Ephesians 2 & 3: God’s Sovereign Almighty Power for Our and the World’s Salvation from Sin

Ephesians 2 & 3: God’s Sovereign Almighty Power for Our and the World’s Salvation from Sin

Aug 12, 2026 | Theology

After being a born-again Christian for five years, one night by God’s providence I was introduced to Reformed theology, what some call Calvinism. In its broad contours it goes back to the great Bishop of Hippo (North Africa), Augustine (354-430), who emphasized man’s inability to save himself and God’s sovereignty in our salvation from sin. If you read through his Confessions, it’s clear who’s in the driver’s seat when it comes to God saving him from pride and paganism. I remember forty years ago like it was yesterday, going home that night after this introduction and opening my Bible to Ephesians. The gentlemen I’d just met and who would become a friend with profound influence on my life, suggested I read it, especially the first two chapters.

Up to that point, unlike Augustine, I saw my salvation and relationship to Christ as something where I was basically in the driver’s seat, and I clearly shouldn’t have been allowed on the road. I couldn’t have explained any of this given I had no understanding of theology, but that night as I read Ephesians, I saw it immediately and wondered how I’d missed it all those years. Now, instead of seeing my Christian faith in black and white, all of sudden it was in color, or having been trying to read about my faith in a foreign language and coming across an English translation; it all made sense now. Instead of me seeking after God and trying to be a good Christian, The Hound of Heaven had been seeking me and transforming my heart from within. Jonathan Edwards said our seeking and finding God doesn’t happen after a search on our part, but that our seeking and finding him starts with him seeking and saving us. This  was upside down and inside out from how I perceived things just earlier that same day.

Chosen and predestined in Christ: Spiritual Resurrection from the Dead
I’d probably read these words of Paul several times but somehow missed that God chose us in Christ before the creation of the world—I didn’t choose him; I couldn’t have, I wasn’t born yet! I realized my choosing him was because he first chose me; he initiated, I responded. That’s the way it always is in our relationship to God. As Paul says, God pre-determined, or predestined us, to be adopted as his sons through Christ, to be his heirs, even before we were born. I had nothing to do with any of it because it was all of his unmerited favor. And again, Paul says we were chosen because we were predestined, and that God had this all planned that it might happen “in conformity with the purpose of his will.”

All I could think of as I was reading and meditating on these words, as if for the first time, was the picture my new friend shared with me about how I might understand this process. I used to see salvation as if I were drowning in a pool, bobbing up and down in the water crying out for help. The gospel was the life preserver someone threw to me, I grabbed it and was saved! But now I realized I’d actually been dead, at the bottom of the pool, and God had to supernaturally raise me spiritually from dead, bring me to spiritual life so I could believe, so I could trust in Christ. This radical change in orientation, in perspective, changed everything for me.

Reading Ephesians 1 and 2 more than forty years later brings all that vividly back to life, and I see more than ever how The Hound of Heaven has molded and shaped me, transformed me, sometimes kicking and screaming, but wonderfully, amazingly, incredibly. I now see soteriology, our salvation from sin, not just as the immediate grace given to open our once blind eyes to God’s mercy and Christ’s merits for us, but as the lifelong transformation process we were promised in Christ. We are told that was Christ’s mission when Joseph was given his name, Jesus, by the angel in a dream (Matt. 1):

21 She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

I come back to this verse repeatedly because to me it says it all: he will save us, not try, not offer, not make it possible, but actually save us from our sins. This salvation, as the great hymn Rock of Ages says, is the double cure for sin from both its guilt and power. Reading Ephesians again reminded me that salvation is primarily about God and his work for, in, and through us. It’s not about me!

Ephesians 2 makes the contrast even more obvious. Paul brings death into the picture, and not merely as a metaphor, but as a spiritual reality. He tells us we are dead in our “transgressions and sins,” bottom of the pool, not flailing away in the deep end. Because of the way we lived, we were “by nature deserving of wrath.” Because we were unrepentant sinners, God was our judge, jury, and executioner. Then there is a world transforming conjunction, a “but” to reveal our transformation to a new life, all by the power of God. We had literally zero to do with it, and I will quote the full passage:

4 But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. 6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7 in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. 8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast. 10 For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Paul could not be clearer that a resurrection from the dead is the spiritual reality of salvation. And not an escape by the hair of our chinny chin chin, but raised up to a royal position in Christ to the very right hand of God! And if Paul could not be any more explicit, he says, “and this is not from yourself.” I’ve heard people say since it’s a gift then we have the choice to accept or reject it, but nobody rejects the gift of a king. If it were because of our choice, then we would have something in which to boast. Look how smart I am; I made this choice and you didn’t. Regardless of what anyone’s theology is, everyone knows our salvation is the providential sovereign work of Almighty God. Nevertheless, Christians thinking they are making it “fair,” insist we must have the ability to accept or reject the offer. Dead people do not have that choice.

The History of a Man Centered Faith: How We Got Here
When I was a young Christian I would never have said my faith was “man centered,” but that was the implication of the theology I didn’t even know I had. I believed I was drowning in my sin, not dead in it, when God saved me. Once I became a Christian I believed that accountability implies ability, that if God commands something we have the innate ability to do it. Ever since Augustine, and even before, no Christian believed, nor did the Catholic Church teach, that we had the innate ability to obey God’s law. Despite much Protestant invective against Catholicism over the centuries, the Catholic church has never taught we can be saved by our obedience to the law. Grace is thought of differently in Catholic theology, but it is still grace.

No, the blame for a man centered faith rests at the feet the Protestants. After Luther and Calvin set the Reformation on a thoroughly Augustinian trajectory, the Arminians in the 17th century started to push back against that. They still defended the grace of God in salvation, but they had opened to door to Christians seeing salvation as primarily about our faith, our choices, our decisions, about us. Those things are of course involved, but they are only in response to the mighty resurrection power Paul talks about in chapter 1:

18 I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, 19 and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength 20 he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms.

