Topic Archives: Theology

I Wish Someone Would Explain Hebrews to Me!* So do I, and so do a lot of other believers who, reading Hebrews, find it a rich mine of Divine teaching and, sensing there is something special about it, nevertheless don’t really know quite what to make of it. Well, Stuart Olyott has done us the […]

Until recently the name of Archibald Brown was just a name to us. We must confess, however, how interested we have become in reading his biography1, and now with pleasure we have read his sermons (twenty-two in the book2), and commend them to our readers. It will be said, ‘There is not the depth that […]

. . . wrath and indignation on the contentious, on those who disobey the truth, who obey unrighteousness. There will be tribulation and distress for every soul of man who does evil, of the Jew first and also of the Greek. Romans 2:8-9 In August 79 A.D. the people of Pompeii awoke to nearby Mt. […]

Richard Phillips is the Senior Minister of Second Presbyterian Church in Greenville, South Carolina, USA. The seven terse and insightful chapters of this brief work on The Death of the Saviour1 cover John 19:13 to John 19:42. The chapters first began life as sermons preached to the author’s Greenville congregation. No doubt, they have been […]

Who is the Wretched Man of Romans 7? In Romans 7 we find the statement, ‘O wretched man that I am!’ It is made by no one less than the Apostle Paul. A question that is often asked is, does he speak here as a regenerate or unregenerate person? The answer to this question is […]

From the Foreword by Michael Reeves, which gives us a helpful summary of Thomas Goodwin’s life, we learn that The Heart of Christ in Heaven Towards Sinners on Earth1, was first published in 1651. It soon became Goodwin’s most popular work. The book is in three parts. In the first, entitled, ‘Outward demonstrations of the […]

Divine Conduct, or The Mystery of Providence can be found in Volume 4 of Flavel’s Works, published by the Trust.1 It is also available separately in a Puritan Paperback edition, The Mystery of Providence.2 For this review, Volume 4 of the Works was used, and the page numbers cited correspond with that. John Flavel (JF) […]

Puritan Paperbacks which is the series into which this volume fits, may be familiar to some readers, and they will know what to expect from this addition to it, under the imprint of The Banner of Truth Trust. The latter is to be thanked for re-printing the 1861 edition of Goodwin’s treatise. It would have been […]

Then Ezra blessed the Lord the great God. And all the people answered, ‘Amen, Amen!’ while lifting up their hands; then they bowed low and worshipped the Lord with their faces to the ground. Nehemiah 8:6 God had promised through Jeremiah a return from the exile after seventy years (Jer. 25:11-12, 29:10) and indeed God […]

The doctrine of creation is one of the most fundamental areas of the Bible’s teaching. The first statement of Scripture is: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’. It was he who did so; it was not evolution – a random, uncontrolled process – that brought everything into existence. And God created […]

The Christian life is lived at the intersection of the ages, this present age and the age of the world to come that has already, in Christ, punctuated this present age. In Christ, believers are a ‘new creation’ (2 Cor. 5:17). Paul does not mean here that believers are inwardly renewed men and women, but […]

What would you say is the fundamental doctrine of the Christian Faith? For many of us, the instinctive answer would be, ‘justification by faith alone, in Christ alone’. There is no doubt, or should be no doubt, that this is a biblical and evangelical fundamental. Didn’t Martin Luther describe justification by faith alone, in Christ […]

This book is aimed at those new to the Christian faith who would like to understand more about 66 books that make up the Bible. After an excellent introduction, there is a chapter devoted to each book (except for 1 &2 Chronicles which are considered together). Pastor Crooks first of all outlines the background and […]

The title above, as many readers will recognize, is from answer 16 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism (and Larger Catechism 22). It expresses a central truth of Scripture and reflects the universal confession of the church about Adam. Why then the added question mark? Not because non-Christians widely reject this truth, as they have for […]

‘How did we get here?’ is a question that is always relevant and often illuminating. Yet contemporary evangelicals don’t ask it as often as they should. In his book Revival and Revivalism: The Making and Marring of American Evangelicalism, 1750-1858,1 Iain Murray tells a story that helps explain how evangelicals – Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and […]