Yearly Archives: 2012

If someone were to ask you, a neighbour, a fellow worker or fellow student, ‘What exactly is the gospel?’ what would you say? Perhaps I could ask you to stop reading this article, pick up a pen (or turn on your computer), and write in a few brief sentences what is the heart of the […]

Judas Iscariot seems a most unlikely choice to be one of the disciples. He turned out to be a thief, the betrayer of the Lord Jesus, and a graceless man. But Jesus made no mistake; he did not act in ignorance; indeed we are told that he ‘needed not that any should testify of man: […]

On the whole, pastors in the West today minister without seeing revival on a large scale. Yet many of the role models we have adopted from history did labour in revival times: Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and Charles Spurgeon, among them. They have a great deal to teach us, of course. But their very success, […]

All I knew about Ernest Kevan before reading this book* was that he was the author of The Grace of Law (1964), a study of Puritan teaching on the place of God’s law in the Christian life (the published version of his doctoral thesis), but this useful account of his life introduced me to the […]

Charles Hodge (1797-1878) embodied the ethos of Old Princeton, whose two hundredth anniversary we celebrate this year [2012]. Hodge was not the passionate pulpiteer that Princeton’s first professor, Archibald Alexander, was. Nor did he enjoy the sheer brilliance of his celebrated pupil and successor, Benjamin B. Warfield. In the fifty-eight years that Hodge taught at […]

‘Build up, build up, prepare the way, remove every obstacle out of the way of My people.’ For thus says the high and exalted One, who lives forever, whose name is Holy, ‘I dwell on a high and holy place, and also with the contrite and lowly of spirit in order to revive the spirit […]

Whom have I in heaven but Thee? And besides Thee, I desire nothing on earth. Psalm 73:25 After John Wesley’s ‘heart was strangely warmed’ at Aldersgate in 1738, he preached and laboured for the gospel, unabated, until his death in 1791. In that fifty-three year period he wrote over two hundred books, compiled dictionaries in […]

My dear mother, Johanna Beeke, aged 92, passed on into the presence of her Saviour at 3:45 a.m. on July 23, 2012. Though words seem hollow right now, I have tried to write a little of the tremendous legacy she left us five children and our spouses. Some of this material I used for leading […]

On Monday 10th September 2012 I had the privilege of attending a minister’s fraternal in Mount Merrion Free Presbyterian Church, Belfast, where the guest speaker was Dr Joel Beeke. Dr Beeke is minister of the Heritage Reformed Congregation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and President of Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary. The subject he had chosen to […]

Graham Miller was a friend and mentor to many – not least to me – and ‘I thank my God in every remembrance of [him].’ Many will echo this sentiment as they read A Day’s March Nearer Home, compiled from his journals, formed into an autobiography by the Rev Iain Murray, and published by the […]

This is a book* which draws the reader in as it outlines and analyses all the events and elements of the crucifixion, which he sees as the central event of all Scripture. In so doing he relates these events back to Old Testament prophecies and forward to New Testament fulfillments and outcomes in the Early […]

If the world hated you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. John 15:18 At one time I taught logic at our Classical Christian School on St. Simons Island, GA to seventh graders, and the focal point of that first year curriculum was to demonstrate all the logical fallacies which people […]

From Krabbendijke, the Netherlands, the family of my father John emigrated to America when he was seven years old, and settled in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He married Johanna VanStrien at the age of nineteen; they were blessed with fifty-three years of marriage. He was brought under saving convictions at the age of twenty-seven when the Lord […]

Let no one look down on your youthfulness. 1 Timothy 4:12a Jesus was thirty when he began his public ministry (Luke 3:23), and Peter must have been close to Jesus’ age when he began to follow him. Some say Saul of Tarsus was in his twenties when he was converted on the road to Damascus. […]

The death of B. B. Warfield in 1921 effectively marked the demise of the old Princeton Theological Seminary, for it was ‘reorganised’ in 1929 along liberal theological lines, but for 110 years its aim had been to produce godly pastors and faithful teachers of God’s Word. This volume* commemorates the efforts of the pious and […]