When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead it was a one-way deal, as is our salvation. That deal not only saves us from God’s wrath and the guilt of sin, but also from its power in our lives, what we know as sanctification. If we are one of God’s chosen ones he came to save from our sins, that’s going to happen whether we like it or not. And since God’s law is now written on our hearts, we will like it very much.

By the time of the First Great Awakening in the mid-18th century the cracks in the providential sovereign salvation damn began to form. It would become much more apparent in the Second Great Awakening a hundred years later, but our choosing and less God’s saving power began to be emphasized. Slowly but surely the focus shifted and now it was up to us. John Wesley was the theological turning point. He despised Calvinism and decided to lose his friendship with Whitfield over it. He believed that perfect holiness was attainable for the Christian, and that meant the Christian would not commit any known sin. You can’t get much more man centered than that. Holiness in the Christian life basically came down to our will, which is a fragile piece of machinery upon which to base the Christian life.

As the 19th century developed, Wesley’s influence could be seen far outside of the fields of Methodism, the movement and denomination he essentially founded. The various strains of Evangelical Christianity that participated in the Second Great Awakening fully embraced the Wesleyan understanding of Christianity. What came to be called Revivalism embraced a salvation that turned on a person’s decision. Each human being in this understanding has “free will,” so we are able to accept or reject the offer. Out of this Awakening several strains of Wesleyan perfectionism developed known as Holiness Movements like The Higher Christian life and Victorious Christian Living. The great 19th century evangelist D.L. Moody put it perfectly: “Whatever the sin is, make up your mind that you will gain victory over it.” 

That didn’t seem to work real well for me because I was in two minds about sin, and in many ways I still am. If defeating sin is about “making up my mind,” I may as well check out before I begin. That was basically the first five years of my Christian life, and it was a constant battle against guilt and shame. Even in the late 70s and into the 80s, perfectionism was still in the Evangelical air I was breathing, and I was not pulling it off to say the least. I’m currently reading Augustine’s Confessions, and this was the battle he experienced more before he became a Christian. Whenever it happens, it’s a battle for all Christians. Paul shares the same struggle in Romans 7 and asks, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” His answer?

25 Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

But thanks be to God because he planned a salvation in Christ for his people that wasn’t up to us or our wills or abilities, but up to his resurrection power, and the Holy Spirit whom he would send to live in his people, as John says, to “tabernacle among them.” Our enduring faith is nothing less than God dwelling with us, in us, his people, now and forever.

The Difference Between Being a Parent and a Grandparent

The Difference Between Being a Parent and a Grandparent

Aug 5, 2026 | Parents and Family

I’ve thought about this a lot since we became grandparents over four years ago. As our kids were growing up and entering adulthood, I encountered people who had become grandparents tell us what’s great about being a grandparent is that you can enjoy your grandkids and then send them home. That seemed kind of hard-hearted when I heard it, or they didn’t really appreciate what they had, but I understand what they were saying now.

Raising children is a young person’s game and it’s a lot of work, especially when they’re young. Our daughter and son-in-law have three kids four and under, and it’s a challenge to say the least. My wife experiences it daily during the week as she sits the kids with our daughter who works from home. Praise God they live five minutes away and she can do that, but it’s a grind for a grandparent, even more exhausting than for the parents. It’s an incredible blessing and she loves it, but when she comes home at the end of the day the benefit of being a grandparent is obvious.

I was inspired to write this when I saw a post on Twitter/X where a guy whose children are just entering adulthood asks:

Don’t we all miss our babies? Does this feeling come back when you become a grandparent?

It depends on what feeling he’s talking about, but yes, we most certainly do miss them, which I’ll muse on below, but for us being grandparents is a completely different feeling.

I remember vividly how I felt when our daughter finally decided to make her entrance into the world after a grueling labor for my wife. I loved her instantly; it was total and complete. I had previously told my sister that I liked children and all, and looked forward to having them, but nothing prepares you for the love and emotion welling up inside you when it’s your child. My first thought through the flowing tears was, “There is a God!” It was by far the most profound thing I’d ever experienced in my 31 years of life. God is the only explanation for new life. As a Christian, knowing these feelings are in some way analogous to how God the Father feels about us, his people in Christ,  is incredibly comforting given how terribly imperfect we all are. Do we love and feel any less emotionally connected to our children because they are rotten little scoundrels sometimes? Well, I guess that depends when you ask the question, but having children teaches us unconditional love, and that is what God the Father poured out on us his children in Jesus on the cross.

But back to this-worldly realities. After a couple of days at the hospital, we were almost shocked they were letting us take her home. I thought, nobody’s coming with us? Somehow, she survived, obviously. I remember spending time just looking at her asleep in her crib and marveling. It was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen! I’d get emotional with the marvel of it all, of God giving us this little creature, of letting us co-create with him a new life on earth and for eternity. Just entirely too heavy.

Thinking about this reminds me of this passage from a book by Whitaker Chambers. He became famous in mid‑20th century Cold War America because of his association with convicted Soviet spy and American government official, Alger Hiss. In his magisterial autobiography Witness, Chambers tells the story of his life, including his conversion from atheistic communism to Christianity. The profound turning point in his journey came from something you’ll never guess: His daughter’s ear. Every parent knows how exactly he felt, even if it doesn’t lead them to Christ, which it should.

My daughter was in her highchair. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. I liked to watch her even when she smeared porridge on her face or dropped it meditatively on the floor. My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear—those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: “No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.” The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind. But I never wholly forgot it or the occasion. I had to crowd it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God. I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.

Unless you’re a parent you have no idea what these feelings for your little children are like. It’s the purest emotional love imaginable. I see it in my daughter now as she beams when she’s with them, holding them, or even talking about them. It’s so incredibly special to see this experienced in the next generation, to relate to exactly how she’s feeling, and also, sadly, how fleeting it is.

The Depressing Passage of Time
This is another huge and inevitable difference between being a parent and a grandparent. When you’re in the middle of raising children, you have no clue how fast it goes. You catch glimpses of it, of course, but nothing prepares you for the thief that is time. It steals our lives from us once second at a time and we don’t even realize it until we find it impossible to believe. Where did it go? How did I get here so quickly? The birth of a child, as any grandparent can tell you, seems like a hundred years ago and yesterday at the same time! It’s crazy, and only those getting closer to the end than the beginning can fathom its mystery, an unsolvable one. As Augustine said, everyone knows what time is, but when asked to describe it, we’re rendered mute.

