Jesus From Above
Stephen Venable
Where do you start with getting to know Jesus more? It might seem like the answer to that question would be straightforward: start with what is clear. If you begin with what is plain and comprehensible, then you could move from there toward the loftier truths about Him. Established firmly on the footholds of the […]
Jesus and the Battlefield of Beauty
Stephen Venable
“…beauty is the battlefield where God and Satan contend with each other for the hearts of men.” (Fyodor Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov) The forerunner stands as an emissary of the jealous heart of Jesus and fights to apprehend the distracted affections of His people that He alone is worthy of. The day of His wedding […]
Heralds and Friends
Stephen Venable
John answered and said, “A man can receive nothing unless it has been given to him from heaven… He who has the bride is the bridegroom; but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore this joy of mine is fulfilled. He must increase, but […]
Is Someone Missing?
Stephen Venable
There is a residue that still lingers within the Protestant tradition. As a result of what Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and the other reformers were responding to (distortion of the doctrine of justification by faith primarily communicated in Pauline literature), in their generation and centuries following there emerged an overemphasis on the effects of Christ’s saving […]
They Stayed
Stephen Venable
“Many a morning have I stood on the porch of my house, and looking northward, have seen the smoke arise from villages that have never heard of Jesus Christ. I have seen, at different times, the smoke of a thousand villages—villages whose people are without Christ, without God, and without hope in the world … […]
The Morning Star
Stephen Venable
Aside from God Himself, the primary hope set forth in the New Testament is the resurrection of the body in the eschatological kingdom of Jesus Christ. Any view of reality or system of thought that does not keep this central is in dissonance with the biblical vision of the future. This vision is intended to […]
The Heart of Eschatology
Stephen Venable
Eschatology is not simply a question of “what is going to happen?” The deeper question at stake in eschatology is “what is God like?” The drama of the end of the age is primarily about the revelation of God’s character and the culmination of His mission. A distorted interpretation of eschatology is, therefore, reciprocally intertwined […]
The Great Divide – Part 2
Stephen Venable
Ideas, actions, and lives can all lie very close to one another at their inception and look very similar. However, what appears enmeshed and indistinguishable at first can actually be flowing in opposite directions. Given enough time, the delineation will become strikingly clear. Just as the snow on the Great Divide eventually melts and begins to cascade […]
The Great Divide
Stephen Venable
Drive through the Midwest for long enough and a surreal experience begins to overtake you. The highway cuts across the flat landscape and disappears into the horizon with no sign of ever relenting from its monotonous course. Staring off into the distance you begin to fear that you are not on the interstate at all, […]
The Prison Called Freedom
Stephen Venable
“They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption. For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved.” (2 Peter 2:19) In our earliest and most formative years within this culture, a very potent message was communicated to us. It has continued to to be instilled in our souls from virtually every […]
The School of Sickness
Stephen Venable
I woke up yesterday morning thinking it was going to be a normal day. “Normal” for our family includes various struggles with chronic illness, but I wasn’t expecting anything beyond that. Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, sickness decided to pay us a visit in the form of a vomiting 6-year-old. No one who is sick or […]
Beholding Jesus Specifically-Part 2
Stephen Venable
In the previous post I used the example of the divinity of Jesus to raise the question of what the implications would be for someone if the knowledge of Jesus never moves from being general to specific. For one thing, they will probably stop answering the door when a Mormon or a Jehovah’s Witness comes […]
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