Posts by Pastor Eric (Page 23)

• This is Joshua 7:24-25. “And Joshua and all Israel with him took Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver and the cloak and the bar of gold, and his sons and daughters and his oxen and donkeys and sheep and his tent and all that he had. And they brought them up to the Valley of Achor. And Joshua said, “Why did you bring trouble on us? The Lord brings trouble on you…

• “ Theodicy” is the term given to a defense of God’s goodness in the face of evil. It attempts to answer the age-old question: “ How could God let this happen?” The body of scholarship relating to theodicy is immense and ancient in origin. I’m not going to touch it. Instead, I’d like to chisel away at a premise that is hidden in the question, namely, that God’s treatment…

• Brief opening thought: God has always been the giver of gifts to his people, and he does not change in this (Jas 1:17). So though there is a popular notion that he became truly good and generous only in the New Testament era, his motive has always been love, the outcome always grace. I was struck by this reading in (of all places) Leviticus this morning. He rescues his…

• Some background on our guest preacher this Sunday — you have to take a moment and try to imagine the world this describes. In 1989, after several years of incremental change in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, the Berlin wall comes down and Eastern Europe breaks ties with the Soviets. Just one year later, 1990, the first western missionaries arrive in the Soviet Union…

• Here’s a follow-up to last week’s note which created some questions and confusion. First, that note had (in retrospect) two points: to free people from worrying that if they don’t rightly read the will of God out of their circumstances, they will lose his favor and find themselves “out of God’s will.” My hope was to give relief to some of you who labor under false…

• A single clause jarred me awake as I was reading in Leviticus this morning, but a couple important items before I get to that.

• Paedocommunion, the practice of giving communion to (weaned) infants, was a topic of debate at this year’s General Assembly because a minister had been ordained in our own presbytery (Pacific Northwest) who held the view. The denominational position is that communion can be given only to those “as are of years and ability to examine themselves.” While the man we…

• I owe you two more comments on General Assembly, one on something called the Federal Vision movement and another on Paedo-Communion. I think I’ll get to the first tomorrow. For now, two important prayer needs. I encourage you to steal a moment and bring both of these to God today.

Didn’t accomplish as much this week as I would have liked, but let me make a beginning on key issues at this year’s General Assembly, which ended last Friday, June 21. As you may know, Presbyterian government involves three main levels of accountability: the sessions of individual churches (the elders) are accountable to presbyteries (we file our meeting minutes with the…

The reemergence of debate over the role of women in the Church is based on a confusion, I believe. The confusion is the result of asking, and attempting to answer, the wrong question — namely, what value does biblical Christianity assign to women? The answer to that question is not gender-specific, and it is a disappointment to anyone hoping to find the center of what…