The mystery of time and its passage is an obsession with me, as anyone who knows me will tell you. After our first grandchild was conceived, I turned to my wife and said, “In the year 2,100 she’ll be 78!” and she replied, reasonably, “Can you just let her be born first?” Good point. Well, that little one is now well on her way to 2,100, and she only has 74 years to go! Be here before ya know it! Now she’s as cute as a button, an impossibly cuteness cute. It just rips your heart out. The is where parents and grandparents are on the same page. Your grandkids are clearly the most adorable on the playground; isn’t it obvious! But her already being four is a reminder of how swiftly time is moving along. Now a little girl, before you know it she’ll be a teenager, and then a grown woman. It makes our daughter sad, a common feeling among parents, maybe more for mothers than fathers.

We have neighbors who have two boys who walk to and from the bus stop every day during the school year; I’ve been watching them for six years. One morning I was outside with our grandkids while my wife stopped by the house with them on the way to the park. The youngest of the two boys and his mother were passing on the way to the bus stop, and I said to the mom, “Wow, he’s becoming a little man!” and she replied, “I know! And it makes me so sad.” Welcome to the club! You want to capture time in a bottle like Jim Croce sang, to hold on to these moments forever, but they slip away as if like a child on the playground taunting you.

I’m reminded of this every day. A couple years ago we got this thing called a Frame, which is basically a slideshow within a picture frame. As we’re walking around the house, in and out of the backyard, closing and opening the nearest window, we see on the rolling display a kind of kaleidoscope of our lives, years or decades passing as one picture slides into the next. When I see our kids as children or teenagers, the family on memorable trips, more than once I’ve turned to my wife and said, “That’s depressing.” She agrees. Even though old people, like I am now, try to warn us when we’re young how quickly it goes, to appreciate it now because before you know it . . . . , we have no idea until it happens.

Solomon in Ecclesiastes says that God has put eternity into the heart of man, which is why we get sad when we begin to realize just how fleeting life is. We want to somehow capture forever these moments in bottle, and we know we can’t: the wages of sin . . . . In that sadness we perceive something of the reality of eternal life which in this “body of death,” as Paul calls it, we can’t have. But thanks be to God! As he also says, we will have it, and one day will be, as John tells us, where there is “no more death or mourning or crying or pain” for the old order of things will have passed away, praise God! Right now, this longing for eternity, as C.S. Lewis said about all human longing and desires, implies there is something existing that will fulfill it. That sure hope is what allows us not to be consumed by our sadness, and enjoy those fleeting moments God has so graciously granted us.

Mind Over Matter is Not a Cliché: Living as the Image of God

Mind Over Matter is Not a Cliché: Living as the Image of God

Jul 29, 2026 | Explanatory Power

One of the most powerful things in the world is the human mind. God created a marvel of inconceivable engineering that produces a phenomenon going well beyond the mere matter of the machine running it, the brain. These two things, the immaterial mind and the material brain, have been a topic of much debate in the history of modern philosophy. Or how is it that an immaterial mind interacts with a material brain. Atheist/materialist philosophers, those who believe only the material exists, believe the mind is the brain, or it is merely the mechanical processes of the brain accounting for what we call the mind. Yet, the thing this mind creates or reflects, consciousness, appears to be far more than the sum of its parts. Atheist philosopher, Thomas Nagel wrote a short book titled, Mind & Cosmos, to grapple with this issue and concludes it is impossible for the mere matter of the mind to account for consciousness. Here is how he explains the issue:

Even if there is a residual problem of exactly how to account for consciousness in physical terms, the orthodox naturalistic (materialist) view is that biology is in principle completely explained by physics and chemistry, and that evolutionary psychology provides a rough idea of how everything distinctive about human life can also be regarded as an extremely complicated consequence of the behavior of physical particles in accordance with certain fundamental laws. This will ultimately include an explanation of the cognitive capacities that enable us to discover those laws.

Shazam! How convenient, and all this by chance. As I taught my kids growing up, and will now be teaching our grandchildren, when confronted with something insanely complex and amazing beyond human comprehension to grasp, they should proclaim out loud, Praise Chance! It’s a sly way to mock the pretensions of atheist/materialist claims.

Nagel raises the difficult question of where those “fundamental laws” came from, not to mention the material stuff that for no reason at all turned into the “extremely complicated” brain that somehow magically produces mind, or consciousness. Nagel admits the atheist/materialist has no answer in the subtitle of his book: “Why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false.” Yet, Nagel is still an atheist! As I like to say, wanting to be your own God is a powerful motivator to deny the obvious.

One of the powerful aspects of apologetics, defending the veracity of Christianity, is called explanatory power, what best explains something, or is the most potent explanation for something. What Nagel is saying is that the atheist/materialist explanation for the brain, and the entire cosmos, is extremely weak. Yet he still rejects the obvious explanation, Almighty God. Whenever I have difficulty believing this whole God things is true, wondering if life after death is real, if the resurrection of the dead is actually going to happen, I look outside. That causes me to think to myself, or say out loud, there is absolutely no way the universe and the world and everything in it is a product of chance. Impossible! We must always consider the alternative when we’re wondering and doubting. Something has to be true. Either it is God who created everything, or nothing “created” everything out of nothing for no reason at all. In the title of the book by Norm Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be An Atheist.

There are several ways we can see and experience the evidence of how powerful the mind is specifically because we’re made in God’s image. We’ll address a couple of those below.

Mind Over Matter: Being Made in God’s Image
The Imago Dei, Latin for the image of God, is why our minds have such incredible power. Our minds are in some derivative way analogous, and similar to, God’s mind. It’s crazy trying to wrap our minds around the truth of that statement, but until we do, we’ll tend to think like the atheist/materialist, that the mind is simply a function of molecules and cells and synapses. We’ll miss the incredible spiritual, immaterial power the mind and consciousness have over the material world even though the evidence is all around us. What do I mean by power?

