Vol 95 Issue 21

Trivia question You may have heard the Latin phrase in loco parentis. Do you know what that means? Answer later in this column. Sister church activities There is a Protestant Reformed Theological School—a seminary—in the Philippines! That is a noteworthy statement! Here’s what more we know: Regarding the school, the first week was completed. Classes were taught as scheduled on Tuesday through Friday mornings. Bro. Jeremiah Pascual seemed to enjoy his first week as a seminary student and seems glad to be underway with training. Our missionaries are too! Rev. D. Holstege teaches the class in Hermeneutics; Rev. D. Kleyn...

Graciousness: Tempering Truth with Love, by John Crotts. Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018. 137 pp. $14.00. ISBN 978-1-60178-586-2 [Reviewed by Brenda Hoekstra] Most SB readers have heard of and believe that they live by the scriptural truth of Ephesians 4:15, ‘speak the truth in love.’ When the truth is a real part of you because you wholeheartedly believe it, your zeal can actually get in the way of the very truth you are trying so fervently to present. When we are bringing important things that need to be said to others, when we are delivering truth, graciousness is...

Previous article in this series: September 1, 2019, p. 465. “This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them.” Hebrews 10:16 “Why will God…have the ten commandments so strictly preached? .That we may become more and more conformable to the image of God, till we arrive at the perfection proposed to us in a life to come.” Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 115 Introduction These concluding articles in the series on premillennialism are a kind of “postscript.” They examine...

The messenger matters Readers of the Standard Bearer may remember Joshua Harris and his book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye (published in 1997), as it was the occasion for some discussion in the pages of this magazine a number of years ago. Harris’s book became very popular as “a manual for young evangelicals looking for love.”1 There were also many Christians who were critical of Harris’s proposal to replace dating with his prescribed method of courtship. Sometime last year I discovered that Harris himself has come to disagree with “the central idea” of his book that “dating should be avoided.”2 So...

I have some problems with the recent article by Prof. B. Huizinga on “The nature of good works as works.” I appreciated that faith was called an activity, a demand of the gospel call, and obedience, but in plain language, an activity is done and obedience must be done. The definition of “work” or “doing” provided in the article excluded this common usage since it also required: 1. Exertion 2. Producing 3. External work through the body As a software engineer, I spend much of my time thinking. This involves much more exertion than typing on a keyboard, and it...

The doctrine of election is the foundation of the Reformed truth of salvation by grace alone. The first head of the Canons of Dordt establishes the doctrine of double predestination in answer to the first point of the Remonstrants. The Arminians placed this doctrine first in their five objections (remonstrances), knowing that if they could successfully change the Reformed teaching of election to a conditional election, the rest of their teaching (errors) would follow logically. If election (and therefore, salvation) depended on man’s choosing it, then Christ died for all to make that choice a possibility, and fallen man is...

“Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” Isaiah 55:1 It was common in the Bible lands to come across vendors selling water. Water was often scarce in the Bible lands. And so venders would sell water, calling out to those who were thirsty to come and buy their water. The word of God before us compares the Lord to such a vendor selling water. “Ho, every one that thirsteth.” This is what the ven­dors would...