This case provides a teachable moment for prospective students and their parents as they consider enrolling at a public educational institution in a day and age where Christian beliefs are more counter-cultural than ever.

Maggie DeJong, in her third year of a master’s program for art therapy counseling at Southern Illinois University (SIU), was shocked recently to receive official emails from the school’s administration ordering her to have “no contact” with three other graduate students in her program, either on or off campus.
What was this Christian student guilty of? What would prompt the university to issue the educational equivalent of a restraining order against her?
According to her attorneys with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the only thing DeJong was told in emails from the university is that “upon information and belief that interactions between yourself [and the other students] would not be welcome or appropriate at this time.”
DeJong was given no prior notice of the complaints against her nor was she given an opportunity to defend herself against whatever accusations have been lodged against her.
In an interview with The Daily Citizen, Tyson Langhofer, ADF Senior Counsel and Director of the Center for Academic Freedom, told us that Maggie has been singled out at times by her professors and fellow students for criticism of her Christian beliefs, even telling her that her beliefs are wrong, insensitive and contrary to the values of the program in which she is enrolled.
For example, Langhofer said, Maggie at one point was texting back and forth with another student who asked her about her beliefs. Maggie informed her that her personal beliefs are grounded in objective truth by the gospel of Jesus Christ. The conversation was friendly and conversational. Yet Maggie’s exact text ended up on a piece of art in a common area at the school entitled “The crushing weight of micro-aggressions.”
Read More

The Reformers knew that for the church to remain faithful to Christ, the church and her congregants needed both to read and to study the Bible. The 1560 Geneva Bible embodied that commitment. We should be thankful for the gifted teachers and leaders of our own day who have applied their labors to publishing quality study Bibles that are faithful to God’s Word. May we take advantage of their labors. Take up a good study Bible and read.

In 1560, an exiled group of pastors and theologians made history. They published the first full edition of the Geneva Bible. It was a remarkable feat on many fronts.
These scholars who worked on the Geneva Bible had been leaders of the Reformation in England and Scotland. When “Bloody Mary” took the throne, she threw into reverse the advancing Reformation, taking the nation back to Roman Catholicism. Britain’s Reformers found themselves in prison, martyred, or in exile. Many went to Calvin’s Geneva.
Calvin wasn’t much for idle hands. Florentine jewelers who had converted to Protestantism were also among the exiles who came to Geneva. Most of their prior work revolved around saint’ statues, rosaries, and the like. They needed something new to do. Calvin suggested they make watches. The rest is (watchmaking) history. So, too, the British scholars who came to Geneva needed to work. Calvin suggested they publish a Bible. The rest is English Bible history.
The Geneva Bible was the first English Bible to use verse divisions, thanks to the work of Robertus Stephanus. Prior editions of the English Bible had chapter breaks only. Stephanus, a brilliant linguist, published several editions of the Greek New Testament. He introduced his innovative verse divisions in his 1551 edition. Nine years later, these same verse numbers appeared in the Geneva Bible.
The Geneva Bible was also the first Bible to have study notes or annotations. The first edition had these annotations in the Gospels only. This edition also had woodcut illustrations, maps, and even tables, which provided a cross-referencing index for names and topics. As later editions rolled off the press, more annotations for the rest of the canonical books appeared. Some later editions even modified the notes or replaced them altogether. Then, as now, the book of Revelation posed special challenges to interpreters and annotators. Later editions fully replaced the notes it had published on John’s Apocalypse.
The Geneva Bible was intentionally affordable. Pocket-sized editions were made available, as were inexpensive editions of the New Testament. The Geneva Bible was intended to be read. It was also intended to be studied. And it was. It was the Bible of William Shakespeare, John Bunyan, and the Pilgrims and Puritans who landed in the New World. A Scottish law from 1579 required “every Householder with 300 merks [silver coins]” to own one. Despite King James’ attempts in 1611 at positioning his new translation in the market, the Geneva Bible held sway well into the seventeenth century. Countless readers were helped by the notes reflecting the doctrinal understanding of the Reformation.
There has been no shortage of English Bibles since the Geneva Bible. Neither has there been a shortage of study Bibles since the Geneva Bible. By way of an informal nonscientific study, I counted the study Bibles listed in Christian Book Distributors Bibles catalog for spring/summer 2015. Not counting children‘s Bibles, the number topped one hundred, among them a facsimile edition of the 1560 Geneva Bible. All of these study Bibles except the Geneva Bible date from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
It would not be too much of a stretch to speak of the century spanning from 1917 to the present as “The Century of the Study Bible.“ In 1917, Oxford University Press published the Scofield Study Bible. This Bible had first been published in 1909 with a system of cross-references. But the 1917 edition had copious notes promoting a dispensational scheme of theology.
Read More
Related Posts:

If we make peace with our sin, no matter how insignificant it appears, we fall into the same corruption that Israel did. Christ summons us to fight a holy war against our own sinful flesh. While the decisive battle of this war was won upon the cross, making our victory secure, the conflict will not end until Christ returns or summons us to Him via death. So, put on the whole armor of God, call upon the strength of the Lord, and stand firm against your sin.

They did not destroy the peoples,as the LORD commanded them,but they mixed with the nationsand learned to do as they did.They served their idols,which became a snare to them.They sacrificed their sonsand their daughters to the demons;they poured out innocent blood,the blood of their sons and daughters,whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan,and the land was polluted with blood.Thus they became unclean by their acts,and played the whore in their deeds.
Psalm 106:34-39 ESV

The majority of this psalm is a recounting of Israel’s unfaithfulness to God, especially in the wilderness, but ultimately leading to the exile. These verses particularly recall Israel’s refusal to utterly destroy the Canaanites as the LORD commanded them to do. Instead, they mingled with the Canaanites, marrying them and becoming like them. The likeness continued to the point of the Israelites sacrificing their children to false gods as the peoples of Canaan did.
While so many today are repelled by the conquest of Canaan and by the genocide that God commanded, this was one of the ultimate reasons why it was necessary. The Canaanites were thoroughly wicked and deserved to be annihilated. These were corrupt and barbaric nations that deserved every ounce of judgment that was to come upon them. The prevalence of child sacrifice was the supreme and only necessary evidence of that fact.
Read More
Related Posts: