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The Art of Holding Fast The motto of Scotland’s Clan MacLeod is “Hold fast.” This could be the church’s motto. To be faithful we must hold fast to what we believe. More importantly, in order to be faithful we must hold fast to Jesus Christ. This can be hard to do when others around you compromise. In the church in Pergamum, some claimed to...

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Popular culture has widely appropriated ideas of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It was the nickname of the Notre Dame football team’s backfield in 1924. Rock band Metallica used it as the title for a song. The Four Horsemen made a brief appearance in the movie Hellboy: The Fury and appear in more...

Day of Wrath Giuseppe Verdi’s great work Messa da Requiem is a brooding memorial to a poet and writer whom Verdi admired. One of its most famous sections is the “Dies Irae,” which means “Day of Wrath.” During this section trumpets surround the stage, signifying the call to judgment, and the chorus almost shouts: “Day of wrath, that day earth...

Creation Groans The Renaissance painter and inventor Leonardo da Vinci once observed, “Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.” Silence can be emphatic. A pause in a sentence concentrates our attention on what is said next. In the same way, the silence that follows the opening of the seventh seal is a signal that what is about to...

The Destroyer and His Army “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils,” C. S. Lewis wrote. “One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician...

The Wait is Over Sometimes it feels as if we spend most of our lives waiting. Couples engaged to be married mark the months until the wedding. Workers wait for the weekend. Schoolchildren long for summer vacation—and once it has begun, parents tick off the days until they can send them back to school. Heaven experiences the same sense of...

Invitation to a Wedding Most of us still get so-called snail mail, but we probably get a lot less than we used to. In the last decade the volume of mail delivered by the U.S. Postal Service declined by 36 percent. It is presently at a 29-year low. A few things are still mailed—including Today in the Word! Many people also still send wedding...

The Reign of Christ Musical compositions sometimes have a coda, a passage that brings the piece to an end like the final paragraph in an essay or a story. A musical coda can be short, lasting for only a few measures, or it can be much longer. Some composers, including Beethoven, occasionally employ a “false” coda, a passage that seems about...

The Death of Death Theologian Helmut Thielicke said that death, although common, is unnatural. “This is what the Bible teaches us with uncompromising firmness: the death of man points to an ultimate disorder; it should not be, the dark boundary posts should not stand between us and the eternal life of God.” In today’s passage we read about...

A Whole New World In Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, Mark Twain wrote, “Singing hymns and waving palm branches through all eternity is pretty when you hear about it in the pulpit, but it’s as poor a way to put in valuable time as a body could contrive.” Twain was wrong on two counts. First, he was wrong about what occupies those who...