God, being rich in mercy, has begun to visit the church in Egypt over the last two and a half decades. In 2005, the Alexandria School of Theology (AST) was founded under the Anglican church of Egypt, with a missionary from the Presbyterian Church in America as its first principal. This seminary has played a pivotal role in reintroducing sound doctrine to the Egyptian church. AST, with its emphasis on Reformed doctrines and solid biblical teaching, started training a new generation of theologians and pastors. Graduates from the school, along with other like-minded believers, have now begun to reintroduce faithful teaching to local churches throughout the country.

Kirollos, a young man from Alexandria, Egypt, was part of a local-church Bible study on the book of Romans. The study profoundly impacted him, revealing depths of God’s grace and sovereignty he had never seen before. Through this study, Kirollos embraced Reformed doctrine, moving away from previous beliefs strongly shaped by man-centered theology and the prosperity gospel. His passion for sound doctrine led him to enroll in the Alexandria School of Theology (AST), where he deepened his knowledge and commitment to biblical principles. This year, Kirollos is set to graduate from AST, equipped to spread the truths he has come to cherish in a context that desperately needs faithful gospel proclamation.
By God’s grace, Kirollos’s story is not unique. Today, God is raising up a growing number of men and women who long to see Egypt and the Arab-speaking world filled with the knowledge of Christ.
Egypt’s Doctrinal Decline
Christianity in Egypt dates as far back as the first century. In the early centuries of the Egyptian church, prominent theologians such as Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria emerged, significantly contributing to Christian theology. Despite this rich heritage, however, the Egyptian church soon faced significant challenges — particularly after the Chalcedonian debate about the person of Christ in the fifth century, and even more after the Muslim conquest in the seventh century. The church in Egypt became known as the Coptic Church (“Coptic” is the name of a language descending from ancient Egyptian).
The Coptic Church constitutes about 9 or 10 percent of Egypt’s population, while Muslims make up around 90 percent. The Coptic Church, with its episcopalian governance under the patriarch of Alexandria, holds doctrines that differ significantly from Protestant beliefs, such as the mass as an atoning sacrifice, the priest as a mediator between God and man, the saints (especially the virgin Mary) as intercessors, fasting as an important means of mortifying sins, and baptism as regenerative. Protestants in Egypt form only about 1 percent of the population, with the majority of them Presbyterian (at least in name!).
The Protestant movement in Egypt began with Moravian missionaries in 1752, followed by the Anglican Church Mission Society in 1825, which focused on Bible distribution and education. Then the American Presbyterian Mission began in 1854, establishing the first presbytery in 1860 and a theological seminary in 1863. Tadrus Yusif became the first Reformed Egyptian minister in 1871. For the next century or so, the Presbyterian work was marked by vibrant churches, sound biblical literature, and a church constitution based on the Westminster Confession of Faith.
In the last few decades of the twentieth century, however, doctrinal decline and a shift toward the social gospel weakened the Presbyterian Church in Egypt. Over time, man-centered theology became rampant. Foundational Reformed doctrines, such as the doctrines of grace, were lost or even abhorred. Liberal professors and ideas invaded academia. Feminism spread throughout the church. And expository preaching was replaced by shallow motivational speeches, leading to a loss of the gospel message. This was the state of the Protestant church around the year 2000.
However, as the Scripture says, “But God . . .”
Sovereign Resurgence
God, being rich in mercy, has begun to visit the church in Egypt over the last two and a half decades.
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The second step to examining if someone is a false teacher is to look at their fruits. We can examine their fruits in three specific areas: their lives, their lips, and their leadership. If we see bad fruit in these areas, that is a sure sign that someone is a bad tree, a false teacher, a wolf who has come among God’s flock in sheep’s clothing. We do well to avoid such people as these.

