The uncertainty of the religious man
Pliny the Elder wrote, in Naturalis Historia, a well-known adage: "Among [mortals] the only certainty there is is that nothing is certain."[1] Few know that Pliny made this statement in a chapter on the gods.
Hudson Taylor | When the mountains move aside
Hudson Taylor undertook eleven journeys between Europe and China, and his mission prospered. He had one of the most complex and successful visions for evangelism.
Three times the world nearly ended
Many doomsayers have “cried wolf” when it comes to the end of the world. Does that mean it’s not going to happen at all?
The Ten Commandments
The book of Exodus is the second book in the Bible. It follows God’s servant Moses leading the Israelites out of slavery and through the desert towards the hoped-for Promised Land. Along the way, they stop at Mt Sinai. Moses goes up the mountain and receives from God ten commandments carved on a stone tablet. This is one of the most famous sections...
The Bible as a sign of offence
“‘The days are coming,’ declares the Sovereign Lord, ‘when I will send a famine through the land—not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the Lord, but they will not find it’” (Amos...
The cry of contrasts
It is the spring of 31 A.D., halfway through the 70th prophetic week of Daniel 9:24. This passage from the book of Daniel predicts that between the command to build the city of Jerusalem—in the autumn of 457 BC—and the appearance of the Anointed One (the Messiah), 69 prophetic weeks or 483 years (a prophetic day corresponding to a calendar year, according to...
COVID-19: Hope ordinances and a divine governance
Fines, military ordinances, police and army patrolling the streets – this is the reality we have suddenly found ourselves living in. It is a tightening reality, a rigid corset-like structure of rules.
Miracles or superstition? | An a posteriori response to the anti-supernaturalist assumption
Up until the Enlightenment, the idea that the miracles recorded in the pages of the Bible happened as the biblical writers described them was widely accepted. With the rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an alternative theory emerged: that miracles were not possible in naturalistic metaphysics.
The luxury of knowing why
Nothing can prepare us in advance for the suffering we will experience in this life. But even knowing this, we often remember with guilt the moments of blissful ignorance we had before suffering hit us.
The angry Christian: How can we free ourselves from destructive anger?
A man is about as big as the things that make him angry – Winston Churchill
What I wish I knew about God in my 20s | Reflections, testimonies, and suggestions
There is a poignant poem by the young Nicolae Labiș, a profound thinker and visionary who tragically passed away at the age of 21, that warns of the danger of wasting one’s life.
#SELFCARE for Christians
The concept of self care—defined as the entirety of ways in which a person understands how to solve their emotional problems and manage their anxieties—has become a real movement in the past two years with an entire industry ready to make our lives easier and more comfortable. For Christians, however, this trend has proven to be quite problematic: making our lives easier is...
The conditions for courage (I)
Motto: "Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision." (Winston Churchill)
Let’s read Genesis with “new eyes”
In the spring of 2022, I interviewed the venerable professor of Hebrew exegesis, Jacques Doukhan, for the second time. Ten years before, in our first interview, we discussed his life: his beginnings in a Jewish family in Constantine, Algeria, his studies in France, Switzerland and the United States, his work as a teacher and author. This time we talked about the study that...