To give us the answer in a biblical sense we’ll look at the Apostle Paul who uses the word power three times in Romans 1. First let’s look at the Greek word Paul uses, δύναμις-dunamis. It’s the word from which we get our English, dynamite. The extended meaning from Strong’s is helpful:

force (literally or figuratively); specially, miraculous power (usually by implication, a miracle itself) — ability, abundance, meaning, might(-ily, -y, -y deed), (worker of) miracle(-s), power, strength, violence, mighty (wonderful) work.

Each use of the word is related to God. First in verse 4, he tells us God appointed Jesus in or with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead. Christ by the power of God defeated death, something that has haunted human beings since the fall, all of whom despise, hate, and fear it, and know it’s wrong, that somehow it shouldn’t be. God by his power took care of it, Christ being the first fruits, as Paul says in I Corinthians 15, and then the rest of us to follow in the resurrection.

Next Paul declares the gospel is “the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.” Our salvation from sin, our reconciliation to God, is a spiritual resurrection of going from being dead in sin to alive in Christ by the power of God. The physical reality of God’s bringing Jesus back to life is manifested in a spiritual reality of the resurrection of our souls, the center of our being. The reason the New Covenant is better than the Old according to Jeremiah (chapter 31), is that the law is no longer stuck on tablets of stone, but God himself now in Christ puts his law in our minds and writes it on our hearts. That supernatural spiritual reality now reflects itself out into the material world through us.

Lastly Paul uses the word power related to God’s creative power in the material world.

20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so they are without excuse.

The very essence of God’s divinity, his God-ness, can be seen in every material thing he created which as we know from Genesis he created out of nothing—now that is power! All he had to do was speak, and it was. Speaking of Abraham in Roman 4, Paul says in verse 16:

He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed—the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not.

The ESV translates that last clause as, “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” You can’t get more powerful than that! And while we can’t call things into existence that don’t exist, because we are made in God’s image, we can take the raw material he’s given us and transform it into new and marvelous things.

Mind Over Matter: Transforming the World
When I use the phrase, “mind over matter,” I mean that literally. Our minds are above matter, over it, superior to it. We, contrary to the atheist/materialist, are not the same as matter, merely a function of matter, but superior to it in a way the whole is superior to the sum of its parts. You can take the parts of a car and put them in a pile, but you’re not going to have a car. In a similar manner, our brains when put together by God produce something superior to just the material parts making up our brains. This was the plan from the beginning. When God created man, male and female he created them, he set them over his creation, to rule and have dominion over it, to fill the earth and subdue it. Got gave them the raw material, something out of nothing, now they were to take that and make something out of everything.

This was a slow process, but started happening right from the beginning, and often in ways that did not result in blessing. Early in the story, the people God had created built a tower, not in humility and gratitude to God, but to in effect be like God, so that “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” After God “scattered them over the face of the whole earth,” they built cities and places they could live that would protect them from the dangers of the wilderness and other peoples. This was just the beginning of the dominion mandate being fulfilled, most of it, however, not in humility and to the glory of the creator God. For that, God chose one man out of all the peoples of the earth through whom blessing would come to all those peoples. We know him as Abraham, and the people he gave birth to, the Hebrews.

The transformation process of this fallen world, paradise lost, would take 2,000 years before it could really begin in earnest and the possibility of paradise being restored become a reality. Unfortunately, the mindset of most Christians is Pietistic, otherworldly, focused more on heaven than on this material world. That, however, is a mistake. The gospel wasn’t an escape project from this world, but a transformation project of it.

The contrast of the earth and the peoples in it from BC to AD is stark, from law to gospel, from the letter to the spirit. Everything spiritually changed, man now reconciled to God, when Christ accomplished his mission and was coronated as King sitting at the right hand of God. The day he poured out his Spirit at Pentecost everything then materially changed. In other words, man’s spiritual transformation in his relationship to God would be manifest in the material world on this earth. Initially, it wasn’t apparent how radical that transformation would prove to be in passage of time, but the change was like coming across Mount Everest in a desert. The ancient world was a brutal place where the primary goal of existence was survival. In moral terms, might made right. Whoever had the biggest sword or the biggest army determined right and wrong, and there was no appeal to anything higher, no recourse to challenge the powerful. This unpalatable fact of existence was why so many of the poor and powerless were attracted to Christianity in the early centuries of the church—now their lives counted. They were no longer cogs to be ground down in a pitiless machine. Slowly, surely, inevitably, Christianity changed everything.

Mind Over Matter: The Body
The power of the mind over matter can also been seen in the material that makes up our bodies; the connection is a powerful one. The human body is an almost infinitely complex system that works in response to our environment, which includes our mind’s control over our bodies, again the immaterial controlling of the material. Most of that happens without our being aware of it, which is called the autonomic nervous system and is driven by the brain. But our minds, our conscious thoughts, can override the system as well, for good and for ill.

I have a good example of how this works from when I was in college. I went to Arizona State University, and my parents and little brother came to visit one time, and we went to the Grand Canyon. My dad decided we would take a ride on donkeys down a trail to the bottom of the canyon, and it was terrifying. I’ll never forget being on that donkey with a cliff to our immediate right, and it must have been hundreds of feet down. I could see the donkeys in front of me stepping within inches of the edge, and I asked the guide if it was dangerous. He said, “They don’t want to fall any more than you.” That was definitely not comforting. My stomach was gurgling all the way down, and I barely made it to the outhouse and immediately lost 10 pounds. I don’t think I’ll do that again! It was my mind driven by fear that caused my intestines to do what they did—that is mind over matter.

Our bodies are a marvel of divine engineering meant to respond to perceived threats in our environment, to stress or danger. We have adrenal glands that produce two hormones that flow into our bodies when we’re confronted by a threat, adrenaline and cortisol. These threats, like riding on donkeys on a narrow path, can be real, or just a figment of our imagination. For the guides who had probably done that trip down hundreds of times, there was no fear, and no need of an outhouse when they got to the bottom. There was no actual threat, but my fear was very real. Mind over matter means it doesn’t matter, no pun intended, if the threat is real or not, the response of the adrenal glands will happen anyway.

