Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is the very foundation of the Christian faith. As Paul puts it in I Corinthians 15: “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have…
Martin Luther’s Small Catechism has a lot of memorable passages such as “What does this mean?” “We should fear and love God,” “This is most certainly true.” Young Lutherans as they go through their confirmation training have the privilege of memorizing portions of the Catechism. But the real power of Luther’s Small Catechism is that…
Jesus said, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly I say to you unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies it remains only a single seed but if it dies it produces many seeds. The man who loves his life will lose it, but the…
Matthew 27:24–25: “So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.’ And all the people answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’” (ESV)…
In a recent broadcast of The Lutheran Hour, Dr Michael Zeigler and Rev. Ryan Tinetti discuss how Christians should respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. They explained that in our response to this pandemic Christians can fall into two errors. We can say too much or we can also err by saying too little. Saying too…
The miracle of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead as recorded in John 11 stands out in many ways. First we should point out that Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead is a resuscitation, not a resurrection. The term resurrection is reserved for Jesus’ rising from the dead because of one important factor; Jesus rose…
John 9 tells the story of the time when Jesus healed a man who had been blind from birth. In this story we encounter three forms of blindness: physcial blindness, spiritual blindness and sacramental blindness. The physical blindness in this story is quite profound; the man had been blind from birth. To heal him, Jesus…
In John 9 Jesus and his disciples encounter a man who was blind from birth. The disciples ask Jesus, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Did they really think that the man could have committed a sin while in his mother’s womb for which God then punished him…
In a recent post I wrote about the two ways Scripture uses the word tempt or test. When the Bible talks about the ways God tests our faith to make it stronger and when Scripture tells about the devil tempting us to sin, it uses the same word. In this post we will discuss how…
The last segment of the video “Our Created Stars and Galaxies”, produced by the Creation Astronomy ministry, features a series of statements demonstrating the profoundly different worldviews of some scientists and the Bible. First there is this quote from scientist Steven Weinberg in 1993: “It is very hard to realize that this all is just…
Mirror Neurons 