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Thursday, November 18, 2021

Precedent For Metaphorically Drinking Blood And Eating God

Do a Ctrl F search for "John 6" in Glenn Miller's article here. In a video here, Steven Nemes makes a lot of good points about the eucharist and whether Christ is physically present in it. My main interest in this post, though, is his examples of precedent for viewing the eucharist in a way that doesn't involve a physical presence. We often apply the same sort of reasoning in other areas of life (when speaking of the Passover elements, when referring to how an actor is the character he represents, etc.).

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

He Gives His Rest Under A Yoke

I've been reading John Piper's recent book on providence. As he continues to produce so much good work in his retirement years, it's useful to look back at a poem he wrote about retirement and the dangers of sloth shortly before he retired. If you go here, you can read the poem, with an introduction explaining its background, and watch a video of Piper reading it.

Sunday, November 14, 2021

Don't Underestimate Prophecy Fulfillment

Prophecy fulfillment is often underestimated in a lot of contexts for a lot of reasons. For example, it seems that people often underestimate the value of prophecy fulfillment that's occurred since the Biblical era, and there's probably more than one reason why that happens. We hear more about the postbiblical era than the Biblical era, since we have more evidence for the former and it's closer to our time. We become more accustomed to it accordingly, and we often grow increasingly less appreciative of something the more we're accustomed to it. And we don't have any Biblical passages informing or reminding us that the prophecies have been fulfilled and how significant those fulfillments are, since the fulfillments occurred after the Bible was written. I suspect there's also an overreaction to false claims that have been made about alleged prophecy fulfillment in our day and in previous generations. People overreact to those false claims by going too far in the other direction, so that they neglect the fulfillments that have occurred.

Here's a post I wrote a couple of years ago that provides some examples of postbiblical prophecy fulfillment and how to argue for it. And this post goes into more depth about how to think through and articulate the principles involved. Here's one that lists some examples of prophecies fulfilled by non-Christians and/or whose fulfillment is acknowledged by non-Christians. The list includes some postbiblical fulfillments.