In our first article, we discussed the first step in identifying false teachers. To develop the necessary discernment to unmask deceivers, we must recognize that false teachers often look like genuine followers of Christ. False teachers come as wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing. They arise from within the church and disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their deceptive appearance aids them in carrying out their destructive desires. Therefore, we must be on the alert, knowing that not everyone who claims to follow Christ necessarily is a genuine disciple. But how can we discern who is true and who is false?
Jesus gives a second step to identify a false teacher in Matthew 7:16-20. He describes false teachers using the agricultural metaphor of an orchard. Trees in an orchard are planted to produce quality fruit the owner of the orchard can enjoy, share, and sell. However, not every bush or tree produces good fruit. Some bushes are thorn bushes, and others are thistles (Matthew 7:16). These kinds of bushes and trees produce what Jesus describes as “bad fruit” (Matthew 7:17). Furthermore, the only thing thorn bushes and thistles can produce is bad fruit. Bad trees never produce good fruit; conversely, good trees never produce bad fruit. A fig tree, for example, will not produce poisonous berries.
Jesus applies this imagery to His warning against false teachers. He says, “So then, you will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:20). We can identify false teachers by looking at what “fruit” they produce. What, then, does Jesus mean by fruit? What specifically are we to look for in the life of a church leader, pastor, or any other professing Christian seeking to influence us? Let me suggest three types of fruit we should examine to discern if someone is a false teacher.
The first kind of fruit we should inspect is the product of a leader’s life. This meaning for fruit is found in Matthew 3:8, when John the Baptist told the Pharisees and Sadducees to “bear fruit in keeping with repentance.” John was warning them to turn away from their ungodly ways and to walk in genuine godliness. Israel’s religious leaders embodied the characteristics of false teachers, and their hypocritical and self-righteous behavior was a clear indictment that their character did not bear good fruit.
While everyone sins, including the most godly and sincere Christian leaders, the false teacher sins as a way of life. The fruit of his life is habitually contrary to the Word of God. In 2 Peter 2:15 such false teachers are described as “forsaking the right way, they have gone astray, having followed the way of Balaam, the son of Beor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness.” Peter describes the greedy way of Balaam, the prophet for hire, whose entire ministry seems to be based on financial gain. False teachers are those whose lives are marked by a love for the world and the things in the world rather than a sincere love for God.
When we consider Jesus’ warning about bad fruit coming from bad trees, the first aspect of a leader’s fruit we should consider is his life.
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Roger Scruton often wrote about his beloved England and how he was witnessing its tragic collapse. In 2000 he penned England: An Elegy (Bloomsbury). While focusing on just this one nation, much of what he says there can be applied to other parts of the West. Here I simply want to offer some quotes from the volume. In his Preface he writes: “What follows is a memorial address: I speak of England as I knew it, not as the country might appear to the historian. My intention is not to add to the store of factual knowledge, but to pay a personal tribute to the civilisation that made me and which is now passing from the world.”

That everything in life, including ourselves, our families, our loves, our relationships, our communities, our cultures and our countries are all transitory is a given. But we tend to live as if this were not the case. Things that we really love and value we tend to want to continue forever. But as George Harrison once put it, “All things must pass”.
Our life and our world will come to an end soon enough. The Bible also speaks to these realities. In James 4:14 we read: “What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.” And Hebrews 13:14 says this: “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.”
My youth is gone. My wife is gone. My very life will soon be gone. And many things I have loved will also one day be no more. But still, we can and should appreciate the good things that we have known. And that can include cultures and nations. Love of country can be a good thing, and grief over a country that was once great but is now in decline is also appropriate.
I grieve over the fate of the once great West, and the places I have spent most of my time in: Australia, America and Europe. Others also lament the decline of their own nations. One such figure is the late Roger Scruton. He often wrote about his beloved England and how he was witnessing its tragic collapse.
In 2000 he penned England: An Elegy (Bloomsbury). While focusing on just this one nation, much of what he says there can be applied to other parts of the West. Here I simply want to offer some quotes from the volume. In his Preface he writes:
“What follows is a memorial address: I speak of England as I knew it, not as the country might appear to the historian. My intention is not to add to the store of factual knowledge, but to pay a personal tribute to the civilisation that made me and which is now passing from the world.”
Various chapters look at such things as English character, culture, religion, law, society and government. But here I want to focus on his final chapter: “Epilogue: The Forbidding of England.” As with so many other Western nations, the demise of England is not due to external forces so much as inward decay. Self-loathing, guilt-tripping, and a determined repudiation of the past are all part of this.
The chapter begins with these words: “England consisted in the physiognomy, the habits, the institutions, the religion and the culture that I have described in these pages. Almost all have died. To describe something as dead is not to call for its resurrection. Nevertheless, we are in dangerous territory.”
He admits of course to the country’s many weaknesses and defects. He lists some, but then he says, “I find myself confirmed in the desire to praise the English for the virtues which they once displayed, and which they were taught even in my youth to emulate.” He continues:
This does not alter the fact that these virtues are rapidly disappearing. Having been famous for their stoicism, their decorum, their honesty, their gentleness and their sexual puritanism, the English now subsist in a society in which those qualities are no longer honoured – a society of people who regard long-term loyalties with cynicism, and whose response to misfortune is to look round for someone to sue. England is no longer a gentle country, and the old courtesies and decencies are disappearing. Sport, once a rehearsal for imperial virtues, has become a battleground for hooligans. Sex, freed from taboos, has become the ruling obsession: the English have the highest rate of divorce in Europe, regard marriage as a bore, are blatantly promiscuous and litter the country with their illegitimate, uncared-for and state-subsidised offspring.

