Some things from around the web

Here are a few things that I found today.

First, here is an article by Justin Taylor on the ESV Study Bible. It includes several pictures of Herod's Temple. Enjoy!

I've avoided putting anything political up here but this is a very good post from Nicholas Batzig (a PCA pastor in Pennsylvania) on the government and charity. Hopefully I'll have time one day to put up a summary my views of a Biblical economic.

Here is a link to the latest edition of the New Horizons magazine (an official publication of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church). The subject of this issue is the Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck. I haven't read everything by any stretch but as far as what Systematic Theology work I have read I consider his Reformed Dogmatics to be second only to John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion. Since we are in the PCA, here is the latest issue of Equip to Disciple as well.

Finally, here is a quote from Michael Horton's new book, People and Place: A Covenant Ecclesiology (this is the fourth is a series of four on a covenantal systematic theology). This is a very good quote on Christ's real absence and his presence in the Spirit that is worth thinking about and meditating on (HT: Shane Lems):

The more we receive from the Spirit of the realities of the age to come, the more restless we become. Yet it is a restlessness born not of fear but of having already received a foretaste of the future. Only when we have caught the scent of everlasting life and joy that pervades the atmosphere of the consummation does the air of this present age seem stale and redolent of death. Having tasted the morsels of the heavenly feast, we no longer find the rich banquets of this age satisfying.

The Spirit’s presence always tantalizes us with the more still to be enjoyed, which makes Christian suffering different from either a nihilistic and cynical fate to be accepted with Stoic indifference or a reality to be denied in a spirit of triumphalism. Those who are filled with the Spirit are characterized by struggle more than victory, since it is the Spirit’s presence that draws the two ages into conflict and draws out the insurgents of this present evil age to defend their new contested terrain. Where the Spirit indwells, there is peace with God and conflict within, with the powers of sin and death within us and in the world. (pg. 23)