Written by Bryan D. Estelle |
Thursday, August 11, 2022
With the death, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ, the understanding of death and the afterlife changed radically for the saints. Here it is important to understand our Lord’s seventh saying on the cross: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” (Luke 23:46). This final saying was a statement of consolation and filial trust. It was an act of offering His human spirit to His heavenly Father (meantime, His divine nature remained united with His human nature, even as He lay in the grave; see Belgic Confession 19). By making this final statement on the cross, Christ gives us an affirmation of the uninterrupted life.

What is this place called Sheol for the Old Testament saint? In most Old Testament references, “Sheol” is used to describe human fate. A pallid aura hovers over the concept. Sheol is often described by the righteous as a place that one does not want to go to—an “unwelcome fate,” such as in Psalm 30:3. Often, when the psalmists refer to Sheol, what they most feared was not death per se, nor that they might lose themselves in death. Rather, they feared that they might lose contact with God. For example, Psalm 6:5 says, “For in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who will give you praise?” The number of words for this place of the dead is striking in the Scriptures: “Sheol,” “pit,” “grave,” “depths,” “place of perdition,” “land of oblivion,” “Abaddon.”

Sheol was often thought of as a place of divine punishment, a destiny often wished on the ungodly. The psalmist often speaks in a metaphorical manner about Sheol. Sometimes “Sheol” is used to metaphorically describe the strength of affliction by someone who is not literally in Sheol. For example, in Psalm 88, the psalmist cannot literally reside in Sheol, because clearly he is still alive; therefore, he is using metaphorical language to describe his existence as if he is already in the realm of those who dwell in Sheol. Sometimes “Sheol” is used to describe the pain of being in exile. Sometimes “darkness” is used as a metaphor for a Sheol-like state, as in Psalm 143:3: “For the enemy has pursued my soul, he has crushed my life to the ground; he has made me sit in darkness like those long dead.”

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Written by J. Warner Wallace |
Friday, August 11, 2023
The concept (and the actual word) “acceptance” has been added to the definition in a way that subtly transforms the classic definition. This view promotes not that we must “endure” each other in the context of our disagreements, but that we must “accept” and embrace each other’s worldview as equally valuable and equally true. 

There is growing cultural skepticism and criticism of all things “Christian”. At times like this, the issue of religious “tolerance” is sometimes raised and examined. Christians are often called intolerant, especially when examined under a new definition of tolerance that has emerged in our culture. How should we respond when people call us “intolerant” simply because we refuse to embrace a particular value or behavior?
First: Help People Understand “Classic” Tolerance
YourDictionary.com says that tolerance is “a tolerating or being tolerant, esp. of views, beliefs, practices, etc. of others that differ from one’s own”. And when asked what it is to tolerate something, the same source says that we ‘tolerate’ someone when we “recognize and respect (others’ beliefs, practices, etc.) without sharing them”. TheFreeDictionary.com says that ‘tolerating’ is “to put up with” or “endure” something.
Now did you notice something here? In order for ‘tolerance’ to exist and to be demonstrated, several things are required. Let’s take a look at the list of pre-requisites for ‘tolerance’:
1. Two or more people must exist2. These folks must hold divergent views, beliefs or practices. In other words, they must DISAGREE.3. These same folks must endure one another. In other words, they cannot eliminate each other even though they don’t embrace each other’s beliefs, but must instead find a way to peacefully co-exist.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Thursday, September 28, 2023
This war against the body lies at the heart of so much of our modern politics. It connects to the sexual politics that deny that human genitals are to be used in some ways and not in others. It connects to gender politics that see the significance traditionally ascribed to sexed bodies as an oppressive social construct. It connects to debates about abortion and the status of the bodies of both mother and the child in utero. And it connects to the politics of parenting that replace the significance of biology with notions of functional parenthood. In each area, the authority of the body is utterly denied. 

Given the chaotic and volatile nature of our culture, what should the church focus on in her teaching? This is one of the pressing questions of our day. The answer, of course, is “the whole counsel of God.” That is true but also somewhat glib. Do peculiar times not call for specific emphases in our teaching? As the fourth century wrestled with the doctrine of God, the fifth with Christology and the nature of God’s grace, and the Reformation era with sacraments and salvation, so our age wrestles with the question of anthropology. What does it mean to be human? More specifically, what does it mean to be an embodied human? For we now find ourselves not so much in a battle for the Bible but in a battle for the body.
The status of the body as it relates to us as human persons seems to be the issue that lies, often unseen, behind many of the other more prominent debates of our age. Take the most controversial question of recent years: What is a woman? This is remarkably simple to answer if bodies have importance, but it is now staggeringly difficult to answer because our culture denies the authority of the body in this matter. Contra Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one cannot punt the question of what is a woman to the biologists because biology doesn’t count.
Confusion over this is in large part the result of the immense power that technology has delivered into our hands. Take, for example, medicine. This was once understood to be restorative. Its purpose was to repair that which had broken and to replace that which should be there but for some reason was not. It assumed a normative notion of what it meant to be human, a normative notion closely connected to a normative concept of what a body should be and how it should function. Once society lost its normative understanding of this, however, the goal of restoration was replaced by that of transformation. And the loss of this normative understanding is inextricably bound up with technology. Technology opens up previously unimagined possibilities—changing from male to female, fusing our bodies with machines, downloading ourselves into a giant computer, developing means of living forever. In each case, technology tilts us toward thinking of bodies not as having integrity of their own but, to borrow Mary Harrington’s memorable phrase, as so much “Meat Lego.”
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