Creation Care: A Biblical Mandate

At each stage of creation in Genesis 1, God likes what he has created. He declares that the world is good. When it’s all done, he declares that the creation is very good. And then something goes very wrong. First the humans decide that they don’t want to be what God created them to be—humans. They want to...

Let God Be God

In the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3, Adam and Eve committed the original sin—“original” not in the sense that it was The-First-Sin-Ever but rather that it’s the first sin that any of us take that leads to all the rest—when they ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In other words,...

Do We Really Want to See God?

“Purity of heart,” Søren Kiekegaard once said, “is to will one thing.” That’s an interesting idea, isn’t it, since purity of heart is generally thought of as something approaching sinlessness, and to will one thing—and only one thing—seems, well, a bit obsessive. I mean, aren’t we all striving for balance...

“You Won’t Die”: Was the Serpent Right?

In Genesis 3, the Man and the Woman eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, even though they had been warned that “in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Genesis 2:17). That’s a pretty specific warning. It specifies 1) what they are and aren’t supposed to do; 2) what will happen if they...

Impossible

A Message Delivered on Christmas Eve, 2014 When you read the gospels it is evident that the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke aren’t the same. That’s because Matthew and Luke aren’t interested in telling what happened, but what it means. Matthew says everything he wants to say with Magi, and Luke says...

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