Because God is with us, we are not to fear. His perfect love casts away all fear (1 Jn. 4:18). Jesus has overcome the world (Jn. 16:33). God may not deliver us from our suffering, but He promises to help us through it. He will give us aid, He will strengthen us, and His powerful hand will cause us to stand. What a great reminder that we are not alone in our struggles!

Earlier this year, I took a Doctoral of Ministry class from Dr. Joel Beeke. Dr. Beeke told a story about a woman in his congregation who was struggling with anxiety and depression. She asked him for counsel. Beeke told her to look through her Bible and write down on different sticky notes as many of the promises of God she could find. Then, she was to post the sticky notes all around her house. As she walked throughout her house, she would be reminded of these promises. Over time, after seeing and reflecting on these promises day after day, this helped strengthen and nourish the woman’s soul.[1]
“How Firm a Foundation” is one of those hymns that is filled with the promises of God. The first stanza begins with the reminder that God’s Word is our sure and firm foundation that we build our lives upon (Matt. 7:24-25). As we run to Jesus for refuge, His Word is fully sufficient to help us in time of need.
How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,Is laid for your faith in His excellent word!What more can He say than to you He has said,To you who for refuge to Jesus have fled?
Journeying through the Word of God, this hymn reminds us of many promises from Him.
God is With Us
The first promise the song mentions is the promise that God is with us. The second stanza is taken straight out of Isaiah 41:10. It says:
Fear not, I am with thee; oh be not dismayedFor I am thy God and will still give thee aidI’ll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to standUpheld by My righteous, omnipotent hand
Because God is with us, we are not to fear. His perfect love casts away all fear (1 Jn. 4:18). Jesus has overcome the world (Jn. 16:33). God may not deliver us from our suffering, but He promises to help us through it. He will give us aid, He will strengthen us, and His powerful hand will cause us to stand. What a great reminder that we are not alone in our struggles!
God Will Comfort Us
The second promise mentioned in the hymn is that God will comfort us.
Read More
Related Posts:

The spectacle of the distress of Mary and her companions enraged Jesus because it brought poignantly home to his consciousness the evil of death, its unnaturalness, its “violent tyranny” as Calvin (on verse 38) phrases it. In Mary’s grief, he “contemplates” — still to adopt Calvin’s words (on verse 33), — “the general misery of the whole human race” and burns with rage against the oppressor of men.

One of B. B. Warfield’s most profound and widely read essays is “On the Emotional Life of Our Lord” first published in 1912. In the essay (originally written for a Princeton Theological Seminary faculty publication and republished many times since), Warfield considers all of those instances in the gospel accounts in which Jesus demonstrates deep and abiding emotions. It is at once a beautiful and moving essay, while at the same time a powerful statement that Christ’s true human nature brings forth true human emotions—ranging from compassion to anger. You can download the essay for free here, but there are new published versions (in booklet form with updated text and with introductions) here and here.
Since we are now in Easter week, I thought it would be a good time to consider Warfield’s discussion of Jesus’s anger upon learning of the death of his dear friend, Lazarus.
Warfield writes,

The same term [for anger] occurs again in John’s narrative of our Lord’s demeanor at the grave of his beloved friend Lazarus (John 11:33, 38). When Jesus saw Mary weeping — or rather “wailing,” for the term is a strong one and implies the vocal expression of the grief — and the Jews which accompanied her also “wailing,” we are told, as our English version puts it, that “he groaned in the spirit and was troubled”; and again, when some of the Jews, remarking on his own manifestation of grief in tears, expressed their wonder that he who had opened the eyes of the blind man could not have preserved Lazarus from death, we are told that Jesus “again groaned in himself.”

But is “groaning,” as in the Authorized Version translation too tame?

The natural suggestion of the word “groan” is, however, that of pain or sorrow, not disapprobation; and this rendering of the term in question is therefore misleading. It is better rendered in the only remaining passage in which it occurs in the New Testament, Mark 14:5, by “murmured,” though this is much too weak a word to reproduce its implications. In that passage it is brought into close connection with a kindred term which determines its meaning. We read: “But there were some that had indignation among themselves . . . and they murmured against her.” Their feeling of irritated displeasure expressed itself in an outburst of temper. The margin of our Revised Version at John 11:33, 38, therefore, very properly proposes that we should for “groaned” in these passages, substitute “moved with indignation,” although that phrase too is scarcely strong enough.

