Yearly Archives: 2014

The Occasion It is a blessing to experience warm-hearted Christian fellowship in an ecumenical conference which holds high the standard of truth while becoming a broad expression of the world-wide unity of the Church of Christ. Rev. L.W. Bilkes of Grand Rapids, Michigan and myself – Pieter VanderMeyden – were privileged to be delegated by […]

Do not grieve the Holy Spirit . . . Do not quench the Spirit . . . Insulting the Spirit of grace (Ephesians 4:30, 1 Thessalonians 5:19, Hebrews 10:29). If the filling of the Holy Spirit yields conviction of sin, conversion, and sanctification;1 if the believer can expect his words to bring forth Holy Spirit […]

Recognizing the special attention that the Church of Christ gives to the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ at this time of the year, the Banner has selected some particularly helpful books for your devotional reading. These books will help you better understand who Jesus is, what He came to accomplish on the […]

Worship services in evangelical churches do not mention sin, a major part of the gospel message, Dr. Cornelius Plantinga, senior research fellow at the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, said Monday [March 24, 2014] at the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Faith Angle Forum. ‘In very many evangelical and confessionally Reformed churches these days, sin […]

At the Reformation in Scotland, John Knox (probably born 500 years ago, in 1514) noted how potently God hath performed . . . the promises made to the Servants of God by the Prophet Esaias, ‘They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall lift up the wings as the eagles: they […]

The message of the angel Gabriel to Zechariah in the temple was that his wife Elizabeth would bear him a son, that this son was to be called John, and that he would be ‘great in the sight of the Lord’ (Luke 1:13-15). There is a right use and a wrong use to which these […]

We have no idea what we take for granted in the United States. I emigrated from Syria to American when I was 19 years of age, and became an American citizen four years later, and then a Christian many years later. As a photojournalist for twenty-five years, I have experienced up close and personal this […]

A review by Kenneth D. Macleod of David B. Calhoun’s Our Southern Zion: Old Columbia Seminary (1828-1927).1 The author has previously written two highly-interesting volumes on Princeton Theological Seminary, from its inception in 1812 until it was transformed into a more liberal institution in 1929.2,3 He has now turned his attention to a smaller, but […]

Nine congregants were ready for baptism, all of whom but my second daughter, Shlomit, were immigrants from the former Soviet Union. God had worked wonders among us. Four were couples who had turned to the Lord together. We hired the CM&A Church building in Jerusalem, reserved three buses and made preparations. The Orthodox, who almost […]

Book Review: God in the Whirlwind: How the holy-love of God reorients our world, David F. Wells [Nottingham: IVP, 2014], 272 pages, paperback. Starting with God in the Wasteland (1994), David Wells has written four influential books exposing and critiquing Evangelicalism’s compromise with modern Western cultural norms and trends. The focus of his new book […]

The great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, infamously referred to the book of James as ‘an epistle of straw’ in his preface to the German New Testament. What is less well known or talked about, is that Luther also praised the book of James in the same preface. Luther said about James, ‘I praise it and […]

This interesting volume, Pleading for a Reformation Vision: The Life and Selected Writings of William Childs Robinson (1897-1982),1 is what a Christian biography should be; not just a laudatory ‘life’ (for we should guard against the tendency to a ‘Protestant hagiography’) but a work in two halves: firstly a detailed life of the subject, and […]

2014 is the centenary anniversary celebration of Leon Morris’ birth on 15 March 1914. Leon Morris is arguably Australia’s greatest biblical scholar, best known for his masterful works on the biblical teaching about the atonement [The Atonement: Its Meaning and Significance] as well as studies on The Gospel of John. Leon Morris was also Principal […]

In the mid-nineteenth century, archaeologists digging around the Palatine Hill in Rome unearthed a house that formed one part of the palace of the emperor Caligula, an unpleasant man who reigned in Rome from A.D. 37 until he was murdered in A.D. 41. In the years following Caligula’s death, the imperial palace continued to grow, […]

This companion volume1 to The Face of Jesus Christ,2 contains 20 sermons, in which Archibald G. Brown concentrates on the Bible’s teaching on God as Creator, Judge and Saviour. Mr Brown clearly had a most fertile imagination as the titles of some of those sermons suggest, such as: ‘Noah’s Telescope’, ‘A Rough Night at Sandown’, […]