These hormones and our bodies that produce them are di. With adrenaline, our pupils dilate to let more light in to better see our surroundings. Our skin turns pale as blood vessels receive a signal to divert blood to areas more in need of our blood’s oxygen, such as our muscles, so we can fight or run away. Our heart pumps harder and faster to deliver more oxygenated blood to areas most in need, like our muscles, and our blood pressure also increases. It even affects our liver where stored glycogen is converted to glucose to provide more energy. Our breathing changes to help accomplish all these things as well. Our minds perceive threat, and all this happens immediately.

After adrenaline does its job, the hormone cortisol continues to respond to perceived stress in our environment or in us. Whether the threat is real or not, the result is the same, adrenal glands pouring cortisol into our bloodstream. When these are needed, they can be lifesaving, when they are not, they can be health destroying. Panic attacks are something I have a little experience with, and it’s disturbing what happens to your heart rate when you think something is wrong. Fear will do that to us. Or if we have something we have to prepare for, and little time to do it, stress and thus cortisol does its thing. For a limited time that’s okay, but living in perpetual stress or anxiety will mess up our bodies.

The good news is that God has given us the power of our minds over matter. We don’t have to live in constant stress because we can trust God. Jesus commands us not to worry, or to be anxious. Paul commands us not to be anxious about anything, which means we can trust God with everything in our lives, every moment of every day. The great struggle of my life is whether I trust God or not. My favorite verse in this regard comes from Isaiah 26:

3 You will keep in perfect peace
him whose mind is steadfast,
because he trusts in you.

Perfect peace is possible, but only in Christ, knowing God’s perfect love for us, and goodness to us, in all things. That is the path to true mental, emotional, and physical health.

Now the Prince of This World Will be Driven Out: No, Satan is Not in Control “Down Here”

Now the Prince of This World Will be Driven Out: No, Satan is Not in Control “Down Here”

Jul 22, 2026 | Eschatology

For most of my Christian life, sadly, I thought he was. Isn’t it obvious? The world is filled with misery, suffering, and death. Violence, stealing, hatred, greed, and every other vice are common. I was convinced sin would only finally be overcome at Christ’s second coming, at the judgment of the living and the dead. In the meantime while I didn’t believe the devil had free reign because God is sovereignly in control of all things, for whatever reason, God allows him to sow misery all over the world. There is victory and transformation in individual Christian lives, in churches and families, but on a societal level, I didn’t believe things would ever change much for the better. I wished and hoped and prayed they did, but it just wasn’t in the cards. Like most other Christians, I believed heaven is my home, and down here we’re just passing though, aliens and strangers caught in the wilderness until we get to the promised land of heaven. Now, I’m pretty sure I was wrong about all of it.

My pessimistic assessment of life in this fallen world began to slowly change over six years ago as I began to grow more optimistic for a variety of reasons. My optimism was theologically confirmed in August of 2022 when I embraced postmillennial eschatology, something I’d previously rejected as a joke unworthy of consideration. Since then, my understanding of redemptive history has completely changed from a primary focus on the life to come, to a focus on both this life and the one to come. I realized victory and transformation wasn’t just for our personal lives and the church, but for the entire world, and the nations within it, in what we’ve come to call the Great Commission. Jesus’ command to his disciples in Matthew 28 assumes entire nations are to be discipled and baptized, not just individuals within those nations. That’s what makes the commission great! It is actually world transforming.

Redemptive History and the Binding of Satan
Before we get to Satan, it’s important to get some historical perspective on redemptive history post resurrection and ascension. We must remember that the gospel is a covenantal work of God in history, slowly developing as he created his-story in and through his people. When God promised Abram that through him and his offspring all nations on earth would be blessed, he was pointing us forward to the gospel, the good news, something by his power and sovereign will he would bring to pass that would bless nations. Prior to Christ that blessing was extremely limited, but when he rose from the dead and ascended to the right hand of God everything changed. The kingdom of God, Christ’s reign, had come, and Satan would finally be bound for a thousand years. In Revelation 20 John tells us what happened in Christ’s victory over sin and death:

And I saw an angel coming down out of heaven, having the key to the Abyss and holding in his hand a great chain. 2 He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years. 3 He threw him into the Abyss, and locked and sealed it over him, to keep him from deceiving the nations anymore until the thousand years were ended.

There has been much debate over that thousand years, but for most of church history it was believed John was referring to the church age, the time between Christ’s ascension and his second coming, not a literal thousand years on earth. I’ve become convinced, unlike most Christians today, that the binding of Satan happened at Christ’s first coming, and not something happening at his second. This is hugely important for how we live the Christian life. There are several reasons I believe this.

When Christ came at his first advent something drastic happened to Satan. He wasn’t left free to roam and create havoc anymore. In John 12 he gives us his version of the triumphal entry. Jesus predicts his death, and right in the middle he makes this statement:

31 Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out. 

Now is the operative word because right after this he predicts the kind of death he will die to bring this to pass, saying he will be “lifted up.” His crucifixion was the binding of Satan, the thing which finally limited his power on earth. In other words, we’re living through the period of history when Satan is bound. There are several other passages in the gospels confirming this.

In Matthew 12 Jesus heals a man who was blind and mute, and the Pharisees claim Jesus is driving out demons by the power of Satan, which Jesus dismissed as absurd. A city or house divided against itself cannot stand. Then he tells them something that changed the course of history, redemptive history to be exact:

 28 But if it is by the Spirit of God that I drive out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.

Jesus and John the Baptist used the exact same words to introduce his ministry, “The kingdom of God is near,” and now it isn’t just near, it is here! And when Jesus is raised up and then ascends to heaven, the devil will be bound for a thousand years, or the entire age of the church. Then Jesus himself uses this analogy to refer to this binding:

29 “Or again, how can anyone enter a strong man’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first binds the strong man? Then he can plunder his house.