Gone are the congregations and the little platoons. Gone are the peaceful folkways — the children’s games, parlour songs, proverbs and sayings — that depended on a still remembered religious community. Gone are the habits — the stiff upper lip, the aloof sense of duty, the instant assistance to the stranger in distress — that went with imperial pride. Gone are the institutions — the village shop, the market, the Saturday-night dance, the bandstand in the park — through which local communities renewed themselves.
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“John Warwick Montgomery was an evangelical, evidential, and confessionally Lutheran apologist, a defender of the faith for all people and for all seasons. The raison d’être for the degrees, the books, the debates, and his tireless contribution to the defense of the faith was not his pursuit of an esoteric idea or an intellectual chess game to win human souls. Rather, it was a life lived sub crucis—under the cross—and dedicated to the aggressive and apostolic defense and presentation of Christ crucified for sinners and raised again for their justification.”Craig A. Parton

I recently interviewed Craig Parton about a book he co-wrote with John Warwick Montgomery titled The Art of Christian Advocacy, and before our conversation officially got rolling, I asked Craig how Dr. Montgomery was doing. After a short pause, he responded by saying, “Between you and me—not good.” At 93 years of age, he had just finished teaching a series of summer courses at the International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism, and Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. Well, this morning I received an email from Craig, along with his colleague Dallas Miller, announcing the death of John Warwick Montgomery. Their email included the following notice:
Dr. John Warwick Montgomery, born October 18, 1931 Warsaw, New York died on Wednesday, September 25, 2024 at the the Bischwiller Regional Health Centre in France. Dr. Montgomery was a citizen of the United States, United Kingdom and France. He resided in Soufflenheim, France for much of the past three decades. A full obituary [is available at the end of this article].
I converted to Christianity in the Spring of 1985, and shortly thereafter I discovered a weekly radio program hosted by Dr. Montgomery called, Christianity on Trial in which he took calls from listeners with questions about the Christian Faith.1 The show primarily dealt with issues related to Christian apologetics, and he would frequently encourage listeners to call with questions relevant for non-Christians who might be tuning in. The result was that he frequently received calls from Christians who were looking for help in dealing with objections they had received as they attempted to share their faith with others.
Looking back, this was just what I needed at the time, since as a new believer myself, I had many of those same questions floating around in my head. And week after week, I found my budding faith strengthened by Dr. Montgomery’s common-sense approach. At the time, Montgomery worked at the Simon Greenleaf School of Law in Orange County, California, and on occasion, I recall him mentioning two of his colleagues, Kim Riddlebarger, and Rod Rosenbladt, who I would later end up working with for several decades in my role as producer of The White Horse Inn radio broadcast.
During that period I began to attend several lectures and conferences featuring Dr. Montgomery and I profited greatly from his legal and evidential perspective. As a result, I had many conversations with fellow Christians in those days about the importance of presenting Christianity as a truth-claim, rather than as a kind of therapy. Most of my friends thought that “sharing your testimony” was more effective than arguing with others about various factual or historical details. But Dr. Montgomery had convinced me that a careful study of the New Testament revealed that the earliest Christians continually appealed to facts and evidence, and rarely (if ever) appealed to their own changed lives as a vindication of the Christian faith.
Following one lecture in particular, I happened to be involved in a conversation with a fellow attendee in the parking lot, and at one point Dr. Montgomery exited the building and asked, “Is anyone able to give me a lift?” I quickly volunteered. His car was a few miles down the road at a repair shop waiting to be picked up, so I escorted Dr. Montgomery to my orange Volkswagen Bug and drove him to his destination. On the way, I told him my story about being raised Jewish and stumbling onto several ancient Jewish prophecies about the coming Messiah, including the following:
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The Church was the first to create universities, and law was the first area of study. As the political and secular realms needed to catch up to these advances in law, they all studied at law schools run by the Church. There are countless other ways Christianity and its doctrines are foundational to the Western legal system, and these presuppositions are precisely what many from the critical legal theory school of thought are working to remove. The only problem is they are unclear on what they want to replace it with. 

Understanding the Western legal system and its formation is impossible without understanding Christianity’s role. One key point involves the doctrine of the atonement. Before you think this is the fabricated rambling of some guy sitting at a keyboard, which is all too common today, you must understand that this theological link is traced clearly in a classic work by Harvard Law professor Harold Berman called Law and Revolution. Written in the 1980s, Berman is a key source for understanding the formation of the Western legal system. Whether you agree or disagree, you must interact with him. So, what impact did the Cross of Christ play in our understanding of law?
The Western legal system, as we know it, began formation around 1050 A.D. Before that time in the West, there was no centralized institution of law. Feudalism and tribalism were the primary political structures of the land. Folklaw held sway with all its rituals, superstitions, and blood feuds. Around 1050, the Papal revolution took place and began to centralize the authority of the Catholic Church. The Abbot of Cluny begins to have authority over other monasteries, and as their authority spreads, they seek a better understanding of the law. They found a copy of the Justinian Code compiled by Roman Emperor Justinian half a century earlier and began to utilize it as their framework. Still, they also reinterpreted and reworked it more systematically, following the Scholastic method.
Around the same time, Anselm is writing and showing that the Christian faith is reasonable, and he uses logical arguments to make his point. He makes a rational argument to prove the biblical revelation that God must punish sin. In other words, a just God cannot simply let sin go. The penalty must be paid, which was the purpose of the cross. The argument flows as follows.

To remit sin without satisfaction or adjustment is not to punish it.
And if sin needs no adjustment or punishment, then the one who sins is no different before God than the one who does not sin.
And if no adjustment needs to be made before God, then what must be forgiven?
Following this logic, there is no reason for forgiveness because being unrighteous or righteous makes no difference before God.
Therefore, it is unbecoming of God not to punish sin because it would make evil and good equal in His sight.
Since this cannot be the case, then God must punish sin.

This idea of a just penalty for sin is foundational for understanding justice as we know it today.
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God’s great love for the church beckons believers to join the church. The Bible repeatedly stresses how vitally important the church is to the living, triune God. The church was on his heart in his work of creation (Eph. 3:9-11). The church was on his heart in his work of salvation (Matt. 16:18; Eph. 5:25). The church was promised his special presence (Heb. 2:12; Matt. 18:20). If the church is so important to the Lord, shouldn’t it be important to everyone who loves the Lord?

