When people look like Satan

Jonathan Parnell from "When People Look Like Satan": Sin is not a thing we can just sweep under the rug. It's not a little this or that. Oh no. Sin is most fundamentally our acting like Satan instead of reflecting the glory of God.

Christ came chiefly for this reason

"Christ came chiefly for this reason: that we might learn how much God loves us, and might learn this to the end that we begin to glow with love of him by whom we were first loved, and so might love our neighbor at the bidding and after the example of him who made himself our neighbor by loving us." — Augustine, quoted by Gary A. Parrett and S. Steve Kang in Teaching the Faith, Forming the Faithful (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 61

(HT: Of First Importance)

Jesus is the True Israel

Justin Taylor: Jesus is the true Israel, and the church becomes the Israel of God as it unites to True Israel. The same is true for ethnic Israel, whom God has not abandoned. But their only hope is to be united with Jesus, the ultimate suffering servant.

"For all the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory." (2 Cor. 1:20)

Read his entire post here.

Is there really hope in a world like this?

Excerpt from Tim Challies talking about fiction in the latest Connected Kingdom Podcast (audio):

I have heard it said that the purpose of fiction is to ask questions while the purpose of nonfiction is to answer them. That may be an over-simplification, but maybe it is not too far off the mark. At least that has been my experience of fiction. Fiction introduces ideas and evokes feelings and arouses emotion. These feelings demand answers or make us long for them. There are many questions I have been asked in fiction that I’ve had to go to the world of nonfiction to answer.

Cormac McCarthy’s novels ask if there is hope even in a world like this one, a world of darkness and depravity. John Piper has rightly said that Cormac McCarthy is to the American literary canon what the book of Judges is to the biblical canon. McCarthy portrays the darkness of humanity and asks us if there is hope even here. It doesn’t offer answers—just questions, questions brought about by deep feelings of pain or revulsion or sadness. Answers must be found elsewhere. ...

I am convinced that to truly enjoy fiction we need to have a knowledge of what is true and fixed and unchanging, which is to say, we need to know the Bible. So many questions are asked in the pages of books that can only be answered in the pages of The Book. The Bible interprets and refines and answers. It gives hope where fiction is hopeless, it gives light where fiction is dark, it gives joy where fiction is depressing. Fiction gives us stories of the world as it is or the world as someone images it; an author takes his experiences and hopes and desires and dreams and wraps them in a story. The Bible takes that story and makes sense of it. It tells us why the world is this way, why this author’s experience of the world has been so painful, why there is still hope even in a world like this.

Wise words on good and bad tweeting

Ray Ortlund on the "intended effect of a successful tweet":

• A failed tweet displays Self.
• A successful tweet displays Christ.
• Who cares about the details of my daily life? I hardly care myself.
• But I think we can all agree on this: we must decrease, but he must increase.
• What I aim at in using the media is another person being able to click in and click out quickly, with maximum benefit to their souls.
• Everyone is so busy. But everyone matters.
• I want to ask little of them, and add much to them.
• I am there to serve, not to demand or impress, by giving them more of Jesus.

(HT: Justin Taylor)