People are willing to travel thousands of miles to see a weeklong worship service, but they’re unwilling to pick up their bibles off the nightstand. If we want to see personal revival, let us be engrossed in God’s word, entrenched in prayer, and in love with God’s people. May God truly revive us again.

There’s been a lot of conversation about revival lately. R.C. Sproul described revival as a time when, “the Holy Spirit comes into the valley of dry bones (Ezek. 37) and exerts His power to bring new life, a revivification of the spiritual life of the people of God.” This “revivification” presumes a knowledge and proclamation of the true gospel, and I long to see this in our churches. I also desire to see this in my own soul. I desire a present, perpetual, personal revival. And while I have no real opinion on what’s going on in other places, I wanted to give three strategies for seeing long term, personal revival.
Read Your Bible Daily
When God gave instructions for the kings of Israel, he commanded the king to write out his own copy of God’s word, and he was to, “read in it all the days of his life.” God goes on to tell us what would be the effect of that daily reading of the word of God. “…that he may learn to fear the LORD his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them, that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers, and that he may not turn aside from the commandment, either to the right hand or to the left, so that he may continue long in his kingdom, he and his children, in Israel” (Deut 17:19-20). And while this instruction is specifically for the king in Israel, the principle remains: If we want to learn to fear the Lord our God, to obey God, and to be humbled, then we must have a daily habit of reading the word of God.
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Written by E. Calvin Beisner |
Saturday, November 12, 2022
Because much of the environmental movement embraces socialism and global governance to replace capitalism and sovereign nations—recipes for poverty and tyranny—we sometimes compare what we’re doing with fighting “Cold War II.” In Cold War II, the threats to liberty and justice don’t come so much from foreign nations—though those remain. Instead, they’re right inside America—and every nation. They come from the elite leaders of the Green movement, which threatens, ironically, to rob America of its productive capacity in the name of saving the planet. 

Two scenes from my toddlerhood in Calcutta, India, have flashed in my mind thousands of times over the last 60-plus years. The first was of a beautiful tree with a red-flowered vine hanging from its branches. The second was of the emaciated bodies of people who had died overnight of starvation and disease.
I saw the tree and its vine as my aia, or nurse, led me by the hand through the courtyard of the building housing my family’s apartment while my father worked with the U.S. State Department. I stepped over the bodies as she led me block after block to the home of an Indian family who cared for me through the day while my mother was paralyzed for six months. Ever since I became a Christian in middle school, the first image has reminded me of the beauties of God’s creation. The second, of the horrors of poverty.
Caring for the Planet & the World’s Poor
After spending much of the first two decades of my Christian life in personal evangelism and apologetics, I found myself led into work that addresses both creation stewardship and the conquest of poverty, along with the gospel.
My two books, Prosperity and Poverty: The Compassionate Use of Resources in a World of Scarcity (1988) and Prospects for Growth: a Biblical View of Population, Resources, and the Future (1990), opened doors for me, initially, to speak at churches and conferences on poverty and the environment, and later, to teach, first at Covenant College and then at Knox Theological Seminary.
In 1999, some thirty scholars and I worked together to produce “The Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship,” issued the next year with over 1,500 endorsements from religious leaders, scientists, and economists, and later signed by many thousands. Then, in 2005, I founded the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.
Over the years, Cornwall Alliance scholars have developed ideas about environmental protection and about how mainstream environmentalism actually posses a significant threat to the world’s poor, despite environmentalists’ frequent warnings that environmental abuse harms the poor more than anyone else.
Cornwall’s thinking on environmental protection rests on the idea that the bottom-line measurement of environmental quality is human health and well-being, coupled with the understanding that a clean, healthful, beautiful environment is a costly good and that wealthier people can afford more costly goods than poorer people can. (Hence, one looks for the dirtiest parts of a city in the poorer areas—not because the poor don’t care about cleanliness, safety, and beauty, but because they can’t afford them as much as the rich.) The number-one aim of environmental protection, then, should be human thriving, though this doesn’t mean jettisoning or even ignoring the health and well-being of the rest of creation. Those matters, too, can and should be pursued.
Another idea the Cornwall Alliance weaves into environmental protection is the economic reality that life is full of tradeoffs. Hence, for example the proper answer to the questions, “How clean is clean enough?” or “How safe is safe enough?” or “How beautiful is beautiful enough?” is not “As clean or as safe or as beautiful as possible,” but “As clean, safe, or beautiful as we can make it before the cost of making it cleaner, safer, or more beautiful exceeds the value of the added cleanliness, safety, or beauty.” (If you doubt this, just ask yourself: Why don’t you spend all your time sanitizing your house? Clearly, because the cost would exceed the benefits. Could it be cleaner? Yes. Should it be? Not if making it so costs more than the benefits.)
It’s not that no other living things matter, but that human beings—alone created in the image of God—are the most important, and that their God-given vocation to subdue and rule nature (Genesis 1:28) is going to be practiced one way or the other, for good or for ill. We should want to practice that rule—what the Bible calls dominion—for good, not ill.
Granted that a clean, healthful, and beautiful environment is a costly good, and that wealthier people can afford it more than poorer people, it becomes clear that economic development.
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Written by Vern S. Poythress |
Wednesday, August 3, 2022
Each attribute describes the whole of God, not just a part of him. If so, it also describes every other attribute, because all the attributes belong to who God is. Truth is one attribute of God. So in this attribute it ought to be possible to see the other attributes, all of which belong to truth.