Alice was livid! This was the first time she’d visited this church. “The last time, too,” she thought. The church had celebrated the Lord’s Supper. “I’ve been a Christian for four years and the pastor had the gall to tell me to stay away from Communion,” Alice fumed. “He asked those who are not right with God or his church to take steps to get right before coming to the Lord’s Table. He included me just because I’m not a church member. How dare he!”
It’s not uncommon in our day for sincere followers of Christ—like Alice—to regard joining a church as an option. And given the other options—books, tapes, videos, radio and TV broadcasts, Internet resources, parachurch groups, etc.—joining the church is sometimes low on the list—if it’s even on the list! Many have never regarded committing to a congregation to be all that important—or all that agreeable. They are usually shocked to hear that Christians have historically regarded joining a church as essential, not optional.
Is this historic Christian conviction arbitrary? Is it legalistic? What does God’s Word have to say about church membership? We think it says plenty. Please consider with us ten biblical reasons why every professing Christian ought to join a local church.
Jesus Commanded Church Membership
First, our Lord Jesus Christ commands his followers to join a church. In Matthew 16:18, Jesus tells his disciples, “I will build My church.” He pictures the church as the new covenant temple, and those who confess that Jesus is Lord are the building blocks in it (Matt. 16:16; 1 Pet. 2:5; Eph. 2:19-20).
In Matthew 28:19-20, Jesus confirms and expands his earlier statement by commanding his followers to make disciples, baptizing and teaching them. Fulfilling this Great Commission entails bringing converts into church membership. Why do we say that? Because part of the Great Commission is a command to baptize. Now, Holy Spirit baptism adds us to the invisible church (1 Cor. 12:13). But we’re not to keep our salvation invisible. We’re to express it outwardly (Rom. 10:9-10). Water baptism outwardly and visibly symbolizes this invisible reality.
Acts 2:41 tells how the apostolic church implemented this principle: “Those who gladly received his word were baptized; and that day about three thousand souls were added to them.” Added to what? Acts 2:47 gives the answer: “added to the church.” This was the visible church; the apostles kept track of those who were baptized, and even counted them.
Christ commands us to be baptized. By commanding us to be baptized, he also commands us to be added to the church. In other words, he commands us to join a church. He wants our relationship to him to be honest and observable (Matt. 10:32). He also wants it to be corporate (Heb. 10:24-25).
The Old Testament Teaches Church Membership
Second, the Old Testament teaches that believers should join a church. The Israelites were God’s old covenant people. He commanded circumcision as a sign of that covenant relationship and membership in the covenant community (Gen. 17:7, 10-11). The New Testament identifies this old covenant community as “the church” (Acts 7:38 KJV).
If you were an alien, you had to receive circumcision to become a member of Israel before you could celebrate the Passover (Ex. 12:43-44, 48). In other words, you had to “join the church” before you could come to the Lord’s Table. If you were not circumcised, regardless of your background or subjective belief, you were to be excommunicated from the people of God (Gen. 17:14).
Can you see the parallel in the New Testament? Baptism is New Testament circumcision (Col. 2:11-12). It marks your addition to the new covenant community, the church (Gal. 3:27, 29; 6:15-16; Phil. 3:3). The Lord’s Supper is the new covenant Passover (cf. Matt. 26:17-19; 1 Cor. 5:7). Just as a person had to be circumcised to become a member of Israel before he could celebrate the Passover, so a person has to be baptized to become a member of the church before he can take the Lord’s Supper. Accordingly, those who “were baptized” and “added to the church” were the ones who participated in “the breaking of bread” with the apostles (Acts 2:41-42, 47).
The New Testament Presupposes Church Membership
Third, the New Testament assumes that every convert joins the church. Conversion includes being added to a visible, local church (Acts 2:41, 47; 14:21-23). It was unthinkable that a person might embrace Christ and then choose not to join Christ’s church. In fact, those who were not church members were regarded as non-Christians (Matt. 18:17). Biblical Christianity is always intensely personal, but it is never private or individualistic.
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Written by John D. Wilsey |
Thursday, September 26, 2024
We bring courage to historical study because it takes courage to confront the realities of human sin as it manifested itself in the past. And we need the courage to avoid simple explanations about past events and personalities. History also requires that we exercise justice to the dead. We avoid cherry-picking from the past for political purposes, and we eschew the temptation to use the past in contemporary power games. 

People are touchy about the topic of history these days. They get worked up about statues in public places, history education in middle and high school classrooms, and whether America was or was not founded as a Christian nation. Academic historians are famous for disparaging beloved authors like Barbara Tuchman and David McCullough for writing nothing more than “popular” history, and for them, anyone who casts himself as a historian must be able to produce a doctorate in history from an acceptable institution.
Most recently, Tucker Carlson interviewed a podcaster named Darryl Cooper on a range of topics including World War II. Carlson introduced Cooper, host of the Martyr Made Podcast, as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” It turns out that Cooper, the most important popular historian today (if we accept Carlson’s endorsement), believes that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain of the Second World War.”
Carlson’s interview with Cooper exploded with controversy. As of this writing, the interview on YouTube has close to 1 million views in a week and a half. That is an enviable statistic. To put that into perspective, leading Civil War historian Allen C. Guelzo struggled to get just a little more than 150,000 views of his lecture titled “Did Robert E. Lee commit treason?”
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The past isn’t a museum, it is happening every moment we live. We are creating our past every moment. How we understand the past is a very present concern. We need to be discerning in understanding the past. And we need to be mindful that our present lives are adding to the past we are accumulating.