I think it’s not a coincidence God in his providence has John and Matthew use the same Greek word for bind. Once Christ accomplished his mission, Satan would be limited in a way he had never been in the history of the world to that point. Christians look around at all the evil in our day and think nothing has really changed, that the devil is still rampaging today as he always has, but that’s not true.

Something else happened in Jesus’ ministry indicating the limits that would now be put on Satan. He sent out the 72 to proclaim the good news of the kingdom, and when they return they are blown away that even the demons submit to  them in Jesus’ name. That had never happened before Jesus came, and could not happen because Satan had yet to be bound, limited in what he was allowed to do. Then Jesus tells them why they could do it:

18 He replied, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. 19 I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you. 20 However, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”

Satan’s authority was now limited because Christ resisted his temptations in the desert (Matt. 4), unlike the first Adam, which was when Satan initially gained all his power and authority to wreak havoc and death upon the world.  

What Makes the Great Commission Great
What exactly does this binding mean? We don’t have to guess. If we go back to Revelation 20, John tells us:

3 He threw him into the Abyss, and locked and sealed it over him, to keep him from deceiving the nations anymore until the thousand years were ended. 

We can draw a straight line from Satan being given the authority to deceive the nations initially, to that authority being rescinded at Christ’s first coming and his command in the Great Commission to disciple the nations. Prior to Christ’s coming all nations on earth save one, and that not a very effective one, were thoroughly pagan nations. That was all set to change when Christ was given “all authority in heaven and on earth.” Now the nations could be taught to “obey everything” Jesus had commanded them, and not just the individuals in those nations. It would be nations corporately, as well as the individuals that make up those nations. So yes, we can have Christian nations. We must have Christian nations because it is that which makes the great commission Great!

If we go back to the beginning of the calling of God making a people for himself who would be the means of transforming this fallen world into blessing, we are taken back to his call of Abram in Genesis 12. Through him and the Patriarchs, and by extension the people of Israel, all nations of the earth would be blessed. Over 2,000 years to the time of Christ God’s blessing has not gone beyond Judea, and as we see from Jesus’ ministry completely misunderstood. This blessing God promised was to go to the entire earth, to all peoples, but it got stuck with the Jews, and they rejected anyone who could un-stick it! When Jesus was crucified, rose from the dead, ascended to the right hand of God, and sent his Holy Spirit on his people everything changed. The blessing that was promised, which was confined to one nation, was now unleashed on the entire world. Compare the next 2,000 years to the previous 2,000, and there is no comparison.

This contrast of the inability to bring the blessing to the world with seeing it done is what makes the Great Commission great. I stole the title of this section from a book by Ken Gentry called, The Greatness of the Great Commission.  In the introduction Gary North says Gentry’s book makes the theological case “for the comprehensive nature of God’s redemption in history.” He says this about the healing power of the gospel of Jesus Christ:

Nothing is to be excluded from Christ’s healing: not the family, not the State, not business, not education, and surely not the institutional Church. Salvation is the salve that heals the wounds inflicted by sin: every type of wound from every type of sin. . . . God’s salvation brings us back to the original task: to exercise dominion to the glory of God, in terms of his Bible-revealing law. The gospel will succeed in history before God comes again to judge the world.

This means the blessings of redemption go well beyond the walls of the church because God’s kingdom, the one Jesus said was coming, is not limited to the church. As we sing in Isaac Watts great hymn Joy to the World every Christmas:

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.

Watts, the father of modern hymnody, realized everything infected by the curse of sin and man’s rebellion would be transformed by gospel blessings. It is comprehensive in its effects, not limited, expansive in scope, not narrow. That means the gospel of God’s reconciliation to man and the biblical/Christian view of reality affects every nook and cranny of existence, all of material reality. Nothing we do or see or experience, every moment of our existence, is infused with gospel blessing.   

God’s Covenant in Soteriology and Eschatology
I mentioned above that “the gospel is a covenantal work of God in history,” which means it’s his work. It is something he is committed to bring to pass. The blessings he promised to Abram started being fulfilled at Pentecost. Now that God’s Holy Spirit indwelt his people, his law, as he promised in Jeremiah 31, would be written on the tablets of their hearts instead of tablets of stone. That would transform people who would eventually transform the world. The last 2,000 years provides us with plenty of evidence as the ancient pagan uncivilized world transformed into the modern world. Because of Pietism and Christian over spiritualizing of the gospel, Christians miss the profound material implications in this fallen world because of the work of Christ.

Our salvation from sin, what Christ accomplished on the cross, soteriology, wasn’t just for our souls or going to heaven when we die, but for our lives in this fallen world. The ministry of reconciliation Paul speaks about in 2 Corinthians 5 is the coming of a new creation (v. 5), of taking the paradise Adam lost, and Christ is restoring. This ridding of our alienation to God in Christ has implications for, literally, all of existence. As I write this I just returned from a shopping trip to Sam’s. Do you realize how big a deal it is that we no longer have to grow or kill the food we eat? We run to the store where almost everything imaginable is available and cheap. We live in a swamp called Florida where we can control the temperature in our houses. I have relatives who live in Phoenix, a desert, where it’s north of 100 degrees for five months a year, who live comfortably with air that is is cooled by big machine at the flip of a switch. I could mention the blessings associated with modern medicine and nutrition, technology, travel, indoor plumbing, or safe drinking water. I’m writing and recording something that can be accessed anywhere in the world at any time. It’s crazy!

I could go on, but you get the point. Most Christians would never connect these things to the gospel because to them these are “material” things, not “spiritual” things. In fact, everything is spiritual because everything human beings do with God’s creation is a reflection of them as image bearers of God. When Christ rose from the dead, ascended to heaven, and sent his Spirit, everything his people did and thought and created was touched by gospel transformation, a way of doing things that would bring God’s covenant blessings to the earth, so to all nations and peoples. That’s the promise emphasized over and over again in Genesis. Satan is powerless to stop it. His efforts are futile because he has been stripped of his authority over the earth. That has been transferred to Christ, and is now being lived out through God’s people. This is what salvation from sin means, and we’re just getting started!

