Law & Grace

Should a nation take its penal code from Sinai? The law was addressed to one people, its penalties were welded to a covenant and a land, and the selection everybody makes from it is governed by a rule Scripture never supplies. Leave the law whole, learn from it, and put it back where God put it.

A graphic circulating online asks how a man never under the first covenant could be redeemed from transgressions under it. The question carries a premise it never states: that the only redemption there is, is redemption from covenant transgressions. Paul says guilt reached men who never had a covenant to break, and so does the remedy.

Believers ache for a past that was more moral and more Christian, and grieve a covenant they believe the nation broke. But the remembered age never existed as remembered, no Gentile nation was ever in covenant with God, and Scripture rebukes the longing itself. A look at nostalgia, the Christian nation, and the post God actually gave you.

Opposition to once saved, always saved seldom turns on the verses it quotes. This article traces the objection to its root — a righteousness a man built himself, and the distance from other men that grace erases — then divides the passages. Israel's salvation is an inheritance received at the end; the Body's was handed over at the beginning.

One of the hardest sentences Paul wrote appears to say a man's bad works can get him destroyed by God. Read whole, it says very nearly the opposite, and the clause most often left off the end is the one that answers it. Here is what defiling means in Paul's own vocabulary, and why the temple was never the thing in danger.

A revival is being proclaimed across the nation's campuses — crowds, conversions, and a call to reclaim the nation for God. But the renewal of a nation is not the gospel of grace, a faith with no shared creed is not the faith once delivered, and a summons back to Sinai revives the wrong program. A look at what the campus revival actually revives.

Rome claims to follow Christ, Peter, and Paul — and by right division it follows none of the three. A stand-alone study of the papacy, the Mass, Mary, purgatory, confession, and tradition, showing that Rome, the Eastern churches, and Rome's Reformation daughters share one ancient error: works added to the finished work of Christ.

Matthew stands at the seam of right division. Peter Ruckman hands much of it back to Israel — the Sermon on the Mount, the Disciples' Prayer, conditional forgiveness — then pours the Body of Christ back in through his method of spiritual application. How a book gets wrongly divided even by a man who can see where its parts belong.