As an example
Holy hatred: Hands that shed innocent blood
The story is told of a three-year-old girl with a pet tortoise. One day, the tortoise would not emerge from its shell, so the concerned little girl took the reptile to her mother. When her mother could not coax the animal out, she concluded…
Holy hatred: A lying tongue
On 11 September 2001, Tania Head was working for Merrill Lynch in the south tower of the World Trade Centre. After the second Boeing 767 ploughed into her floor, a dying colleague pleaded desperately with her to return his wedding ring to his wife….
Holy hatred: Haughty eyes
Finish this sentence: God hates … What is the first thing that comes to your mind? Adultery? Murder? Blasphemy? If you were to rank sins in terms of heinousness, what would your list look like? It is true, of course, that Christians should hate…
Holy hatred: Introduction
Jesus was once asked what is the greatest command in Scripture. His answer was simple: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” He said that this is “the great and…
Profaning the Name
There is a misnomer in Christian circles that all sin is equal in the eyes of God. This is perhaps based on a misunderstanding of texts like James 2:10, which reads, “Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty…
Confirmation bias and pet sins
I was recently reading my son a bedtime story from Ura Miller’s 101 Favorite Stories from the Bible. The story that I was reading that night was the story of Lot in Sodom. The story, as told in this particular storybook, included these words:…
The robust theology of lament
Erik “Ordinary Pastor” Raymond recently published a blog post titled “Can Your Theology Handle the book of Lamentations?” In it, he argues that far too many professing Christians “ignore this God who judges” because “it is much easier for him to be, well, nice.”…
Repentance: Six special ingredients
One of the most important distinctives of true Christianity is repentance. William Plumer (1759–1850) once wrote that “repentance belongs exclusively to the religion of sinners. It has no place in the exercises of unfallen creatures…. The wickedness of the human heart makes it necessary.”…
The vilest offender
In a previous post, I reviewed a book by Roy Ratcliff titled Dark Journey, Deep Grace, which is the account of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s journey to faith. As I said in that post, I read the book in the space of a few hours….
Paedophiles are people too
There is a picture that has been doing the rounds recently that portrays seven skeletons, captioned in turn with the following ascriptions: black, white, gay, straight, religious, atheist and you. The point of the picture is that, underneath it all, we’re really the same,…