Written by Derek J. Brown |
Sunday, October 15, 2023
Continue to boldly proclaim that Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven. Teach and preach and share with a soft heart and tender love toward others, and remember that love does not preclude clarity on the exclusivity of Christ. Love demands it.

As you share the gospel with your friends, family members, classmates, and business colleagues, you may find that they tolerate much of your worldview until you press the point that Jesus is the one true Savior and the only one who can deliver them from eternal judgment and bring them into right relationship with God. In other words, your spiritual conversations may coast rather smoothly until you land on the exclusivity of Christ.
To speak of the exclusivity of Christ is just a way of saying, along with the apostles, that “There is no other name given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). It is simply an affirmation of Jesus’ own words when he spoke to his disciples in the upper room just before his execution: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Here are two things you need to know about the exclusivity of Christ.
1. The exclusivity of Christ is narrow, but not in the way you may think it is.
People usually don’t take well to these claims because they believe they are far too narrow. And we would be dishonest if we didn’t agree that these claims are, in fact, narrow. Yet, the exclusivity of Christ is not narrow in the sense that it is offered only to those who meet certain conditions, like an elite members club.
In her article for CNN travel, “10 of the world’s most exclusive members clubs” Michelle Koh Morollo quotes Vincent Lai, a managing director of an elite concierge service: “Those who are invited fulfill certain requirements, they usually have economic capital but most importantly they carry a lot of social clout.”
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Written by Michael J. Kruger |
Wednesday, November 30, 2022
The New Testament canon that we possess today is due not to the machinations of later church leaders or to the political influence of Constantine but to the fact that these books imposed themselves on the church through their internal qualities. In other words, these books were used the most because they proved themselves to be worthy of that use.

From the very beginning, Christians have plainly affirmed that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the inspired Word of God. That much is clear. But looming in the background of such an affirmation is a question that won’t seem to go away: How do we know that these books are from God? It’s one thing to say that they are from God; it’s another thing to have a reason for saying it.
Of course, critical scholars have long challenged the Christian view of Scripture at precisely this point. It’s not enough to merely claim that these books are inspired. Christians need to have some way of knowing whether they are inspired. As James Barr liked to point out, “Books do not necessarily say whether they are divinely inspired or not.”
Over the years, Christians have offered a number of answers to this question. Certainly, the Apostolic origins of a book can help identify it as being from God. If a book can be traced to an Apostle, and Apostles are inspired, then we have good reasons to think that the book is from God.
But this is not all that can be said. Christian theologians—especially in the Reformed world—have long argued that there is a more foundational way that we can know that books are from God: the internal qualities of the books themselves.
In other words, they have argued that these books bear certain attributes (Latin indicia) that distinguish them as being from God. They argue that believers hear the voice of their Lord in these particular books. In modern theological language, they believe that the canonical books are self-authenticating. As Jesus said in John 10:27: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.”
Anyone familiar with Reformation-era authors will know that this was the core argument given by the likes of John Calvin, William Whitaker, and John Owen in some of the key discussions on Scripture. Moreover, the idea of self-authentication is expressed in the Westminster Confession of Faith, which holds that the Bible does “evidence itself” to be from God by its own internal qualities:
We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the church to a high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scripture. And the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is, to give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man’s salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof, are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God. (1.5)
Beyond this, the concept of a self- authenticating Bible played a central role for later Reformed thinkers, particularly Herman Bavinck, as they sought to explain how we know that books are from God.
But some will wonder, Is this whole idea of a “self-authenticating” Bible just a novel invention of the Reformers? Did they invent the idea just as a tool in their fight against Rome? Not at all. When we look back even in the patristic period, we see that this concept was there from the beginning. Here are a few examples.
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Written by Darrell B. Harrison |
Saturday, October 14, 2023
The Pharisees knew, ironically, as a result of their own zealous study of the Law, that no mere mortal — and every mortal is a sinner (Gen. 6:5; Eccl. 7:20; Lam. 3:39; Rom. 3:23) — could ever make a blind man see. They knew that whoever could perform such a miraculous and merciful act would have had to be as holy, pure, righteous — and sinless — as God Himself. Which is to say, he would have to be God incarnate.

Recently, as I was in my home office studying John 9:13-16, I was taken aback at the blindness of the Pharisees who, upon hearing that Jesus had healed a blind man (John 9:13) — from the formerly blind man himself (John 9:15) — complained only that Jesus has dared to perform such a fete on the Sabbath (John 9:16).
What hardened hearts the Pharisees had (John 9:41)!
To be so obdurately tethered to the Law as to ignore the literal eye-witness testimony of something that was humanly impossible is, frankly, astounding! It is no wonder, then, that Jesus would so severely admonish the Pharisees, saying, “For judgment I came into this world, so that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind” (John 9:39).
Nevertheless, despite their self-righteous incredulity, the one thing for which I do give the Pharisees credit is that they at least appeared to have understood that no sinful person could ever have done what Jesus did by restoring sight to a man who was congenitally blind. That the Pharisees knew this is affirmed by their posing the following rhetorical question in John 9:16, “How can a sinful man do such signs?” [emphasis added]
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