The First Commandment: No Other Gods We come now to our exposition of the Ten Commandments.[1] Following the Westminster Larger Catechism, we can divide them into one group of four, pertaining to “our duty to God,” and a group of six, describing “our duty to man.”[2] So the structure of the Decalogue parallels Jesus’ “two …

In the often invisible, yet real warfare between the forces of good and evil, will this decision likely serve the forces of good or the forces of evil? Beneath everything else recorded in biblical history is the great warfare between Satan, God’s rebellious creature, and God himself. Satan is malevolent, attempting to destroy all true …

Biblical Christianity makes two indisputable affirmations, yet not without generating fierce controversy. First, God controls in some sense all that transpires in time, space, and history, including the course of human lives. Second, human beings are responsible moral agents who freely choose the direction that their lives take. Our ability to make meaningful choices that …

Untold evils lurk in the ever-present darkness of our disturbed world, a world that is not what it ought to be, a world that is often cold and inhospitable, where pain and suffering seem to be the rule of the day. Consider the story of Louis Zamperini.[1] Louie was a promising young American track champion who ran in …

Plato was the greatest student of Socrates and one of the greatest philosophers of all time. The greatest philosophers (among whom I include also Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, and Hegel) tend to be those who bring together many ideas that at first seem disparate. As an example: Parmenides said that Being is fundamentally changeless, Heraclitus that …