Blog 65: 2.8.25 – 2.8.32
Institutes 2.8.28-32Calvin on the Sabbath. The “Continental view”! “The purpose of this commandment is that, being dead to our own inclinations and works, we should meditate on the Kingdom of…
Sinclair Ferguson
Blog 64: 2.8.20 – 2.8.27
Ungodly people always take the higher ground when arguing with God and the lower ground when living their own lives. Is God unjust to visit iniquities on successive generations? On…
Blog 63: 2.8.15 – 2.8.19
How misunderstood the Law of Moses has been! It begins with and is grounded in–grace. Always! For the Exodus from Egypt was but the foreshadowing of the greater Exodus of…
Blog 62: 2.8.8 – 2.8.14
There is more to obedience to God’s commandments than meets the eye! Calvin’s reason? The law is full of synecdoche. Synecdoche?–that un-spellable figure of speech from High School English in…
Blog 61: 2.8.2 – 2.8.7
John Calvin is full of surprises. As he comes to expound the Decalogue (the third longest chapter in the work, after his expositions of Prayer and the Lord’s Supper), how…
Blog 10: 1.5.6 – 1.5.11
God has revealed himself above and below man, in the cosmos; he has also revealed himself in man, since he is God’s image. But we might also say that God…
Blog 9: 1.5.2 – 1.5.5
The heavens declare God’s glory, and so the astronomer is also a theologian who explores the Book of Nature in which God has inscribed his glory. But “what is man…
Blog 8: 1.4.1 – 1.5.1
Man is God’s image. The implanted knowledge of God is universal. Yes, perverted and fragmented by the fall, but still real.. It gives rise to the seed of religion, notes…
Blog 7: 1.2.2 – 1.3.3
If my first question about God is “What is he?” then I am already mistaken. The really important question is “Who is he?” “What is God like?” The biblical answer…
Blog 6: 1.1.1 – 1.2.1
Calvin’s Institutes opens with a strikingly important sentence–crafted first by a young man in his mid-twenties and only fine tuned between its first appearance in 1536 and its final expression…