God has given us (fallen mankind) three institutions as essential weapons for us to use as we fulfill our original, pre-Fall mission of ruling over the earth (Genesis 1:26-28)—the family, the church and the civil government  As we have seen, the diagram of the Ship of the Kingdom, pictured below, shows us how God is, post-cross,  re-establishing His  original Eternal Purpose of delegating dominion over the earth to mankind. The initial delegation by God of His kingdom was to the Perfect Man, Jesus Christ. …

In our task of ruling over the earth, God has given us three main weapons to accomplish that task—the family, the church and the civil government. We discussed last week that John Calvin and Abraham Kuyper proposed the concept of sphere sovereignty to explain how these three weapons function together as God’s original ruling purpose for man is fulfilled. Today I’m posting the “Ship of the Kingdom” diagram that I have shared several times, as it is a summary of their ideas. I present…

Solid, biblical churches today, in one way or another, teach or mention the first three of our four  pillars in our “Theology for Dummies” course of study—1.) “God is absolutely sovereign,” 2.) “Man is absolutely sinful,” and 3.) “God relates to man absolutely by grace alone.” However, today’s churches are generally silent about the fourth—4.) ”Now what do I do?” This seems strange, since the Bible’s very first mention of man at all (Genesis 1:26-28) was at his creation when God declared WHY HE…

For the past few weeks, we have established God’s absolutes—His sovereignty, our sinfulness, and His forgiveness. We struggle with each of these absolutes, because since the Fall, we are all PERFORMANCE ADDICTS. We have an unconscious, universal  addiction to desperately wanting to be like God ourselves. We all want to be our own decider, as we each strive to obey God’s Law, and we fight to preserve our own free-will at all costs!. This means that we each think we are the ultimate determiners…

We have now navigated through three of the four topics that constitute our “Theology for Dummies” seminary course in some detail (not too much because we are, after all, “Dummies!”). What common idea has run through each topic so far? Here is a brief review: 1.) God is absolutely sovereign; 2.) Man is absolutely sinful, 3.) God relates to man absolutely by Grace alone.  Even we, who must qualify as theological dummies to get credit for this course, can see that the common thread…

I concluded last week’s posting about the utter, absolute wickedness of man with the following statement: ”One would think a clear and expanding divine revelation of such personal wickedness, as defined by God Himself, would be very discouraging, if not devastating, to me, particularly after a full life-time of ‘pursuing God. and His work.’ But, strangely enough, I am finding myself REJOICING, and literally bursting with what I am learning! Next week I’ll tell you specifically WHY I feel that way.” So, now it’s…

Yes, we are all theologians because we all have ideas about God; does He exist, and if He does, what is He like? We are in the process of looking at the four, cornerstone theological truths that I call “Theology for Dummies.” We saw last week the first of these cornerstones is 1.) God is absolutely sovereign. We saw that this theological point, if true (and we saw a number of verses that left us with no doubt that the Bible teaches that He…

In 1518 Catholic monk Martin Luther presented to his Augustinian Order a clarification and amplification of the shockingly critical 95 theses that had been famously nailed to the Wittenberg Church door a year earlier. These 28 statements are called the Heidelberg Disputation, and they are the source of many of the ideas we have been discussing in this blog. This includes the idea that God’s will is naturally, spontaneously and  unconsciously (NSU) performed in us by the Holy Spirit. In the Heidelberg Disputation, Luther…

We saw last week that the two irreplaceable factors for me to live as a Spirit-led believer who is “living by faith” are 1.) living as a little child who 2.) walks in the light with my brothers and sisters about my sin. It takes God’s divine revelation in my heart in order to see this truth experientially. This is, as we saw last week, ginosko (experiential) knowledge, and not simply eido (intellectual) knowledge.  However, I firmly believe that once He has this for…

In our previous posting we emphasized an amazing truth of which much of the church is unaware—we are all ADDICTED to the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil! When Adam ate of that fruit in the Garden, the whole human race was dramatically and permanently altered. We, as Adam’s future descendants who were “in him,” moved permanently away from simply trusting that everything God told us was true, right, and unquestioningly obeyed. Instead, in that act of independence…