About this Site

975 words long.

Published on 2024-04-24

If you seek wisdom and love the Bible, this is a good place to spend some time. This is not a blog. I don't toss off random thoughts every few days about unrelated subjects. I have thought carefully about the core ideas of the Christian faith and here present an organized account of the most important things I have learned.

Of course by important, I mean important to me! They might not be that important to you. The ideas here fall into two flavors:

• You will find well known Christian principles made vivid because I have lived them and explain them through my personal testimony. I teach truths that changed me. These truths set me free from depression, anxiety, nightmares, the fear of death, loneliness, and a life of purposelessness.
• You will find original ideas, the fruit of long years of study of the Bible's wisdom books, particularly Job, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, Psalms and Matthew.

The ideas fall into two major categories:

• Advice to foster personal spiritual growth
• A Novel system of Eschatology (the study of prophecies of the end times)

People looking for information on one of these topics are often not much interested in the other. Are you focused on living in the here and now? Or do you crave to know how the story ends? These two concerns are intertwined. My chief insight was that God has structured the phases of a single human life using principles analogous to how he has designed all of human history. When you see how much of history has already been predicted by the Bible, you will see the power of those principles and that will bolster your faith that they can work for you.

Navigating the Website

Table of Contents. The table of contents appears on the left side of most pages. If you click on a section entry that has subtopics, it will expand to show them. In every case, clicking the main section heading always opens up the main article which the subtopics elaborate upon. Don't skip the section articles!

Chevron Button. A red chevron (>> or <<) appears over the table of contents. Click on it and it will hide the table of contents, making the article take up the full screen width which will make it easier to read. Click on the chevron again and the TOC will reappear.

Full text search. The bottom of most pages has a search box. If you type text into it, it will find all articles containing those words. If many articles have the phrase, you will see a link to go to the next page of search results.

To quickly navigate to the search bar, type the key combinations control-F or command-F.

Scripture Index. Beside the full text search box is a button that says "Scripture Index". If you click on it, you will go to a page that lists the books of the Bible that have been quoted. Click on a book name and a list of all chapters that are cited somewhere on this web site will appear. Under that heading are links to every article that cites at least one verse from that chapter.

Images. On a touch screen, pinch-to-zoom will be handy as many tables and images are too small to read unless zoomed. On a computer, you can right-click and choose "Open in new tab" to open the image in a new tab at full size.

Section Links. Many articles have a dashed box around links to related articles in a series or other sections on the same page.

Doctrinal Statement

I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, who died on the cross for my sins, who rose from the dead on the third day, and that there is no other name under heaven or on earth by which anyone can be saved.

I believe the Apostle's Creed and the Athanasian Creed.

I accept the conclusions of the seven ecumenical councils.

I believe in the plenary inspiration of the Bible and believe it to have been inerrant in the original autographs.

My longest association as a church member is with the American Baptist Church, and my beliefs are generally consistent with the Reformed Baptist tradition, and Calvin's five points.

I was raised Roman Catholic and have worshiped at one time or another with the Dutch Reformed, Congregational and Pentecostal churches, all of whom I respect and from which I have benefited, even though I take issue with certain doctrinal positions that they hold.

I believe that the charismatic gifts still operate in the church today, excepting the gift of apostle, which I believe is reserved for those who walked with Jesus, with the sole exception of the apostle Paul.

On the matter of origins, I am a Young Earth Creationist. Yes, and I also hold a degree in Physics from MIT.

On the matter of women serving in leadership as pastors and elders, I am egalitarian. This view is one I adopted only recently. I explain my reasons for reversing a position I held strongly for over thirty years in detail in the article Against Complementarianism

Concerning a matter that will perplex many, while in agony one night in January 2023, waiting until the day when they could perform major surgery on my broken arm, the Lord had mercy on me and relieved my pain instantly. He did this by sending me a vision of the Virgin Mary. Let this be a final testimony to who I am. I know what I believe, I believe it with passion and tenacity, and when I am proven wrong, I submit. You will find my testimony of this blessed event on this website if you hunt long enough...

Acknowledgments

Many of the illustrations on this website were created with the help of generative AI from these Websites:

• Microsoft Copilot
• OpenArt.ai