I recently turned that magical age of 65, where the social services part of our government suddenly becomes very important. When I think about my life at this point, I’m very aware that the thing I have most of is my past. It seems like aging is simply the rapid accumulation of the past through wanton spending of an ever-decreasing supply of the future. The question is, what do we do with the past we’ve accumulated? Is the past an asset or a liability? How do we draw on the past for good use? How can a poor use of the past hinder our present and our future? These are questions of increasing urgency to people my age—maybe any age.
The Past Is the Human Experience of Time
Here’s a question that may seem dumb but is actually pretty important. How do we know there is a past? The obvious answer is that we know there is a past because we experience the passage of time. But that doesn’t solve the question. Where does time come from?
The perception of the passage of time is a distinctively human experience. God is eternal—timeless. Everything He creates exists in time. “In the beginning” (Gen. 1:1) does not refer to the beginning of God; it is the beginning of creation. Creation is time-constrained, while God is outside of time.
All of creation records the passage of time. Trees grow over time. Sharp rocks become smooth stones through weathering over time. Animals instinctively know when to build nests, when to hibernate, and when to migrate. But humans are the only creatures who conceptualize time, who “count” the passage of time. God called Adam to exercise dominion over creation—to tend it for good. One of the ways we do that is to manage life according to time. Days and seasons and years and centuries and epochs and millenniums, as well as hours and seconds and nanoseconds, are measurements we use to make sense of our existence in the exercise of dominion.
And we’re constantly monkeying with time. Anyone who has a spouse who watches a lot of sports knows not to trust when you hear, “I’ll be there in a second; there’s only two minutes left in the game!”
Think about it another way. How many of us can think back to what happened while we were asleep at 4 am this morning? Things didn’t stop happening when we fell asleep last night. We just don’t have any memory of it because sleep is a human state that stops tracking time.
God relates to us through time. We are not Buddhists, finding enlightenment in escape from the constraints of time.
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Written by R. Fowler White |
Thursday, September 26, 2024
The sin in Hebrews 10 is aggravated by the fact that the offense against Christ by the apostate in that text is worse in its character than the offenses of the crowds and the Pharisees against Christ in Matthew 12. In Matthew 12, the crowds were sinning against Him in thought and word, but it seems most probable that we’re to understand that they did so in some ignorance since the process of revealing His identity had not yet reached its culmination. On the other hand, the Pharisees were sinning against Him in thought and word too, but were also doing so in deed by conspiring to destroy Him (Matt 12:14).

Heb 10:29 How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?
Matt 12:32 And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.
During a recent small group Bible study, a good question came up about the two passages above. Both passages describe sins against Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Strikingly, however, the offender against Jesus in Matt 12:32 will be forgiven, while the offender against Jesus in Heb 10:29 will be everlastingly punished. Do these two statements contradict one another, or do they harmonize with each other? If they harmonize, how do they harmonize? Here’s my take.
As a first step, it might help us to refer to two passages, 2 Pet 2:20-22 and Rom 2:4-5. In 2 Peter, Peter describes apostates. What stands out to me is 2:20, where Peter states that the last state has become worse for them than the first. I understand him to mean that the last state of apostasy is worse than the first state of (simple) unbelief, and that last state is worse because there is neither renewal from nor atonement for it. Turning to Romans 2, Paul says to the hardhearted and unrepentant hypocrite that you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath (2:5). For the hypocrite who continues in unbelief, God’s wrath against him only accumulates (and presumably gets worse by being compounded) for him over time. What I gather from those descriptions in 2 Peter 2 and Romans 2 is that unbelief is a state (condition) that may vary from bad to worse.
Another step that seems to help us is to keep in mind WLC Q/A 151, in which we are taught that sins may be aggravated by who the offender is, who the offended party is, what the effect of the offense is, what its character is, or when and where it happens. These factors, I believe, assist us to sort out some differences between Matt 12:32 and Heb 10:29. As I see it, though both passages record offenses against Christ, the sin in Heb 10:29 is aggravated in three ways that are not present in the sin in Matt 12:32. Those aggravations seem to clarify why the sin against Christ in Heb 10:29 is unforgivable, but the sin against Christ in Matt 12:32 is forgivable.
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One can begin with the shortest verse in the Bible, John 11:35, “Jesus wept.” Some might wonder how memorization of such a short passage could be beneficial. Any passage memorized comes from a context and each text stored in the memory can be the key to remembering the content of its chapter. Why did Jesus weep? Because he was suffering emotionally for the loss of his friend Lazarus and mourning for his family. It is the verse that is soon followed by the eschatological miracle of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. 

