Their foot shall slide in due time.
Deuteronomy 32:35

In this verse is threatened the vengeance of God on the wicked unbelieving Israelites, who were God's visible people, and who lived under the means of grace; but who, notwithstanding all God's wonderful works towards them, remained (as vers 28.) void of counsel, having no understanding in them. Under all the cultivations of heaven, they brought forth bitter and poisonous fruit; as in the two verses next preceding the text. -- The expression I have chosen for my text, their foot shall slide in due time, seems to imply the following things, relating to the punishment and destruction to which these wicked Israelites were exposed.

Question 101 - But may we swear an oath by the Name of God in a godly manner?

Answer - Yes, when the government demands it of its subjects, or when necessity requires it, in order to maintain and promote fidelity and truth, to God's glory and for our neighbour's good. Such oath-taking is based on God's Word¹ and was therefore rightly used by saints in the Old and the New Testament.²

¹ Deut. 6:13; 10:20; Jer. 4:1, 2; Heb. 6:16. ² Gen. 21:24; 31:53; Josh. 9:15; I Sam. 24:22; I Kings 1:29, 30; Rom. 1:9; II Cor. 1:23.

What is your bottom line? What are your goals? What do you want from life? What do you want for your children? Perhaps you desire personal happiness for you and for your children. Or maybe you long for financial security so you can pay the bills and see your children well educated without a lifetime of debt. Perhaps your goal is a good name or good character, success in your line of work, success for your children in school, in their careers, or in developing their gifts.

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner that is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested that seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
Exodus 20:8-11 (ESV)

I come from a basically secular upbringing, and I was converted in a "broadly evangelical" setting. All of this means that I had no grasp of the Christian Sabbath – in fact, I really had no idea of just what a Christian should think of God's moral demands in general. What is this "freedom from the law" that the New Testament is supposed to bring us?

Human beings climb. Always have, always will. First hills, then mountains, then pinnacles so high they're called "death zones." That's as high as legs could carry them, but not high enough. So people invented balloons, blimps, airplanes, and spacecraft, the higher the better—to a point.

At first, scaling heights made people feel big and powerful. Then they began to feel small, utterly insignificant even, in the hugeness of the cosmos. Today, ironically, the same forces that once shrank humanity's perception of himself now magnify him beyond the wildest imagination, yet with no basis for pride and every reason for humility. Those forces, insatiable curiosity, and capacity for inquiry have lifted humans to a vista, an insight called the anthropic principle, that carries their gaze to the edge of the universe and beyond.

The anthropic principle says that the universe appears "designed" for the sake of human life. More than a century of astronomy and physics research yields this unexpected observation: the emergence of humans and human civilization requires physical constants, laws, and properties that fall within certain narrow ranges—and this truth applies not only to the cosmos as a whole but also to the galaxy, planetary system, and planet humans occupy. To state the principle more dramatically, a preponderance of physical evidence points to humanity as the central theme of the cosmos.

It is the unhappy lot of any man who cares a fig for truth to be called on to engage in controversy. He may embrace it as a purse of gold or despise it as a putrefying sore, but he can no more escape it than he can escape the atmosphere or the common cold. In a fallen world, truth and controversy are bedfellows.

It is true: we cannot make progress by controversy alone. Real progress toward unity is the work of God. This is also true, however: We are unlikely to make progress without controversy. All Scripture bears this out, not least when it couples the sovereignty of God with the use of means in the highest interests of the soul. We do not simply hope for the day in which all will be absolutely in one accord. No, we seek by means to bring "every thought captive to the obedience of Christ" (2 Cor. 10:5).

A man may spend valuable time bemoaning that fact, but what is needed is a way to come to terms with it as a godly man, a way to carry on controversy with a minimum amount of damage to his opponent and to the interested bystander and the maximum amount of good to the cause of God and truth.

"For he flattereth himself in his own eyes, until his iniquity be found to be hateful."
Psalm 36:2

In the foregoing verse, David says, that the transgression of the wicked said within his heart, "that there is no fear of God before his eyes;" that is, when he saw that the wicked went on in sin, in an allowed way of wickedness, it convinced him, that he was not afraid of those terrible judgments, and of that wrath with which God hath threatened sinners If he were afraid of these he could never go on so securely in sin, as he doth.

In our text he gives the reason why the wicked did not fear. It was a strange thing that men, who enjoyed such light as they did in the land of Israel, who read and heard those many awful threatenings which were written in the book of the law, should not be afraid to go on in sin. But saith the Psalmist, They flatter themseIves in their own eyes: They have something or other which they make a foundation of encouragement, whereby they persuade themselves that they shall escape those judgments; and that makes them put far away the evil day.

None of the explanations offered in the accompanying article imply that God randomly selected the life span of early humans or that He simply reacted to natural disasters in shortening human life. Rather, Genesis 6:3 states that God acted purposefully to shorten human life spans, and Genesis 6:5 and 11 imply that the shortening of human life spans at the time of the Flood served a specific spiritual purpose.

Why did God allow for long life spans in the first place? Long life expectancies early in humanity's history reflect God's mercy and provision. Long life spans make it possible for human technology and civilization to emerge rapidly. Living 900 years gives people ample opportunity to make discoveries, develop technology, refine technological achievements, and teach all that has been learned to ensuing generations. Under these conditions, human civilization can make dramatic advances in relatively few generations.

A biblical worldview must definitely encompass ones view of men and women. Basic beliefs about who each sex is and what each should be like greatly impacts ones own gender evaluations as well as the shaping of boys and girls, the education of young men and women, the success of marriages, the effectiveness of the church in the world, and even the stability of society. Ones view of a man or a woman affects attitudes, character, and interaction with one another.

In some very key ways, men and women are the same but they were not created to be exactly the same: "male and female he created them" (Gen 1:27). There are not only op-posing opinions over whether or not there is any significant difference between the sexes, but also over what those differences really are. Surely, Christians need a clear understanding of what distinguishes a man from a woman according to their Creator. The focus of this article will be devoted to understanding what true masculinity is and is not. The question of how a man knows whether he is a real man or not will be discovered from Scripture.

Imagine this topic being discussed on one of Americas most prestigious college campuses. The ideas expressed would be as varied as the many strong opinions found there. One might hear, "A man should be macho and self-reliant," while another may say, "A man should be interdependent and sensitive." Others might insist, "A real man must be romantic," while still others would offer, "All boys should be raised to be good at sports in order to express their masculinity and relate to other men." Perhaps another would say, "A mans man is successful and a leader," while someone else may interject, "A respected man sees himself as an equal--a non-leader, a fifty-fifty partner." Another student could possibly declare, "A man is not a man unless he can rule his family without any questioning from them." How can there be so many opinions among supposedly learned individuals? There are at least two key reasons: the sinfulness of man and the loss of absolutes.

The fault lines of controversy in contemporary Christianity range across a vast terrain of issues, but none seems quite so volatile as the question of gender. As Christians have been thinking and rethinking these issues in recent years, a clear pattern of divergence has appeared. At stake in this debate is something more important than the question of gender, for this controversy reaches the deepest questions of Christian identity and biblical authority.

For too long, those who hold to traditional understandings of manhood and womanhood, deeply rooted in both Scripture and tradition, have allowed themselves to be pushed into a defensive posture. Given the prevailing spirit of the age and the enormous cultural pressure toward conformity, traditionalists are now accused of being woefully out of step and hopelessly out of date. Now is a good time to reconsider the issues basic to this debate and to reassert the arguments for biblical manhood and womanhood.