Covenant Theology

A fashion designer goes about creating clothes for people with a keen sense of how the parts and the whole will best fit together. The designer does not just throw fabric, thread, and needles into the wind but carefully draws patterns and then every stitch brings the pieces together. So ... God is...

Genesis 1-2 reveals that God created in an orderly way and a cosmic order with everything having a function based on what he created it to be. In other words, when we use the phrase “the design of creation” we ought to understand the word “creation” as both a noun and a verb. Creation refers not...

Throughout Genesis chapters 1 and 2, the reader understands that it is God alone who gets to determine and pronounce what is good (each of His created days - 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31) as well as what is not good (that man should be alone - 2:18). It is for this reason that God put a reminder, a...

In Genesis 1, humanity is created and introduced to us as ‘made in the image of God.’ The description of humanity in Genesis 1 is foundational for the Christian worldview. The moral and ethical implications abound from the single statement than humanity is made in God’s image. In this brief post,...

How important are the first chapters of Genesis to our understanding of the whole of Scripture? What happens to our perspective if we isolate Genesis 1-3 from the rest of God’s Word? Richard Barcellos drops in. He’s written Getting the Garden Right: Adam’s Work and God’s Rest in Light of Christ...

Primary or Secondary Importance? Jonathan and James are enjoying a conversation about doctrines of primary and secondary importance. What are these doctrines, and how may we distinguish them? Can our clear understanding of certain doctrines help us determine their importance? Our hosts carefully...

A friend of mine, a fellow pastor, spent some time as an ultra-runner. Most runners, who run with any sort of seriousness, seem to knock out a 5k or 10k for fun. Some of those will take some more time to train and get a 1/2 Marathon done. Fewer are those who go the whole 26.2 miles for Marathoner...

Not too long ago at a small party, I was chatting with a young lady who had just switched churches. She had left a rather large, seeker-sensitive type of church in the Washington D.C. area, a church which put a lot of emphasis on the worship experience. And she had now joined a much smaller,...

The One Who Endures Can we claim the doctrine of perseverance is the distinct doctrine in the Reformed tradition? Jay Collier does. When thinking about the Reformed faith, we typically about think election and predestination. But in his recent book , Jay makes a strong case for the distinctiveness...

Quite a while ago, I met a woman with whom I had attended a particular church several years earlier. At the time of our meeting we were both worshiping in different congregations. In the midst of the conversation, having discovered that I was reformed in my theology, she informed me that she too...