Bible memorization should be promoted within Presbyterian and Reformed Christianity in conjunction with the existing emphasis on catechesis. Catechisms are emphasized so that children and novices in the faith can learn the system of doctrine taught in the Bible. It is clearly advisable to catechize for grounding in the faith, but could it be that the Reformed shy from Bible memorization because it is often affiliated with the biblicism of some churches and other ministries within Evangelicalism? Given that the driving sola of the Reformation was Scriptura, it is appropriate to reconsider the association of catechesis with Bible memorization. Some direction is provided from the household of the Lion of Princeton, the Warfields of Grasmere, Kentucky.
Commenting in his brief biographical memorial for his brother Benjamin B. Warfield, Ethelbert D. Warfield said,
He was so certain that he was to follow a scientific career that he strenuously objected to studying Greek. But youthful objections had little effect in a household where the shorter catechism was ordinarily completed in the sixth year, followed at once by the proofs from the Scriptures, and then by the larger catechism, with an appropriate amount of Scripture memorized in regular course each Sabbath afternoon (Works, 1:vi)
The teaching tools used by William and Mary Warfield with their children were the Shorter and Larger Catechisms, along with the sometimes-tenuously related Scripture proofs found in the Shorter. Since Ethelbert specifically says he and his brother memorized Scripture, then it would appear catechesis involved the boys sitting in the parlor with a parent using the question-and-answer format to teach the boys. The question is, what does Ethelbert mean by “completed” with reference to the catechisms? If the Warfield children had memorized the catechisms, it would seem Ethelbert would have said so. Of course, as they were directed through the questions and answers with repetition, they became sufficiently familiar with them to remember their content. Memorizing the Bible was part of every catechetical session as both catechisms and proofs of the shorter were worked through. If this practice was used by two covenant sons that matured to become premier educators, scholars, and exemplars of the faith, then Bible memorization should be emphasized with catechesis to ground believers in the faith. Unfortunately, it would be interesting to have the list of verses memorized by the Warfield boys, but one could not be located (see Notes).
Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the longest book of the Bible, with its topic being the Word of God. It just so happens that in the English Standard Version the psalm begins eight pages short of dead center of the whole Bible (not a study Bible). It is also organized by means of an acrostic that follows the Hebrew alphabet. The first section begins with aleph, the second section beth, and so on. Throughout the lengthy psalm are found mentions of meditation, the heart, and loving the Law of God. At the beginning of beth are these verses.
Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? by taking heed thereto according to thy word. With my whole heart have I sought thee: O let me not wander from thy commandments. Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee. (KJV)
For one to walk uprightly and follow God’s revealed perfect written will, Scripture must be a part of life not only through personal, family, and church worship, but also stored within by memorization. Repetition is the mother of memory and sometimes by default verses are memorized through repeated use, such as the Aaronic blessing found in Numbers 6:24-26 that is often used for concluding worship services in churches that still have benedictions.
The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lifts up his countenance upon you and give you peace.
This wonderful passage stored in the memory by repetition or study prepares worshippers for the week as they hear of grace and peace.
Moving to Matthew 4:1-11 in the New Testament, the Scriptures were central to Jesus’ victory over temptation in the wilderness. For each of the three temptations presented by Satan, Jesus responded using passages from Deuteronomy each of which is prefaced by “It is written.”
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