Written by T.M. Suffield |
Tuesday, March 7, 2023
The age to come is the one which is breaking into ours, it’s the one where Christ’s kingdom rules and reigns triumphantly, the one where death is defeated by the hand of Life riding a white horse. We are saved for this glorious revisioning of the cosmos.

I suspect most of us give little thought to time. It’s simply something we move through, or exist in, or bemoan the passing of as the years slowly strip away the vigour of our youth.
The fact that what time is amounts to a philosophical question that is notoriously tricky and nevertheless vital to any sense of trying to live a good or harmonious or flourishing or blessed (delete as appropriate) life, is a fact that passes most of us happily by.
Afterall, philosophers are a notoriously unhappy bunch, so contemplating their tricky questions is unlikely to contribute to our sense of a good life, right?
That may be, and yet the Bible has a lot of things to say about time as a broad concept and as something to be inhabited well. Our theology, at least at the popular level within our churches, leaves these questions alone most of the time. It sounds esoteric, irrelevant, and impractical.
While I would want to mount a spirited defence of the relevance of the esoteric and impractical, today is not that day, and my introduction is already long and meandering enough to have lost you.
Here are five theses on time.
We Are Saved from Time
In Galatians 1 we are described as being delivered from the ‘present evil age.’ We are saved from a time. We tend to think of salvation either psychologically (rescued from the guilt or shame of sin), ontologically (union with Christ), spatially (rescued from Hell or the earth for heaven), chthonically (rescued from the powers of evil and death), or in terms of dominion (transferred to the kingdom of light).
All of those are Biblical, though I would suggest that spatially is not the best way of describing that particular set of realities. Rarely do I hear anyone speak of salvation chronologically (or kairologically?). We are saved from time.
There are lots of things to bemoan in our age, and there have been in ages past too. The Bible would see these as a weave stretching back to Eden: not several ages but a succession of sin’s dark marring written across the face of the world. We are rescued from this age, so we do not have to face its consequences if we choose not to, we are free to call it evil where it is and should do so, and we do not have to live according to its rules or principles.
In other words, we’re free from the curse of this time.
We Are Saved for a Time
Positively we are rescued for the age to come (Matthew 12, Ephesians 1, Hebrews 6)—that time after our stint in the presence of Christ in what we often call ‘heaven’ as shorthand. By the age to come we mean the time after the resurrection of the dead and the triumphant and everlasting victory of Jesus the Christ over all powers and authorities.
The age to come is the one which is breaking into ours, it’s the one where Christ’s kingdom rules and reigns triumphantly, the one where death is defeated by the hand of Life riding a white horse. We are saved for this glorious revisioning of the cosmos.
This time is breaking into our time because Christ came at the end of time (1 Peter 1, Galatians 4, Matthew 26, Mark 1, John 7). We now live in the collision of two epochs, the time between the times.
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Written by E. Calvin Beisner |
Saturday, November 26, 2022
Negotiators at COP27 have put “loss and damage” — a.k.a. “reparations” — on the agenda, too. The idea is that wealthy nations, which developed their wealth using hydrocarbon energy and therefore are to blame for global warming and the increased numbers and intensity of extreme weather events, owe developing nations financial assistance as they deal with climate disasters.

