Articles

In Romans 16, the apostle Paul sends his greetings to dozens of his friends and fellow workers in Rome. Some, like Prisca and Aquila, are familiar names. Others, like Epaenetus, appear nowhere else in the Bible. They played a role in Paul’s monumental ministry, yet we know next to nothing about them. Even so, God knows them. They share Christ’s reward, and they’ve added their voices to the chorus of heavenly praise.

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The crucifixion of Jesus Christ was an amazing act of divine intervention to save sinners. In the cross, God imported all the wrath of the judgment day into a moment of time, dying in the place of those who believe, bearing their punishment, settling the score, and crediting them with a righteousness they didn’t earn so that they can live with Him forever.

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On October 21, 1805, one of the most famous sea battles in modern warfare occurred: At the Battle of Trafalgar, the British troops soundly defeated the French and Spanish fleets.

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“We … thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.” (1 Thessalonians 2:13)

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Everyone seeks comfort—not just in the sense of material prosperity but also in the sense of assurance, stability, or, perhaps chief of all, happiness. The quest for happiness is universal, transcending barriers of race and geography and time. And many regard it as an eternal quest, an unanswerable question.

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After Jesus fasted in the wilderness for forty days and nights, the devil tempted Him to turn stones into loaves of bread—something the Son of God surely could have done in that moment. But instead of performing that miracle, Jesus quoted Deuteronomy 8:3, saying, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4).

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In one of the most perplexing books of the Bible, Ecclesiastes, we are introduced to “the Preacher,” a king in Jerusalem—perhaps King Solomon—who set out to discover what was worthwhile in the short space of his life.

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The words we say indicate what’s on our minds. Prayer probes even deeper, revealing what is going on not only in our minds but also in our hearts. As our use of money and time tell something of our priorities, so, too, do our prayers.

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The Scriptures sing a number of melodic lines about Jesus. John Calvin identified three in particular as the munus triplex,¹ the threefold dimension of our Lord’s ministry: Jesus is Prophet, declaring God’s glory; He is Priest, intervening to make atonement for sin; and He is King, ruling over God’s kingdom. The third of these—Jesus as the Divine King who governs His church and exercises “all authority in heaven and on earth” (Matt. 28:18)—is a particular source of encouragement to Christians.

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For many, the nativity is an isolated scene in the biblical story, more familiar as holiday décor than as Holy Scripture. It’s like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle bearing the partial image of a baby in a manger: Few seem to know where it fits into the picture of the Bible’s commands and promises, let alone human history. Instead, it has been framed on its own, sentimentalized as a moral lesson about feeding the homeless, putting coins in the red kettle, and just trying to make a difference—“because, after all, isn’t giving and working together what Christmas is all about?”

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