The Fall – Already Not Yet

June 24, 2020June 24, 2020

Groaning, Waiting, Hoping – How to Live in a Fallen, Fragile World

Jon Bloom: A late verdant spring is at this moment giving way to a lush early summer in Minnesota, the state where I have sojourned these nearly 55 years. Walking outside on a fair morning, when the brilliant new variegated greens of the trees and grasses are bursting with life, when a gorgeous spectrum of colorful, fragrant blossoms waves in the gentle breeze and seems to silently sing for joy, when the deep blues of our abundant rivers and lakes quiet frenetic thoughts, and everything is awash in the golden light of a blazing star ascending in a sky-field of azure, one can almost wonder if Eden has returned. Almost. Then a police vehicle speeds by me, followed soon by a blaring ambulance. Then beneath the bridge I see the decaying body of a songbird whose voice so recently added more beauty to our urban avian choir. Then I pass by burned-out, boarded-up buildings that testify to the great pain

January 14, 2019January 14, 2019

Evangelism Must Explain What’s Wrong with the World

Becky Pippert: People around us today often scoff at the notion of sin. Our world has new names for what ails us: poor self-esteem, neurosis, addiction, anxiety, psychological wounding, and so forth. It isn’t that these issues aren’t a reality; it’s that such analysis doesn’t go deep enough to reveal the root cause. Yet for all the protest that sin is an old-fashioned, outdated concept, nearly everyone agrees that something has gone terribly wrong and must be made right. We see the wrong in world wars, racism, genocides, terrorism, human trafficking, exploitation of children—and in our own personal battles evidenced in broken relationships, anger, addictions, and on and on. What happened that caused our planet to go from paradise to our present brokenness? And how can this explanation be good news for our unbelieving neighbors? First Rebellion In Genesis 3, we discover that, though Adam and Eve were created in God’s image, they rejected God’s rule and chose to be

May 3, 2015May 3, 2015

God, Why This Broken World Like Ours?

John Piper: God put the natural world under a curse so that the physical horrors of that curse — of that futility, of that corruption, disease and death — would become a vivid picture, a parable of the horrors of moral evil, sin. In other words, natural evil exists in the world as a sign post of the horrors of moral evil. Before I show you the text in the Bible, I want you to picture what I am saying in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve, perfect, sinless; the world, perfect, no death. Everything is perfect. They eat fruit forbidden, and God strikes the world with a curse in the natural world. Now, in his sin Adam did not hit Eve. There’s no domestic abuse in the Garden of Eden. He didn’t hit her, and God did not say, “You hit her, I am hitting you.” No. Adam hit God. And he hit him not with his fist,