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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...

Paradise Regained Some people like to skip ahead when reading a mystery in order to read the rest of the story with the end in mind. Others like to watch the game after it is over to anticipate the victory. Perhaps that is the point of the book of Revelation. It is not really “history written in advance.” It paints its picture of the end...

Human Silence: Job and the Silence of Humility When Isaiah received the call to be a prophet, He saw a vision of the Lord and responded, “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.” God graciously sent an angel with a cleansing coal to touch Isaiah’s...

Divine Silence? A Prayer for God Not to Be Silent Moody professor John Koessler wrote about the silence of God in a recent blog post. We tend to interpret the silence as “proof of His absence,” “a sign of disinterest” or “disengagement.” “We worry that it means that God can’t hear us or even worse that He won’t hear us.” But we’re mistaken.