AI and the Longing for The Real

AI and the Longing for The Real

Jul 15, 2026 | Culture, Parents and Family

I’ve heard the phrase Artificial Intelligence all of my boomer life. Grok says the phrase goes back to 1955 and a proposal some scientists put together to study the concept. This lead to the “Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence” in 1956 which is regarded as the founding of AI as a formal field of study. I was eight years old when 2001: A Space Odyssey came out, and although the phrase Artificial Intelligence isn’t used in the movie (“machine intelligence” is), AI was by then culturally well known. It hasn’t been until the last several years, however, that the real life implications of AI have become culturally ubiquitous. Along with that have come debates about its value, whether it promises unproblematic endless benefits, or dystopian dangers. And likely plenty of both. I just learned about the history of AI with a simple question to Grok—benefit!

But as sinful human beings are won’t to do, hubris and overreaching is part of the deal. I think that’s where we are. And whenever there is overreaching, as any physicist can tell you, there is always an equal and opposite reaction. The Covid debacle and peak woke are perfect examples. Hundreds of millions of people around the world were driven to question, many for the first time, the “experts” and the managerial class, including in modern medicine. Like me, they decided, also for the first time, that their health is primarily their responsibility and nobody else’s. And tens of millions of people in America decided peak woke was a bridge too far, and turned back to God and traditional morality. I see the same reaction regarding AI, and God is part of that too. When God in his sovereign providence provides the cultural and historical conditions for revelation, we ought to consider taking advantage of it.

I grew up in the era of vinyl records. In the mid-60s big four and then eight track cassette tapes became popular so you could actually listen to your music of choice in the car. Then by the mid-70s little cassette tapes came along, which was mind blowing at the time. Then in the 80s came CDs, and it wasn’t long before vinyl would be dead and gone forever. Uh, maybe not. Everyone said digital was the future, and analogue was passé. Get rid of your records, boomer! Get with the times. It seems, however, analogue waves are more appealing than digits. There are other reactions against all things digital. It’s impossible today to know with any kind of certainty if a picture or video or music is real or AI fake. It’s like living in a world with plastic flowers that look real but have no smell and don’t feel like flowers. How about cars without drivers? For many of us there is something unnerving about that, even as flawed as human drivers can be.

The AI hype seems to have struck a nerve in people who are pining for The Real, the creational order, objective reality as God designed it to be. We can see this in other reactions to what most agree by now is a dying secular culture.

Secularism and the Turn to the Subjective
AI offers us a stark contrast to what I like to call, The Real. This explosion of AI is happening at the same time secularism as an experiment in Western culture is coming to the end of its cultural credibility. The idea of secularism started to develop in the 17th century in response to the wars of religion. Christians killing each other because they disagreed about theology wasn’t real appealing, so Western cultural elites and intellectuals decided to push religion, i.e., Christianity, out of the cultural spotlight, and try to build societies without God. Religious practice became a personal thing, and Pietists went right along with that. It took several hundred years for this to fully infect Western culture, but by the middle of the 20th century, secularism became the default worldview of Western peoples, in effect, the entire world outside of Islam.

Secularism did what C.S. Lewis warned about in The Abolition of Man, turning him inward and making everything in life about the subjective, our feelings, our thoughts, our opinions. Life’s all about me! He famously uses the story of a high school textbook teaching students how the beauty of a waterfall is more about our feelings than about any objective beauty in the waterfall. On the surface this doesn’t appear to be a big deal, but in fact it was the beginning of abolishing human beings as God created them. This is where we find ourselves in this third decade of the 21st century. We got to a point where everything in the culture focused on the individual, “the sovereign self.” The deeper one goes into that self, the deeper one realizes there is nothing there on which to anchor life. That has to come outside of us, something really there, something we can depend on as real.

The indications of the cracks growing in the secular Berlin Wall can be seen in a variety of consequences, but a blatant one is the mental health crisis in our country. I recently received a publication from my Alma Mater, Westminster Seminary Philadelphia, about exactly this. The author starts with statistics from the National Institute of Mental health to make the point:

Over 20% of the population 18 years and older is being treated for a mental illness. For adolescents, 49.5% report having a mental disorder. According to the CDC in 2023, 12.8 million adults seriously thought about suicide; 2.7 million made an actual plan; and 1.7 million went through with it. Depression rates, according to the latest Gallup poll, are at a record high.

Once we reject or ignore God’s created order, and its Creator, we are preparing for disaster. This inevitable descent into the subjective because of secularism was always eventually going to turn out this way. In the book Lewis tells us why objective reality, the real as God created it, is so important:

It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.

The mental health crisis is a result of people being deluded into seeing themselves as something they are not, embracing lies about who they are and what the world is. The delusions are why disaster is inevitable, a form of God’s judgment on rebellious humanity.

The title of the first chapter in which this quote is found is called, “Men Without Chests.” In the classical understanding of man, he is three-fold: the mind, the upper, and the appetites, the lower, and in between is the chest where magnanimity and sentiments are trained so they might become “the indispensable liaison officers between the cerebral man and the visceral man.” Without that training, to put it crudely, we’re screwed.

The Craving for the Real
I’m convinced, in general, people crave what is Real more than what they feel. This is because they are created in God’s image and live in God’s creation; postmodern relativism will always eventually disappoint. We can’t make up our own reality no matter how hard we try. By definition, postmodern relativists have a tenuous grasp of reality because they think they get to determine what reality is. Their take is a slippery one, like living their lives walking on rocks through a shallow rushing river. Why would that be? If our epistemology—what we know and how we come to know it—is based on what is inside of us, then how can we ever really trust what we think we know? Maybe what I’m thinking about at the moment is just a bit of indigestion, as C.S Lewis once said. Or maybe the conclusion I’ve come to about such and such is only some Freudian trauma I’ve experienced with my mother or father.

