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Punishment Is Declared In August 2017, millions of Americans traveled to see a total solar eclipse. With sophisticated astronomical calculations, scientists could predict exactly where and when to see this celestial phenomenon. But in the pre-scientific era, people told stories to make sense of the sky’s blackness. Societies who worshiped...

The Ruins Are Repaired Cognitive neuroscientists have discovered that we have a “good-news” bias. We remember good news more clearly and believe it more confidently than bad news. As one example of our unfounded optimism, participants in a study conducted by University College London researchers identified their chances for developing cancer...

Hear: The Words of the Lord Until the early twentieth century, it was customary for survivors to wear mourning clothes for a period of time after the death of their loved one. (Famously, Queen Victoria wore black for forty years after her husband died.) After World War I, however, when nearly every family was affected by grief and loss of...

Receive: The Peace of the LORD In his book Science Speaks, published by Moody in 1958, Peter Stoner attempts to calculate the mathematical and scientific probabilities of the biblical record. (At the time, Stoner was professor emeritus of science at Westmont College in California.) Stoner discusses the probability that even eight of the many...

Good News: God’s Enemies Are Defeated In her book The Crucifixion, Fleming Rutledge says we are usually “queasy” to talk about the wrath of God: “If we are resistant to the idea of the wrath of God, we might pause to reflect the next time we are outraged at something.” Rutledge goes on to describe how God’s wrath (always against sin and evil)...

A Second Eden Hurricane Harvey made landfall in the United States in late August 2017, and the Category 4 storm turned the streets of Houston into waterways. Bible teacher Beth Moore, a resident of the deluged city, wrote in Christianity Today shortly after the storm: “We are devastated. They say it will take many months and perhaps even...

A Prophet’s Visions Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said he was standing in grove of trees in western New York State when God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him. From this vision, Smith taught that God the Father had a physical body and that the Mormon religion was the only path to salvation.

A Curse (and Blessing) In The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer explored the distinction between “cheap” and “costly” grace. Cheap grace requires no real contrition or repentance. It says that people will be forgiven regardless of their desire to be delivered from sin. Costly grace, on the other hand, “is costly because it condemns...

A Coming King In the 1930s, the Southern Plains region suffered an ecological disaster now called the “Dust Bowl.” Homesteading legislation had brought inexperienced farmers, incentivized by land ownership, into the region, and they had responded to the demand for European grain by plowing up the grasslands to use for farming. But without...

God: Father, Master, King When he was a high-school junior in Phoenix, Arizona, Jacob Staudenmeier created an elaborate “prom-posal,” Staudenmeier decided to remake the opening scene of the movie La La Land in order to ask the film’s star, Emma Stone, to go to prom with him. (Despite his efforts, Stone declined graciously.) The trend of “prom-posals”...