The Serpent Didn’t Lie about Death

Humans have a natural fear of death, but that fear has caused us to miss the true lie of the serpent in Genesis 3. In the story Adam and Eve are told that they can eat of any tree in the garden except the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, “for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” (Gen....

The Hang-Around God

Long before anyone ever came up with a word like “omnipresence”, humans believed that the gods lived “up there,” in the heavens. That’s right, before “Heaven” came to mean “the spiritual realm where the forgiven go to live in bliss forever” it simply meant “the sky and everything else up there.” It’s where...

To Rule Over Creation

In Genesis 1, God made humans in his image and entrusted them with sovereignty over the rest of creation. This sovereignty over creation isn’t a despotic rule to do whatever we want with and to the earth, imposing our will on it. Have you ever tried to do that to a garden, forcing the soil to bend to your...

Abandoning Left/Right Thinking

Everybody should know their place and keep their place. Including God. Right? One of the unfortunate effects of the Enlightenment worldview is that God was kicked upstairs (to borrow N.T. Wright’s wonderful phrase) and we don’t know how to handle it when he comes down and tries to enter into the...