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As a practical, house-bound shut-in, I am limited to this blog and the phone calls and e-mails I receive in response, both in agreement and disagreement. That’s not a substitute for church, but it’s the best I can do. I deeply appreciate your participation with me. In last week’s blog posting, I related my fitful, reluctant 5-year journey to become an Evangelical Universalist (EU). Yes, I now believe that Hell is TEMPORARY, REDEMPTIVE DISCIPLINE, rather than PERMANENT, PUNITIVE PUNISHMENT! All of God’s wrath and…

Last week’s concluding Scripture in this blog posting was Ephesians 2:8, 9: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that (faith is) not of yourselves (not anything you have of your own), it (that faith) is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast”. I interpreted these two verses to be telling us that we can neither muster enough careful obedience, nor scholarly reason, nor even the simple faith to believe the gospel! We cannot even “make a…

Last week we concluded our posting by proposing what I believe to constitute what “walking by faith,” or  “walking in the Spirit,” ( i.e., “Jesus living through me – Galatians 2:20) actually looks like: 1.) We are walking by faith like “little children“ (Matthew 18:2-5), only knowing and believing what our Heavenly Daddy has told us, experientially, in our hearts (ginosko knowledge), rather than simply intellectually, in our heads (eido knowledge).  2.) As “little children,” we “walk in the light” with our brothers and…

Martin Luther taught that there are only two foundational messages  God is teaching us in the Bible: HUS LAW AND HUS CRACE. They form the two edges of the Sword of the Word of God (Hebrews 4:12, Revelation 1:16). In God’s plan for mankind, they are both absolutely crucial, both supplying a message the church must believe, embrace, stand firm upon, and then proclaim.  The sword of the word of God always has these two edges. As we have been investigating the Ship of the…

Surprisingly, this problem seems to have afflicted the Reformed branch of the Christian faith—those that are the most eager to build the Ship of the Kingdom we have been discussing. We can meticulously build it, carefully, according to the Bible, as we have done in these postings, yet nothing really happens. No wind in the sails!  That’s because we are all born  unconsciously addicted to obedience to the law as our way to live. It may be the law of the Bible, Sharia law…

For the past weeks, we have been investigating the three institutional weapons God has given us to use in accomplishing our original task for which we were created—ruling over the earth. We have used a diagram reflecting Dutch Reformed theologian/politician Abraham Kyper’s “sphere sovereignty” theology to illustrate how those institutional weapons function together.  Each sphere has its own, unique contribution. This idea is depicted beautifully by the diagram—the “Ship of the Kingdom”—reproduced below. This diagram represents the “big picture;” how the daily activities of…

Last week we discussed the fact that there is no neutrality in life; as Jesus said in Luke 11:23 that we are all either “for Me or against Me.” This is true in EVERY AREA of life, including civil government, i.e., POLITICS! This is an “inconvenient truth” which a huge percentage of our evangelical churches either ignore or resist. When was the last time you heard a pastor preach a sermon on the biblical characteristics of civil government, followed by a discussion on which…

  Every nation has a god, today in 2025, just as did all the nation-states that made up Canaan as Abraham first entered it 4000 years ago.  We are created to worship God, and worship we will, either the true God of the Bible or some other god we have chosen/erected ourselves. If we are Christians, we have answered that question—personally. The question, however, remains: which god will we, AS A NATION, choose to worship. Our primary choices today are Jehovah, the God of…

My first reaction to the news of Charlie Kirk’s assassination was “Oh God, how could You let this happen?” Any Christian I talked with about this tragic event, who is interested in the functioning of our civil government, agreed with my evaluation— they had never seen a young man like Charlie Kirk who more perfectly illustrated the attitude of “firmness and compassion” that God wants us to have. Most of us even saw him as J.D. Vance’s probable VP in 2028, and after 8…

In earlier blog postings I have introduced what I believe to be the definitive book on the biblical basis for our U.S. Constitution—The Roots of the American Republic, by Rev. E.C. Wines, written in the mid-nineteenth century and republished in 1997 by the Plymouth Rock Foundation. Following is a brief summary of the first four of 17 characteristics of a biblical civil government Wines mined from the Bible. Following that is a mention of some of the remaining 13 biblical characteristics he sees in…