Topic Archives: Man & Sin

Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God.’ (James 1:13) Charles Templeton, a newspaper reporter from Toronto, after a night of carousing and drunkenness, says that he had a conversion experience. By 1945 he was preaching with Billy Graham at Youth for Christ rallies around the U.S. and Europe. […]

Luke 11:24-26 When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes seven other spirits […]

Satan makes great efforts to keep sinners in his kingdom. His evil hope is that they will continue to dishonour God for the rest of their lives and spend eternity still under his power. Thus Paul refers to the evil work of ‘the god of this world’: he ‘hath blinded the minds of them which […]

Oh that they had such a heart in them that would fear me (Deuteronomy 5:29). On October 23, 1740, after preaching the previous weekend in Northampton with Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, the great eighteenth century evangelist, made his way south along the Connecticut River to Hartford, then Wethersfield, and finally to Middletown. Nathan Cole, a […]

Sin entered into the world through one man (Romans 5:12). I delight in the doctrine of justification by faith – the marvellous truth that God declares the unrighteous sinner (bound for hell due to his guilt) as righteous, putting him into the category of being righteous through the person and work of Christ. Even the […]

Sin is everywhere around us in a fallen world. We come in contact with it constantly; the media bring some particularly-awful examples of it to our attention again and again. And no matter where we look, in any part of the earth, we will find sin and its terrible consequences staring us in the face. […]

And the Lord said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land.’ (Genesis 6:7) Most unbelievers I know trip over the Biblical doctrine of God’s wrath and hell. They ask, ‘How can I possibly believe in and worship a God who would send people to hell? I thought […]

God is infinite; he therefore has supreme authority over all his creatures, and it is their duty to submit absolutely to him in everything he requires. Adam and Eve showed this degree of respect for God immediately after the creation; they submitted completely to him in all their thinking, in their entire motivation, and in […]

. . . the woman, whom thou gavest me, gave me the fruit and I ate of it. (Genesis 3:12) You cannot live one moment of one day without experiencing the effects of Adam’s fall into sin. It adversely affects everything. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the civil unrest in Iran, genocide, racism, tsunamis, […]

A tender farewell The fellowship meal of Abraham with the Lord and the two angels was over, and one part of God’s mission in leaving heaven and coming to Mamre to the patriarch and his wife had been completed. The Lord had assured Sarah that she was going to give birth to a son within […]

Many today assume that things are best when nature rules. Examples we see are such things as a market for ‘natural (organic) foods’, ‘natural (alternative) medicine,’ and for the preservation of ‘natural (unmanaged) resources.’ There are not a few Christians who readily accept this outlook – that nature is best when left alone and allowed […]

‘Man is an enigma, whose only solution can be found in God.’ So wrote Herman Bavinck, the great Dutch theologian. What Bavinck wrote is immediately applicable to fallen men and women. Science cannot explain who we are and what we are. Science cannot tell us what will ultimately become of us. It cannot explain the […]

If we are to live healthy spiritual and emotional lives as believers, it is vital that we understand clearly the true character of the hearts of those who are regenerated by God’s Holy Spirit. In particular, it is imperative that we understand the distinction between wickedness and wretchedness. The Bible tells us that the heart […]

Be imitators of God . . . walk in love. (Ephesians 5:1) Forty-five per cent of people living in America claim to have had a born again experience, but the born again people have virtually the same levels of divorce, adultery, fornication and use of pornography as the rest of the population. Evangelicals are those […]

‘All have sinned’, Paul reminds us (Rom. 6:23). Because of our fall in Adam, we are all coming short of the glory of God; there is never a moment in our lives when we meet God’s demands for perfect obedience to his law. While we remain in a state of nature, our sin leaves us […]