Tried With Fire

I have been pondering the word religion . I used to have a personal bias against the word until I started reading the Puritans. In J.I. Packer's talk on the Puritan Century, he states that religion was to the Puritans as Christianity is to us today. In 1941, Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote, "Religion, a true belief in God, in Jesus Christ, is fundamental, vital, essential." J.C. Ryle wrote on Practical Religion . Jonathan Edwards wrote A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections . Who can forget Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion . So it seems in former days, these godly men used religion to refer to the gospel and its outworking. Something has changed because my former definition of religion would have been scrupulous conformity to a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices by which a person is made right with God . This is an amalgamation of two of the definitions of religion from Merriam-Webster's online ...

Starting next week, the new Sunday school class will be a theological survey using Chosen by God by R.C. Sproul. In the beginning of the 2nd chapter, Predestination and the Sovereignty of God , he gives a modern dictionary definition of predestination. Out of curiosity I looked up the word in the 1828 Dictionary of the English Language by Noah Webster. 1828 definition: predestination (n) - The act of decreeing or foreordaining events; the decree of God by which he hath, from eternity, unchangeably appointed or determined whatever comes to pass. It is particularly used in theology to denote the preordination of men to everlasting happiness or misery. Predestination is part of the unchangeable plan of divine government; or in other words, the unchangeable purpose of an unchangeable God. Contrast the above definition with the one from the 1979 Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary. The second definition is the same as the one in the book. predestination (n) - 1. the act of predestinat...