Who God Is
Let’s explore how various attributes of God are displayed in his truthfulness. “Attributes” of God are terms describing who he is. He is eternal, infinite, transcendent, good, loving, and so on. When we consider God’s truthfulness, we can see that it goes together with many other attributes. His attributes are on display in his truthfulness.
There is an underlying general principle here, related to simplicity. As we have seen, divine simplicity means that God cannot be divided up. Subordinately, it implies that his attributes cannot be divided up, so that we could place distinct attributes into neatly separated bins. We cannot cut out one attribute at a time, and consider it in isolation from everything else that God is. In fact, each attribute describes the whole of God, not just a part of him. If so, it also describes every other attribute, because all the attributes belong to who God is.
Truth is one attribute of God. So in this attribute it ought to be possible to see the other attributes, all of which belong to truth.
1. Simplicity
Let us begin with simplicity. Each attribute corresponds to some truth about God. It is true that God is omnipresent (everywhere present). It is true that God is eternal. It is true that God is unchangeable. Each of these truths is in the environment of the others. We cannot have one without the others. If by attributes we mean permanent features of God’s character, they all belong together, because they all belong to the one God. This inherent “belonging together” is another way of describing simplicity. It is equivalent to saying that God is simple. Or, because we are using the attribute of truth, we may say that truth is simple. That does not mean that there is only one formulation of truth. But it does mean that all the formulations belong together, each formulation having the attributes of God and belonging to the unity that is in God.
We may see one effect of this unity if we reflect on the fact that no truth can be thought about or discussed in total isolation from everything else. For example, for it to be meaningful to say, “God is omnipresent,” we have to have a sense of what it means to be present. And within the created world, his presence is a presence everywhere in space.
2. Omniscience
The next attribute is omniscience. God knows all things. We have said that God is truth. So he is all truths together. Since he is personal, he knows himself, and knows all truths. For example, he knew everything about David while David was still in the womb: “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb” (Ps. 139:13). He knows the words that we will speak before we speak them: “Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it altogether” (v. 4).
3. Absoluteness
God is absolute. By this we mean that he is not dependent on anything outside himself. This attribute is closely related to simplicity. There is nothing in back of God on which he might be dependent. We can confirm this attribute if we think about the way in which we experience contact with the truth.
We are dependent on the truth. It makes an absolute claim on us. We might think that at least some truths are dependent on the world. Consider a particular case: Oak trees, like other trees, reproduce according to their kind (Gen. 1:11–12). That is a truth about oak trees. Naively, it might appear that this truth depends on the prior fact that oak trees exist in the world. So is this truth dependent on the world? To be sure, it is a truth about the world. And we as human beings do come to know about it because of God’s word in Genesis 1:11–12 and also because there are oak trees that we can observe. But what is the origin of the truth? The origin is in God, not in the world.
In thinking about the eternity of truth, truth exists even before the world existed. God had a plan (Isa. 46:9–10; Eph. 1:11) for the world. In his plan, he knew beforehand everything that would take place. So he also knew all truths. The truths about oak trees precede the oak trees. The oak trees are dependent on the truths, rather than the reverse.
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