I teach a seminary class entitled Biblical Creationism. One of the textbooks is Refuting Evolution (2nd ed., 2008) by Jonathan Sarfati of Creation Ministries International. This book is the largest-selling creation book of all time. Because of the importance of this...
Were Old Testament believers, as a necessary part of their sanctification, permanently indwelt by the Holy Spirit? In this post I will respond to this question by initially providing a few resources that treat this subject and then provide a brief theological argument...
I recently worked through a new commentary, Ecclesiastes: The Philippians of the Old Testament, by William D. Barrick. Dr. Barrick is a Professor of Old Testament and Director of the Th.D. program at The Master’s Seminary. He has authored a number of books and journal...
Be not overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself? (Ecc 7:16, ESV) Can “be not overly righteous” really be saying what it seems to be saying? Does God actually want us to tone down our righteousness? In order to correctly...
Though there are a number of Christians who question a literal interpretation of the creation week, a closer look at Genesis 1:1–2:3 should challenge those who have abandoned or are uncertain about the traditional understanding of the creation days. I will give four...
Pondering the Authorship of Ecclesiastes - McCabeDownload
Ecclesiastes Review Article - McCabeDownload
On Wednesday, Nov 14, I attended the fifth meeting of the Creation Consultation at the 64th annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in Milwaukee, WI. This year's creation meeting was entitled, "Scripture, Geology & the Age of the Earth." Dr. Richard...
With this post I finish my critique of the framework interpretation of the creation week. As I stated in the first post, three major theses support the framework view. Having looked at the first and second arguments, I will focus on the final one in this post. The...
With this post I continue my critique of the framework interpretation of the creation week. As I stated in the previous post, three major theses support the framework view. Having looked at the first argument, I will focus on the second argument in this post. The...
The current popularity of the framework interpretation of the Genesis creation account is largely a result of the work of Reformed scholar Meredith G. Kline. His initial entry was an article in the late 1950s, “Because It Had Not Rained” (Westminster Theological...
Jesus answered, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God" (ESV). A contested issue in John 3:5 relates to the meaning of “born of water and the Spirit.” In this post, I will argue that the best way to...
An OT Sanctifying Influence - McCabeDownload
In the early years of my Christian experience, I heard some messages on Proverbs 29:18: “Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he” (KJV; NASB also uses “vision”). The gist of these sermons was that effective Christian...
Last week Dr. Carl Trueman had an informative post that touches on this spring's Gospel Coalition conference. At this conference the issue of the historicity of Adam and Eve will be treated. With some key evangelical leaders embracing theistic evolution, it has become...
With this entry, I will finish my previous post on "America's Violation of "You Shall Not Murder." Having looked at the Bible's teaching on the sanctity of life, the next question we must ask is this: What does the Bible teach concerning the inception of human life? A...
Last week John Aloisi posted an informative entry on "Abortion and the Early Church." With this post, and another to follow, I would like to focus on the Bible's view of abortion. The thesis of this post and the next is that an induced abortion violates the sixth...
In Proverbs 26:4 we are commanded not to answer a fool, but in the very next verse we’re commanded to answer a fool. On the surface I am in a quagmire since both commands seem to be in conflict with each other. So do I or do I not answer a fool? This raises a larger...
Recently I saw on MSNBC’s “Today’s Entertainment” a blog post titled “Bill Nye the Science Guy asks parents not to raise creationist kids.” Nye’s title, “the Science Guy,” comes from his popular science program for children, “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” that ran from...
When I have preached on a psalm in a church, some people have mentioned to me that they were familiar with a verse from the psalm but they had not thought about the passage's overall message. I have often wondered if believers have a good reading strategy for getting...
I have cried out with these words from Psalm 13:1a on a few occasions. How do I know that it is legitimate to apply this verse to my life? And what about other psalms? While there are many ways to determine this, one is to consider a psalm's historical setting. In...
In yesterday's post I noted that a familiarity with the basic genres of the Psalms can be a real aid in reading and understanding them. Today I will cover the last three categories. 4. Kingship and covenant psalms celebrate and affirm loyalty to God as King, the...
An aid in reading the Psalms is to be able to arrange them in literary categories or genres. Based on thematic elements that are shared between psalms and literary features, we can more precisely classify the lyric poems of the Psalms. While some of the following...
While the Psalms are familiar to many Christians, understanding them is often difficult. Part of this difficulty relates to the poetic nature of the Psalms. With this entry I will describe the type of poetry found in the Psalms. Approximately one-third of the Bible is...
EcclesiastesDownload
Ecclesiastes by Dr. James G. Bollhagen is a welcome addition to the growing number of commentaries on Ecclesiastes. He earned his M.Div., S.T.M., and Ph.D. from Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. He has also served as a professor of exegetical theology at Concordia...
Can you imagine the shock when an usher escorts you out of a church service to be told that your mother had just died? Because my mother was forty-four years old at that time and had become a Christian a few years earlier, I was emotionally devastated when I was...