who thought badly of themselves. Rather, it has been those who have been most comfortable in their own skin. They didn’t have anything to prove. They didn’t strive in competition with others. They are people who know who they are and seek to be all they are for the glory of God and the good of others.

This is humility.

We have some big news to share at Overland Church. Starting in August 2025, we will be hosting the Northern Colorado teaching site of Gateway Seminary. I’ll be sharing more about this in coming days, but if you or someone you know in Northern Colorado or Southeast Wyoming would be interested in pursuing theological training within a deep discipleship model, I’d love to hear from you.

Those three words in the Apostles’ Creed summarize one of the most foundational truths of Christianity. We are the people who believe that Christ will come again.

To be honest, this doctrine makes Christianity weird. We expect a Judean man from the first century to appear in the clouds and judge the world. When you think about it as if you are hearing it for the first time, it sounds rather wacky.

Yet, there is no way to dissect the doctrine of Christ’s return from every other doctrine of the Christian faith, including his sacrificial death. It is all part of a singular plan that God made before creation for “the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph 1:10).

We believe in the ending of the present age and the coming of the age-to-come, and we believe that this eschatological transition has already been inaugurated by the death and resurrection of Christ and will be brought to completion at his return. Only through our faith in Christ’s return and the establishment of the eternal order can we make sense of the Christian life and even Christian ethics.

As we reflect on this new year that we have been given, it is good to remember three truths in light of Christ’s imminent return: Time will end. Time is short. And time is evil.

Time will end

Christ’s return promises that time—this age—will end. Of course, time in the sense of the eternal age will go on and on forever, but the present age is passing away. It will come to an end at the return of Christ.

Therefore, do not love what is dying. Peter admonishes us, “Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness” (2 Pet 3:11)! Knowing that everything in this age will come to an end ought to align our priorities with the age to come, and we ought to pursue the eternal rather than the temporal.

Time is short

While we should not love things that belong to this epoch, we nevertheless have a responsibility to make the most of our time in this age. The truth of Christ’s return and the brevity of our own lives both teach us that, one way or another, our time here will be short. James writes, “What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes” (Jas 4:14).

In light of the brevity of time, James reminds us not to plan presumptively but to always submit our lives to the Lord’s will (Jas 4:13–15). Yet it is equally true that the brevity of time should push us to make the most of our time for the glory of God and the good of others.

Moses prays, “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Ps 90:12). When we understand the brevity of our lives, we grow in wisdom, knowing better how we ought to utilize our short lives in the fear of the Lord.

Time is evil

Paul reminds us that “the days are evil” (Eph 5:16; cf. Gal 1:4). Therefore, we ought to be “redeeming the time” (Eph 5:16 KJV), which means to utilize time rightly for the glory of God rather than for evil. The opposite would be to love this age and the wicked things that are done in the darkness of this age (Eph 5:18–19).

But another application of this basic fact can be found in Paul’s commands to the rich in 1 Timothy 6:17:

“As for the rich in this present age, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy.”

The rich are not to put their hope in the transient riches of the present age, but to trust in the rich God of eternity.

This same logic should be applied to almost every area of our lives. This age is evil, and everything within it is marked by suffering, disappointment, and tragedy. In our suffering, we often put our hope in “next year will be better,” but we should not put our hope in the uncertainty of next year. It will likely not be better than the year before, and it may be worse.

Because time is evil, we must put our hope in God and what he is doing for us and in us:

“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Cor 4:16–18).

As my wife says, “Total nerd stuff.”

The gist of my paper is this: Second Baruch and Galatians both discuss promise, law, and fulfillment, but they understand these three theological topics differently. Each book then builds a different theodicy (explanation for evil and suffering) on the resulting theological architecture.

Second Baruch has a disciplinary theodicy that teaches since Israel must obey the law to receive the fulfillment of God’s promises, God had to discipline Israel in order to bring about Israels obedience and thus the fulfillment of his promise. Galatians, on the other hand, has a cosmic conflict theodicy. Christians are persecuted because the world is split into two domains—the domain of the flesh and of the Spirit, which are at war with one another. Persecution shows that Christians belong to the people of God.

If all of that intrigues you, then I’ve done something that is really weird and kind of creepy. I uploaded my ETS paper to Google’s AI NotebookLM, and the mysterious AI genie turned it into a podcast that is strangely good. The main beef I have with it is that they say “Two Baruch” instead of “Second Baruch,” but also the AI takes some liberties and says things that I wouldn’t say. Nevertheless, it’s eerily accurate.

So if listening to creepily-good AI podcasts about 2 Baruch and Galatians is your thing, have at it below:

Over December and January, the CEBT is offering six online Winter Cohorts with top-notch biblical studies professors across the country (and also me). Each cohort will meet weekly on Zoom to discuss portions of a book related to Biblical Theology.

Two introductory cohorts will be discussing Ched Spellman’s One Grand Story: How the Bible Tells Its Story and Why It Matters. The four advanced cohorts will discuss Andrew Das’s Remarriage in Early Christianity. You do not have to start with the introductory cohort. You can jump in wherever you’d like.

My cohort will be reading Remarriage in Early Christianity. I’m excited to get to read this book in a group context. First off, Andrew Das is both an incredible scholar and person. He has written, in my opinion, the best commentary on Galatians, and he was also kind enough to endorse my book on Galatians as well as send me some private encouragement. In his scholarship, he is meticulous in the best sense of the word.

That he has written a book on the topic of divorce and remarriage is intriguing and will prove to foster important conversation with pastoral applications to the local church. At the end of the day, we may not all agree with his conclusions, but we will be better for having had the conversation.

So whether you are a seminary student, just a plain Bible nerd, or someone who wants to learn, join us for a CEBT Winter Cohort this December.

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There was absolutely nothing surprising about the content of the pastor’s videos, but what did surprise me was the response from other Evangelical Christians. I won’t link to any of those responses here because I don’t want to platform those people. Rather here is a summary of the types of responses that were put forward:

“There are unreached people just down the street from your church. Stay home.”

“Sell your home and move there. Stop guilting others.”

“Stop making normal Christians feel guilty for serving God faithfully at home.”

Of course, these are summaries, not direct quotes, and I’ve given the “nice” version of the objections, which were often made in a critical spirit.

But what the responses showed me is that missions sending in American churches is in deep trouble. While the US still sends out the majority of Evangelical missionaries around the world, with shifting attitudes toward missions we should not expect that to remain the case much longer.

Dispense with the Guilt-Trip

One area of criticism, which I think is correct, was that this particular pastor and author tends to default toward giving American Christians a guilt-trip in order to motivate them to become more engaged with global missions.

His guilt-trip mobilization strategy follows these lines: “Look at how good you have it. Look at how available the gospel is where you are at. People in X location have nothing and no gospel access. Why are you being so selfish?”

That is the basic script, and all of us who are passionate about missions have utilized the guilt-trip methodology. I’m sure if you went back into my old sermons you would find me employing the guilt-trip method as well. We’ve all done it.

But I’ve become more and more convinced that we should try to motivate people by the beauty of a life devoted to God’s mission more than by guilting them about a lack of engagement.

Two Wrong Ways to Think about Missions

Secondly, I think both the pastor in question and his critics both have a flawed view of missions. Each of them personify opposite missions slogans. The message of the pastor is the old quip:

“Everyone is called to go unless you are called to stay.”

According to this slogan, the default among Christians shouldn’t be staying where they are but going to the unreached. This fits well with guilt-trip mobilization.

The purpose behind this slogan is to get people to truly open their hearts to the possibility that God might be calling them. The motivation is right, but the execution is wrong. Yes, Christians should be able to sing, “Wherever He leads, I’ll go,” but that doesn’t mean that Christians should go by default.

On the other hand, many of his critics operate from the following slogan that follows a missionary devaluation strategy:

“Every Christian is a missionary.”

Again, many have used this with a good motivation. They’ve wanted to motivate their churches to live “on mission” in their communities and actively share the gospel with those they encounter in their everyday lives.

However, the downside of this slogan is to equate the work of global missions with the work of local evangelism and discipleship. This devalues global missions and missionaries. Missionary devaluation was reflected in many of the criticisms on Twitter, and I’ve heard them myself when serving as a missionary. “Why go all the way there when the need is so great here?”

A Better Way

The entire encounter reminded me that we desperately need to reclaim a biblical understanding of missions and the apostolic gifting. I’ve written about these things before (here, for example) and hope to dive more deeply into them in the future. For now, let me briefly outline the major points and give one biblical example.

First, the NT church understood every single one of its members as functioning toward fulfilling the church’s mission. There are a variety of spiritual gifts, and all are important. Furthermore, every believer has the privilege and obligation of sharing the gospel in their sphere of influence.

Second, the above does not mean that every Christian is a missionary. Our term “missionary” is equivalent to the apostolic gifting described in the NT. While there were uniquely authoritative (uppercase) Apostles who bore firsthand witness to the resurrected Christ, there were also many other “sent out ones” or (lowercase) apostles in the NT church who crossed geographical and cultural boundaries to share the gospel.

Third, while every gifting is certainly important to the body of Christ, it was also simultaneously true that those with the apostolic/missionary gifting and vocation were singled out for special honor and care. No one was saying to them, “It’s great that you are a missionary and left your life in X behind to proclaim the gospel in Y, But really we are all missionaries just like you.”

Fourth, Christians in the NT were never guilted into pursuing the apostolic gift when they didn’t have it. Instead, they were encouraged to support with their prayers and offerings those who were called to be apostles/missionaries.

Let 3 John Guide Us

While we could go to a lot of texts to unpack these points, I think 3 John is the best place to see these things with simplicity and clarity. In 3 John, John identifies a group of “brothers” who have been sent out “for the sake of the name, accepting nothing from the Gentiles” (3 John 5–7). This description is consistent with the apostolic/missionary gifting and vocation described elsewhere in the NT.

John tells Gaius that he should support these missionaries “in a manner worthy of God.” The unique vocation of these missionaries does indeed deserve special honor and care from other Christians.

Yet, John nowhere guilts Gaius for not joining this missionary team himself. He does not say, “Why are you staying in comfort while these brothers go to new and difficult places to share the gospel?” I think this is because John knows that Gaius does not have the apostolic gifting and calling. John writes to Gaius, “Therefore we ought to support people like these, that we may be fellow workers for the truth” (3 John 8). John gives Gaius positive motivation for pursuing his God-given role in the mission.

Like I said, there is so much more that could be written about this, but the point I want to make today is that we need to adopt the biblical view of the apostolic/missionary gifting and to adopt the biblical methodology for missions mobilization.

Will people still question and oppose missions if we do this? Yes. But we will have a firm biblical basis for what we are saying and doing, and we will encourage the right people to go to the field and the right people to stay and support, guilt-free. We will also likely prevent the sending of many people who go to the field for the wrong reasons, some of whom are deeply harmed by trying to follow a calling that God has not gifted them for.

The Great Commission is urgent. The needs of the world are great. God is worthy of worship. But it is ultimately God’s mission we are pursuing, and we should trust him to call, gift, empower, and deploy his people rightly.

There are a lot of helpful resources in the world today, and I don’t want to take away from any of them. But the best place to start for the average believer is simply to read and study Genesis over and over and over again.

Old Testament 1 with Dr. Draper

I took Old Testament 1 in my first semester at Boyce College in the fall of 2004. (Whoa. I just realized that was twenty years ago as I typed that!) The singular Charlie Draper, who has since gone to be with the Lord, was our professor in the chapel of Carver Hall. Dr. Draper spent the first six weeks of that semester on Genesis 1–3. He spent most of the remainder of the semester going through the rest of Genesis. His TA then had the difficult task of getting us all the way to Esther in the last two weeks of the course.

Whenever a student would ask why we were going so slowly, Dr. Draper would reply that the entire Bible is built on the book of Genesis, especially Genesis 1–3. Now that I teach undergraduate Old Testament survey, I don’t follow Dr. Draper’s pedagogical model, but I will never forget the lesson he was teaching us.

Allusions as Real Connections

We live in the world of Genesis, and the entire Bible is written within the world of Genesis. The theological categories that are formed in Genesis 1–3 and then expounded upon in Genesis 4–50 are the same theological categories that the entire Bible engages again and again and again, but even more importantly than that, they are the theological categories that interpret reality.

The Genesis world is the real world.

At first glance, the book of Ruth has almost nothing to do with Genesis other than perhaps the background to the Moabites. Enlightenment-influenced biblical scholarship has taught us to read the book in laboratory-level isolation out of fear that we might import our own ideas into the book.

But if we assume the author was intimately acquainted with Genesis (and possibly even had the book of Genesis memorized), then we can begin to see the allusions and echoes he makes to Genesis everywhere. And we do not see them as an imposition on the text, rather that the same God who was “in the beginning” has providentially controlled all the events in the book of Ruth and sovereignly inspired every word written by the human author to record those events.

These allusions and echoes, therefore, are not artificial. For example, in my sermon on Ruth 3, I wanted to make an allusion to my favorite musical, “Fiddler on the Roof”— “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match. Find me a find. Catch me a catch.” Unfortunately (or fortunately?), I forgot to make the allusion in both services, but let’s take this potential allusion as an example.

The allusion could exist because of the connection between Naomi’s matchmaking and the role of the matchmaker in Fiddler. However, that connection is not what we might call a “real connection.” It is simply a coincidental intersection of themes.

Genesis echoes and allusions are of a completely different order. They are “real connections” because we believe that the world created and ruled by God in Genesis is the real world that we live in. Ruth is written in the context of Genesis not simply because the author wanted to make a literary connection, rather the connection is the real connection that the story of Ruth took place in God’s world that has been broken by human sin. The connection is real because Genesis is the reality that we live in.

So if you want to understand any part of the Bible, you have to read and study Genesis well. If you want to understand your own life, you have to read and study Genesis well. Get to know Genesis backwards and forwards, and then read the Bible and all of life in the context of Genesis.

You can watch my sermon on Ruth 3 below or find it on the Overland Church podcast wherever you listen to podcasts.

If you are interested in diving deeper into biblical theology, I’d like to invite you to join one of the Winter Cohorts of the Center for Evangelical Biblical Theology. These are online reading groups that will meet during December and January.

I’d love to have you join my cohort as we discuss Remarriage in Early Christianity by Andrew Das, but you really can’t go wrong with any of the options.

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