Saving Faith, as we considered in part 1, is a gift of God. It comes from him. Though we exercise that faith, the privilege and power of its exercise draw solely from the font of his grace. Having received the gift from God, we exercise that gift for him and unto him.

With magisterial grace, the Bible weds Christian theology to the male/female distinctions in God’s creation of marriage. Space permits only a brief consideration of this mysterious and intricate knot.

Adam and Eve are one flesh, but they are not one person. Their union is vital and real, yet for that to be the case, their distinct identities endure. Adam is not Eve, and Eve is not Adam. This personal and gender distinction is a sine qua non of marriage itself.

As creatures made in God’s image (imago Dei), we finitely reflect the Triune God. We are not God, but his image bearers. We are not part of him, but made by him and for him. Absolutely distinct from him, we are in essential ways, like him. Different from yet derivative of him, we do not replace or equal him; rather as mirrors of him, we owe him faith, honor, and obedience. The blessed intricacy and inscrutability of this reflection of the Creator continues to fascinate.

Jesus is Head of the Church. He is Head of his Church. This we believe. This we confess. And yet how quickly this we dismiss!

Honestly, how significantly does Jesus’ lordship over the Church shape our thinking, our lives, and our priorities? How seriously do we take his throne, his reign, and rule? What weight do we give his kingly session? Does my life align with the priorities Jesus has established in his reign in and over his Church?

Very little writing warrants reading more than once. Less still deserves numerous readings. An exclusive group of writings rises to the level of “must read once a year” for me. One of them is Geerhardus Vos’ inaugural lecture to his new post as Professor of Biblical Theology at Princeton on May 8, 1894. Today’s 121^st anniversary of that lecture warrants remembering some of Vos’ fruitful insights.

Many in evangelical and even reformed churches lack appreciation for the biblical concept of covenant, finding it obscure and even arcane. The irony is stark. What many perceive as academic smoke is actually just the opposite.

Golden statues, empty rituals, and corrupting bondage. Many conceptions flood our minds when we hear the word “idolatry.” We envision everything from crass idol worship to sophisticated religions like Hinduism, Shintoism, Animism, and even Islam.

As believers in the one true God, we know that idolatry is wrong. We know God hates it. We know first two of the Ten Commandments explicitly demand exclusive worship of the one true God. We even know that idolatry is not merely worshiping a false god, but even worshiping the true God by our own methods. Some of us have prudently made the connection between the first two commandments and the tenth—we know that coveting is a form of idolatry.

Promises. We’ve received them, and we have made them. We have trusted others and been entrusted by others. We have suffered let downs; and we have let others down—probably more frequently than we would care to admit.

With vacuous words, we speak either to ourselves or openly to surrounding skeptics,

The Apostle Paul exhorts the church: “giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 5:20). Ripped out of its theological context, such an appeal would clang like a hammer upon a steely heart. But Paul’s exhortation springs from the transcending power of the gospel. Appropriately grasped, this mandate to thanksgiving gently and super-naturally overflows in the heart of the redeemed. The transforming realties of grace in Christ Jesus propel the heart to sing a new song of thanksgiving.

The questions of life plague our souls, shake us mercilessly, and even cast us into a tailspin of desperation. Into this chaos, we have considered a universally pressing question, drawing upon a booklet entitled, How Can We Know For Sure?

The search is on. Can we find confidence in anyone or anything at all? Or are we left to our own devices and just dumb luck? Is life a meaningless series of serendipitous events, weaving moments of happiness into an ethereal fabric of emptiness?

For many, certainty has gone the way of fairy tales. Like Robin Hood and Cinderella, certainty once intrigued us; it drew us into its wonder. It compelled, enraptured, and even produced a deep sense of peace. But now we know better. We know that we cannot really know. We have put away such childish things. Confidence has shot off like an arrow into the darkness; it has gone the way of glass slippers.

Many evangelicals find the “organized” Church something to be avoided, even dismissed and detested. Denominations, it is frequently thought, represent all that is wrong with the Church and can go wrong with the Church. The logic goes as follows. The structures, authority, and formal processes of the Church stifle the ministry of the Spirit; the machinery of Church polity militates against the gospel itself!

Since the events recorded in the third chapter of the Bible, a subtle and dangerous impetus frequently rebounds in the church to doubt God’s Word, to add to God’s Word, to compartmentalize God’s Word in a way that limits its relevance only to the topics we choose. “Did God really say?” we ask ourselves.

Because of its shared faith and shared confession in the risen Christ, the worldwide confessing Church must maintain mutual accountability in the advance of the gospel. To safeguard faithful missions in the global Church is an act of faith and obedience to the Church’s Christ. To neglect a compromise in missions is itself a culpable compromise.

Extreme practices of the Insider Movement Paradigm (IMP), like those missionaries who publicly convert to Islam in order to “reach” those in the mosque, are rejected even by most IM advocates. But the concerns before the Church of Jesus Christ around the world are not merely fringe excesses in IMP, but its wide and prevalent center and what we might call its “soft” forms.

Theology regularly gets a bad rap. “Don’t give me doctrine. I want something practical.” “I like sermons that touch my heart, not those that fill my head.” Or, “Come on. I’m not interested in all this theology. I just want to love Jesus.”

“I have come to do your will, O God,” Jesus says to his Father (Heb 10:7). With this declaration, Jesus circumscribes his earthly life. He knows his purpose on earth is to work, to carry out God’s work. He came to do the will of God.

Many treat gospel grace with frightful flippancy, and much of this abuse spawns from a misunderstanding of how grace works. In the next few SQN columns, we will work through the all-important theme of biblical grace and its essential relationship to works.

One chief evidence of gospel grace in the life of the believer is wonder. The Lord God himself and his care for us should dumbfound us. Any attention to them catapults the soul into an orbit of awe. The fact is, the more we consider creation and redemption, the more we discover that we simply cannot take it all in. Contemplation of God, his Word, and his works cause the soul nearly to burst.