In case you hadn’t heard, radical environmentalists and their globalist, “Great Reset” allies, people I like to call “climate cops,” are holding their annual doom-fest. The 27th “Conference of the Parties,” or COP, of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change started November 6 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, and has drawn some 40,000 participants from pretty much every country in the world. It’s set to last two weeks.
True to form, organizers are using it as another opportunity to demand global action to fight catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW). Cornwall Alliance will comment from time to time about this COP, as we’ve done about previous ones.
The Associated Press reported on its first day that COP27 was taking place “amid a multitude of competing crises, including the war in Ukraine, high inflation, food shortages and an energy crunch.” Every one of these competing crises, including even the war in Ukraine, is in part a consequence of the very climate and energy policies promoted for the last three decades, and every one of them is exacerbated even now by exactly those policies.
Prodded by past COPs, developed countries have rushed to substitute wind and solar energy for abundant, reliable, affordable hydrocarbon energy. The result, predicted by critics, has been higher energy prices and, simultaneously, increasingly fragile energy infrastructures, especially in Europe. Those fragile, poorly supplied energy infrastructures led to European nations’ growing reliance on Russia for natural gas. That dependence, in turn, led to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calculating that the risk that Europe would respond militarily to an invasion of Ukraine was slim — and he was right. European nations’ support for Ukraine has been tepid compared with the nearly $20 billion in aid the United States has given.
Meanwhile, pressured by developed nations, many developing nations have been forced to rely increasingly on wind and solar rather than fossil fuels, slowing their economic growth and prolonging poverty for their billions of people. That makes those nations vulnerable to the oil and gas price shocks that came with the war in Ukraine.
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Written by Reuben M. Bredenhof |
Sunday, January 30, 2022
The hymn expresses well Luther’s faith, and not only his faith, but that of the church in his day. Christians back then looked to God Almighty as the one who would fight and also win their fierce battles against falsehood and persecution. For that reason, Ein Feste Burg has been called the “Battle Hymn of the Reformation.” It captured the spirit of the Reformation so aptly that when Protestant martyrs were walking to their death at the scaffold or stake, it was often “A Mighty Fortress” that they chose to sing.

Around Reformation Day—and throughout the year—this hymn is sung by the church with great passion. Often after sermons that celebrate the power and faithfulness of God our Saviour towards his people, the organist will pull out a few extra stops and we’ll belt out this cherished song.
Lord of the Sabbath?
As tends to happen with more of the tried and true psalms and hymns, “A Mighty Fortress” contains some old expressions whose meanings are no longer clear. And though we love to sing familiar lyrics , it’s proper that we know the meaning of what we are singing.
In “A Mighty Fortress,” in its second verse, we find especially one phrase that seems to be widely misunderstood. Speaking of the right Man on our side/ The Man of God’s own choosing, Luther asks and answers a rhetorical question about our Saviour: Dost ask who that may be? Christ Jesus, it is He. And then, to further identify this person, his title is given:
Lord Sabaoth his Name.
What is this title, “Lord Sabaoth?” If asked, someone might think for a moment and tentatively suggest that this could be linked to the teaching of Jesus in Matthew 12:1-8. There Jesus is disputing with the Pharisees concerning what is lawful on the Sabbath. Jesus ends his words to the Pharisees with this definitive statement, “For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” (v. 8). So we might conclude that in the second verse of “A Mighty Fortress” we celebrate Jesus as the one with authority over the Lord’s day.
Lord of Hosts
But while Matthew 12:8 teaches an important truth, it’s not Jesus’ revelation of his lordship over the Sabbath that is being celebrated in Hymn 53:2. The confusion arises because the word “Sabaoth”—not Sabbath—is an English representation of a Hebrew word, sebaoth.
Of course, Luther didn’t write his hymn (Ein Feste Burg) in Hebrew, but in German. Yet in his original composition too, he simply gave the German representation of that Hebrew word sebaoth. So from Hebrew to German to English, “Sabaoth” has found its way into this favourite hymn.
For what this word “Sabaoth” means then, we must turn to the Hebrew Old Testament. There we regularly find this title for God: “Yahweh Sebaoth.” This title is often translated in English Bibles as “the LORD of hosts.”
Over what kind of hosts is the LORD? This is debated. There are some texts in Scripture that depict God as the head of human armies. For example, in 1 Samuel 17:45 David confronts Goliath with these words: “I come to you in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel.”
Other texts suggest that the hosts which God commands are the celestial bodies, like the sun, the moon and the stars. For instance, after God defeats the Canaanites, Deborah sings this: “From the heavens the stars fought, from their courses they fought against Sisera” (Jdg 5:20).
Still other texts say that the LORD’s hosts are heavenly creatures, such as the angels. The prophet Michaiah once described this war-room scene in heaven: “I saw the LORD sitting on his throne with all the host of heaven around him” (1 Kgs 22:19).
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