We all know that “Jesus wept” is the shortest verse in the New Testament. But Warfield says “wept” will not do!

What John tells us, in point of fact, is that Jesus approached the grave of Lazarus, in a state, not of uncontrollable grief, but of irrepressible anger.

Read More
Related Posts:

A myriad of apps offers sophisticated AI conversational models that give lonely users a relationship with a pixel model: a perfect companion who is patient, kind, bears all things, believes all things, and doesn’t expect any of the same virtue in return. The great sin of Babel was that they wanted to be like God. While the ancients made a tower to climb to heaven, the modern man descends into his basement and plays the creator as he fashions a pseudo-helper to sedate his lust.

Artificial Intelligence is well on its way to becoming a trillion-dollar industry and has been disrupting sectors from agriculture to finance across the world. The pornography industry is no exception. Sophisticated AI engines can use text prompts to create realistic, fully animated scenes in minutes, and that technology is being used to generate terabytes of new pornography. Deepfake technology can change one person’s face to another or even digitally take the clothes off of a person.[1] Several new companies are using AI to manufacture personalized sex toys. The list goes on.
For Christians, these dizzying changes simply add dimensions to an industry we already recognize as depraved. However, others argue that there are some ethical upsides to AI porn: more computer-generated people mean fewer real ones in an industry fraught with abuse.[2] Even Christians may be tempted to think, “If there’s no person on the other side of the screen, is it really sinful?” I will offer two arguments for why AI porn is every bit as sinful as yesterday’s porn and far more dangerous. But before giving these reasons, allow me to offer a brief theology of sex to show why pornography is such a distortion of God’s good design.
Genesis 101: God’s Design for Sex
The consequentialist ethic asks, “Who does it hurt?” The biblical ethic asks, “What is it for?” The main New Testament texts that speak to sexual ethics are consistently grounded in God’s creational design (Matt. 19:3–12, 1 Cor. 6:12–20, Eph. 5:29–32, 1 Tim. 2:11–14, 1 Cor. 11:7–12), and if Christians want to mount a vigorous critique of pornography, we must develop a robust biblical theology of sex. As we follow the biblical authors in anchoring our theology in the first two chapters of Genesis, we can construct an ethical framework to understand AI pornography. God designed sex for Covenant unity, procreation, and expression of love.[3]
Covenantal Unity
God designed sex for covenantal unity between husband and wife, a unity that is emotional, spiritual, and sexual—the two “shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). God intended the covenant of marriage to image the even greater New Covenant he established with his people, which is why Paul severely reprimands members of the church in Corinth for sleeping with prostitutes. He tells them, “Do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, ‘The two will become one flesh’[Gen. 2:24]. But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him” (1 Cor. 6:16–17). Sex is crucial to covenantal unity. Paul makes this point again in his letter to Ephesus when he shows how the husband and wife relationship is a picture of the unity between Christ and the church (Eph. 5:25–33). In both chapters Paul quotes Genesis 2:24, because his inspired understanding of biblical sexuality is grounded in the pre-fall creational design.
Porn mocks covenantal unity by allowing users to voyeur through endless images till one meets their fantasy. Porn recoils from relational commitment in marriage, which takes genuine effort, understanding, compassion, and empathy. Instead, porn offers an easy and unholy union that only lasts as long as a computer tab stays open. While the beautiful union of husband and wife naturally leads to new life, porn has no thought for the next generation.
Procreation
God designed sex for procreation. He told our first parents, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28). The sexual revolution and the ubiquity of birth control have elevated a shallow “love” to the highest ideal in sex, resulting in a cultural amnesia to the fact that sex makes babies.[4] Procreation is not incidental but core to the very purpose of sex. The Bible consistently proclaims children to be a blessing from the Lord. (Deut. 28:4; Prov. 17:6; Ruth 4:11; Pss. 127:3–5; 128:3-4). One of the reasons God hates infidelity is because sex inside a covenantal marriage is supposed to lead to children (Mal. 2:15).
Procreation provides the logical basis for nearly every sexual prohibition in the bible. Monogamy and exclusivity are crucial because of the teamwork needed to raise children to adulthood.[5]
Read More
Related Posts: