As a little boy, I was blessed to grow up in the small country of Austria, the land of “Silent Night, Holy Night” and of The Sound of Music. Christmas was truly a special time of the year, and many Christmases were in fact white. My sister and I would leave our wish list for… Read More
Advent Reading: Luke 1:1-4
Should someone tell Luke about run-on sentences? Luke was not only a doctor; he was a very well educated man. As a result, he wrote a very elegant literary preface to his Gospel. He says he followed matters closely for some time and talked to eyewitnesses. With regard to Jesus’ birth, who would have been… Read More
Advent Reading Plan
Advent Reading Plan The following Advent Reading Plan, reproduced from The First Days of Jesus: The Story of the Incarnation by Andreas J. Kӧstenberger and Alexander E. Stewart (foreword by Justin Taylor; Wheaton: Crossway, 2015) includes six readings from the Old Testament, six from Matthew, nine from Luke, and four from John. The readings, keyed… Read More
What Happened at the First Christmas?
In order to appreciate the significance of Messiah’s coming—and thus to understand the true meaning of Christmas—we need to travel back in time, back to the first Christmas, before this event even carried that name. We can’t offer you a time machine, but we can point you to the earliest written witnesses to the first… Read More
Scandalous Christmas
God does not always do things the way that we think he should or act as we might expect. He does not always act in accordance with human wisdom (Paul develops this point in 1 Corinthians 1:18–25, 27–29). Nowhere is this clearer than in the infancy narratives of Matthew 1–2 and Luke 1–2. The birth… Read More