“Ask yourself this: if my church put on a conference about how to have a great Christian marriage and fulfilled sex life, would more or fewer people attend than if we did one on the importance of the incarnation or the Trinity?” (Carl R. Trueman, The Creedal Imperative, 37).

In 2 Samuel 21:15-22 several Philistine giants are killed by warriors of the Lord (Abishai killed Ishbibenob, 21:17; Sibbechai killed Saph, 21:18; Elhanan killed the brother of Goliath the Gittite, 21:19; Jonathan killed a man with six fingers per hand and six toes per foot, 21:21). All of this occurs under the leadership of King David.

When Israel was under the leadership of Saul, there was no man found within the armies of Israel, except for David the shepherd boy, who would go out to face a Philistine giant (Goliath). However, under the righteous leadership of King David, Israel has become a nation of Davids; Israel becomes a nation of giant-slayers. Under the leadership of King David, Israel kills the enemies of Yahweh.

“Yet rather had I wished that thou might see him here. Grendel himself, thy foe in his array sick unto death! I purposed in hard bonds swiftly to bind him upon his deathbed, that by the grasp of my hands he should be forced to lie struggling for life, had not his body escaped me. I might not, since it was not the will of God, restrain his flight; I did not cleave fast enough for that unto my mortal foe; too overwhelming was the might of that fiend in body’s movement. Nonetheless he hath left behind upon his trail his hand and arm and shoulder. Yet in no wise thus hath that unhappy one purchased himself relief; none the longer will he live, that doer of evil wrong, burdened by his sins; nay, pain hath him closely gripped in a grasp he cannot flee, in bonds of anguish — there must he, stained with sin, await the great Day of Doom and the sentence that the bright Judge will pronounce on him” (J.R.R. Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, 40).

“We see the impact of suspicion of words even within the Christian church. At the Reformation, preaching came to supplant the Mass as the central act of corporate Christian worship; underlying this shift was a move toward an understanding of the gospel and of salvation as being by faith in that promise. Thus, proclamation of that promise in words moved to center stage. In recent decades, however, many churches have shifted preaching from this central place. In some contexts, preaching has not been abandoned; rather, it has been relativized and now stands alongside dramatic performances, candles, incense, and small group discussion. In other contexts, preaching has been pushed completely aside for conversational discourse, where the authoritative voice of the preacher has been replaced by a more democratic dialogue. Underlying all these shifts, in practice if not always in terms of self-conscious planning, is a suspicion that proclaimed words are no longer a reliable authority, or, perhaps better, a plausible authority, given the wider antiverbal cultural dispositions” (Carl R. Trueman, The Creedal Imperative, 34).

“If ‘human nature’ does not exist, other than as a specific, basic biological structure that means one human can only reproduce in conjunction with another, then what authority can anybody or any human document that belongs to another time or place have? If human nature is really a construct of the particulars of a specific historical, geographical, and cultural context, it is not immediately obvious that, say, a document produced in Constantinople near the end of the fourth century can have any relevance to people living in London or New York at the start of the twenty-first. For historical documents to speak beyond their own time there has to be some kind of fundamental continuity between their form and content and the present age” (Carl R. Trueman, The Creedal Imperative, 30-31).

“In Amos’s day the most severe punishment to fall on the people of God was a “famine . . . of hearing the words of the Lord” (Amos 8:11). There is no calamity like the silence of God. We cannot know God himself unless God speaks to us. Every true Christian should feel deep in his bones an utter dependence on God’s self-revelation in the Scriptures. Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord (Deut. 8:3; Matt. 4:4)” (Kevin DeYoung, Taking God At His Word, 21).

“The chief of those Geatish men had accomplished all his proud vaunt before East Danes, and had healed, moreover, all the woe and the tormenting sorrow that they had erewhile suffered and must of necessity endure, no little bitterness. Of this a clear token it was when that warrior bold had set the hand, the arm and shoulder, beneath the widespread roof — there was all Grendel’s clutching limb entire” (J.R.R. Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, 36).

From the Intercollegiate Review’s – an article titled Fifty Worst Books of the 20th Century.

John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (1956) Should have been called, Profiles in Ghost-Writing.

That is funny.

“There are many texts we could use to show that the Bible is without error, but here’s the simplest argument: Scripture did not come from the will of man; it came from God. And if it is God’s word then it must all be true, for in him there can be no error or deceit” (Kevin DeYoung, Taking God At His Word, 39).

Gary North recently gave a lunchtime seminar on “Careers for Austrians” at Mises University 2014.