Postmodernism requires us to believe there is no there, there, and what might be there only has relevance because of my thoughts about it. It’s really always a guessing game. Postmodernists may say, “That’s true for you, but not for me,” and believe it, but they really have no idea, and deep down they know it. Such a shaky hold on existence is the logical conclusion of the triumph of the subjective. By contrast, The Real is truth, not just an abstract philosophical concept, but things as they actually are.

If there is a God, then he made reality a certain way. Sure, sometimes because of our sinful, rebellious hearts we want to do it our way, but the hope is that it doesn’t take too long for us to realize our ignorance or stupidity. We are all born ignorant and stupid; it’s called sin.

The Real can also be seen in the creational order, the way God created it to be. If we follow that order, life gets easier. For example, we might deny the objective reality of absolute moral values, but our denial doesn’t mean they don’t exist, or that we get to determine those values. I’ve heard it said that we can no more break God’s physical laws than we can break his moral laws without consequences. Both are part of the very fabric of existence. Postmodern relativists, however, affirm physical laws but believe they can define moral laws. Reality doesn’t work that way. Take sexual morality, for instance. There is a reason God established monogamy between one man and one woman as the moral norm for sexual relationships. Flout it, have sex with whomever you want whenever you want, and you could die. Embrace it, and no sexually transmitted disease will ever touch you. As I often say, “That’s the way the world works.” You do it God’s way, in other words, and chances are things will work out well. If you do it your own way, good luck. I love what Isaiah tells us in this regard:

He will be the sure foundation for your times, a rich store of salvation and wisdom and knowledge; the fear of the LORD is the key to this treasure (33:6).

It is this solid foundation that as we come to the end of this secular age that is becoming increasingly appealing to an increasing number of people.

How Ancient Greeks Help Us to Understand the Real
Ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle can be of some assistance when we discuss The Real. They believed in and argued for the existence of objective goodness, beauty, and truth—something countercultural in an age awash in the vagaries of postmodern relativism, yet what every human being believes exist and longs for.

What humans experience of goodness, beauty, and truth, Plato argued, points to the universal or the ultimate form of these things; they exist in life because they exist ultimately. Aristotle, a student of Plato, took his mentor’s thoughts in a more empirical direction: the real for him lay in the thingness of the thing itself, and not in some universal idea of it. Thus, there is a certain dogness in dogs; dogs have the nature of dogness. Roses have a roseness, and so on. This is not as silly as it sounds, and it is perfectly biblical. In Genesis 1 God created everything “according to their kinds.” Things are the way they are for a reason; we can’t wish them to be other than they are, as many Western cultural elites are trying to do with the current debate over gender. Is gender a malleable concept, based on what we feel or think, or is it rooted in the order of creation, “male and female he created them”? The answer is obvious.

It will make more sense if you consider Aristotle’s concept of Telos, or purpose, the ultimate object of a thing. All things in created reality have a reason for being, whether created by humans or God. Their purpose or end defines them. Tim Keller says, “Unless you know the telos of something, what it is for, you can’t make right judgments about whether the thing is good or bad.” It is readily apparent that a hammer has a different telos, or purpose, than a nail. It would be odd to see someone trying to “hammer” a hammer with a nail: Seriously, dude, I think you have that backward.

Everything of human origin has an obvious purpose, and when it comes to creation, the concept is every bit as relevant. I have a simple example that took place in a discussion I had with a friend about something called same‑sex marriage (which assumes sex, male‑female, has nothing to do with why marriage exists). He thought Christians were being unreasonable and judgmental to deny homosexuals the opportunity to marry and be happy; he was adamant the Bible didn’t forbid it. Every biblical argument I tried to make hit a brick wall. Then I brought up the idea of telos. I told him it is evident that the human anatomy, male and female, clearly has a telos. Without getting graphic, it’s clear to any objective observer that certain body parts have an obvious designed end, a purpose for which they were created, and homosexuality doesn’t fulfill those purposes. It’s like trying to “hammer” the hammer with a nail. He got a strange look on his face, stopped, and said, “I’ve never thought of that.” The Bible didn’t open his mind, but telos did.

I’ll end this little foray into the ancient Greeks with a short excursion into nominalism and realism. The Associate Pastor at our church, Rev. John Ravell, is philosophically well read, and young (only 34), and in an e-mail exchange about something related to the ideas in this post, he said modern people are “basically hyper-nominal” as opposed to being grounded in philosophical realism which goes back to the ancient Greeks and Medieval philosophy. I love that phrase. Nominalism as a philosophy was developed by William of Ockham (1287-1347) in a debate with those who espoused realism. A simple overview of nominalism comes from Chat GPT:

Only individual things really exist; general categories or abstract properties are just names we give them. For example:

  • You see many red objects: an apple, a stop sign, a shirt.
  • A realist philosopher might say there is a real universal property called “redness” that all these things share.
  • A nominalist says there is no separate thing called “redness” existing independently — we simply group similar objects under the label “red.”

The word comes from the Latin nomen, meaning “name.”

This was a huge shift in Western Christian culture. Richard Weaver in his wonderful book, Ideas Have Consequences, said this was a profound “change which came over man’s conception of reality.” Indeed it was. Instead of being grounded in an objective reality of things that exist independent of our perceptions of them, we’re awash in a world of meaningless particulars, puzzle pieces with no puzzle or bigger picture into which they fit. As my young pastor friend put it, “We don’t believe in realism anymore. We have a hard time even articulating what it would look like to believe in realism, but it’s exactly in line with a biblical worldview and imagination.” He added, this leads modern people who “attempt to say something about the whole always fixating on the parts, which leads invariably to paralysis.” As Weaver puts it perfectly in the book,

The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than and independent of man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one’s view of the nature and destiny of humankind. . . . The denial of universals carries with it the denial of everything transcending experience. . . . which means inevitably—though ways are found to hedge on this—the denial of truth. With the denial of objective truth there is no escape from the relativism of “man the measure of all things.”

This was written 78 years ago in 1948. Weaver couldn’t imagine, although he wouldn’t be surprised, the depths of absurdity people have gotten to by living in figments of their own imagination. It is exactly such absurdity that is opening an increasing number of people to The Real, and leading them back to the Creator, for from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.