In the Days of Herod (Luke 1:5a)

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Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities opens with the memorable line, “It was the best of the times, it was the worst of times…” Some periods are infamous for their difficulty. Merely naming the age evokes the hard times that people experienced, as with the Irish Potato Famine, the Holodomor, the Great Depression, Vietnam,
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Luke’s Method (Luke 1:1-4)

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In the last blog, we explored Luke’s purpose in writing his Gospel, and I suggested it was quasi-apologetic—meant to stabilize or to reinforce faith in Christ. Now we can ask a second question: what was Luke’s method in writing his Gospel? The prologue gives us five clues. Inasmuch as many have taken in hand to
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The Word “Righteousness” in the Book of Romans

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One of the most interesting things about studying the book of Romans is how Paul uses the word “righteousness.” It is used over 35 times in the book. And that is counting just the noun, not the verb. Sometimes the word is translated “righteousness,” and other times it is translated “justification.” Most famously, it is
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The Purpose of Luke’s Gospel (Luke 1:3-4) 

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People write books for specific reasons, and understanding those reasons can help you understand a book as a whole. So why did Luke write his Gospel? What was his purpose? Consider a contrast: John’s Gospel was written with what you could call an evangelistic purpose, where the “good news” is about how to be individually
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