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Ian Hamilton Resources

The life of faith is rarely straightforward and uncomplicated. Every moment of every day we have to contend with ‘the world, the flesh and the devil.’ Added to this triumvirate of enemies, there is the reality that our circumstances often seem in opposition to God’s promises. These hard facts are one reason why Christians should […]

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Category Articles
Date March 16, 2023
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Banner Trustee and Magazine Editor Ian Hamilton explains why John Calvin’s commentaries are worth reading. If you have never read one, watch the video and consider picking up one of the titles listed below. John Calvin Commentaries

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Category Articles
Date January 21, 2020
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In his perfect wisdom and kind grace God has given to his church, from the dawn of time, great and godly leaders. We need only think of Abraham, the father of all who believe, Moses the man of God, and David the man after God’s own heart. Almost the whole of one lengthy chapter in […]

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Date November 21, 2018
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Ian Hamilton discusses his first time reading John G. Paton’s Autobiography as a young Christian, and the ‘seismic impact’ it had on his Christian walk.

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Category Articles
Date August 29, 2017
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The theme of this year’s Banner of Truth Ministers’ conference is The Living and Enduring Word of God. We thought that would be a most admirable and appropriate title for this year, the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation was essentially the recovery of the authority and sufficiency of Holy Scripture in the […]

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Category Articles
Date April 13, 2017
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‘Honour everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the emperor’ (1 Peter 2:17). Most reading this will have some idea what it means to honour everyone, to love the brotherhood and to honour the emperor. But how many know what it means to ‘Fear God’? This is not an abstract or arcane question. We need […]

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Category Articles
Date May 10, 2016
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The Bible, at times, makes for very uncomfortable reading. Consider these opening verses of 1 Kings 11:1-8: ‘Now King Solomon loved many foreign women, along with the daughter of Pharaoh: Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women, from the nations concerning which the Lord had said to the people of Israel, “You shall not enter […]

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Date February 24, 2016
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Psalm 106 makes for salutary reading. It celebrates the Lord’s remarkable rescuing kindnesses to his covenant people Israel and details his people’s disdain of his great mercies to them. It is hard to take in the persistent cavalier behaviour of Israel in the glowing light of God’s repeated mercies in delivering them from their enemies […]

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Category Articles
Date January 12, 2016
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You might, having read the title of this, wonder what is about to follow. Those of you who know even a little about a remarkable eighteenth century Scottish minister called Thomas Boston, will, however, have immediately recognised the source of my title. Boston’s Works run to twelve volumes and contain some lengthy theological treatises.1 When […]

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Category Articles
Date December 16, 2015
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There is a text in the Bible that is often misunderstood (one of many, sadly). Paul writes, ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him’ (1 Cor. 2:9). Preachers especially are prone to quote these words as if they were […]

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Category Articles
Date November 27, 2015
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The Bible is full of remarkable statements. One of the most remarkable is 1 Peter 2:17. Peter is instructing Christians how to live in an essentially Godless, anti-Christian society. He writes, ‘Honour everyone. Love the brothers. Fear God. Honour the emperor’. This is surely remarkable. Love the brothers and fear God we can readily understand; […]

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Category Articles
Date November 18, 2015
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One of the remarkable features of the early church was its preoccupation with the doctrine of God. Initially the concern of men like Athanasius (300-371) was to establish and defend the deity of Christ against men like Arius who taught that Jesus was a creature. Athanasius understood that if Jesus was not God in the […]

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Category Articles
Date August 10, 2015
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Have you ever read Ezekiel 16? If not, stop now and do so. There are surely few more disturbing chapters in the Bible. Ezekiel has been commissioned by God to bring his word of judgment to his faithless covenant people, a judgment that would culminate in the overwhelming devastation that Babylon would bring to Jerusalem […]

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Category Articles
Date June 3, 2015
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In 1524, Desiderius Erasmus, probably the foremost classical scholar in Europe, published a little book with the title Diatribe sue collatio de libero arbitrio (‘Discussion concerning free will’). Erasmus wrote the book to distance himself from the teachings of Martin Luther that were setting Europe ablaze and challenging the foundations of the papacy. Erasmus was […]

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Date April 27, 2015
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I am writing this en route to Cambridge after a flying (literally) visit to Glasgow. The week before Christmas, I answered the phone to be told that the police and fire service had to break into our apartment in Glasgow where one of our children is living and studying. Our daughter had not misbehaved; there […]

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Category Articles
Date February 9, 2015
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Herman Bavinck in his Reformed Dogmatics begins his exposition of the doctrine of God with these striking words: ‘Mystery is the life blood of dogmatics.’ Bavinck is not telling us that systematic theology is an impenetrable puzzle. Rather, he is saying that incomprehensible and inexplicable wonder lies at the very heart of God’s self-revelation to […]

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Date December 19, 2014
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From beginning to end the Christian life is a life of faith. ‘We live’, Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, ‘by faith and not by sight’ (2 Cor. 5:7). But what did Paul mean? What does it mean to live by faith and not by sight? To live by faith is to live your […]

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Category Articles
Date December 15, 2014
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I would like to ask you a question. But before I ask my question, I want first to prepare the way. The Bible has many ways to describe what a Christian is. A Christian is a forgiven sinner, a new creation in Christ, an adopted child of God, a heaven-bound pilgrim. One of the most […]

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Category Articles
Date November 12, 2014
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Paul’s Letter to the Romans is a pastoral tour de force. It is of course richly theological. Nowhere does Paul more deeply and beautifully open up to us the gospel of God’s saving grace in Christ. But Paul’s theology of grace is not an abstract exposition of doctrine. He is concerned to explain to the […]

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Category Articles
Date October 1, 2014
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The Christian life is a life of faith. More accurately, the Christian life is a life of faith in God. It is the object of faith that gives faith its lustre, and nothing more enriches, ennobles, and establishes faith than the God who made the heavens and the earth, who reigns in unrivalled splendour over […]

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Date July 28, 2014
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Soren Aabye Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher/theologian, described life as paddling in an ocean ten thousand fathoms deep. How right he was. This thought is no less and even more appropriate to the study of theology, the coherent teaching about himself that God has revealed to us in the Bible. Some of us know the […]

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Category Articles
Date June 4, 2014
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Recently I attended the communion service in Magdalene College chapel in Cambridge. The service was rich in Trinitarian worship, in elevated God-centred prayers, in excellent hymns and a fine, if too brief, sermon. As I sat and shared in the worship, this thought came to me, ‘How diverse the church of Jesus Christ is.’ Here […]

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Date April 25, 2014
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Why would anyone in their right mind believe the Bible, believe Jesus Christ, and believe that belonging to a Christian church was a sane and sensible thing to do? Reason 1 why you shouldn’t believe. The Bible! It is simply unbelievable. Who today in this modern, scientific, rational world believes in creation out of nothing […]

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Category Articles
Date February 28, 2014
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Sometimes reading a Puritan author can take you into another world. The Puritans are not always the easiest of men to read, though the difficulty is often over-hyped. However, what follows is essentially an extract from the Works of John Owen, Volume 2, pages 77-78.1 He has been expounding the Christian’s communion with Christ, showing […]

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Category Articles
Date February 3, 2014
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Book Review: From Heaven He Came and Sought Her: Definite Atonement in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective; edited by David and Jonathan Gibson, with contributions by Sinclair Ferguson, Henri Blocher, Paul Helm, Robert Letham, John Piper, Thomas Schriener and others. [Crossway Books, hardback, 704pp, $50/£25-£33 (also available on Kindle).] Historically referred to as ‘limited […]

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Category Book Reviews
Date January 24, 2014
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