Search Articles
Search the archive to uncover reflections, sermons, and studies centered on finding faith and hope amid suffering. Use keywords, scripture references, or topics, like trust, lament, or Habakkuk, to quickly locate teachings that guide spiritual growth through tragedy.
Each result includes a concise summary to help you decide what to read next, whether you want theological insight, pastoral encouragement, or practical steps for living faithfully in hard seasons.
Start your search and find resources designed to strengthen trust and sustain hope.
Recent Publications
From Death to Life: Walking Through Ephesians 2:1–10 with S. M. Baugh
When we walk through seasons of exhaustion, grief, or personal failure, our perspective naturally narrows. In those quiet hours, many of us wrestle with questions about our worth and whether renewal is truly possible. It is into this landscape of human weakness that the Apostle Paul speaks.
The Foundations of Apologetics in Biblical Theology
When many Christians hear the word apologetics, they immediately think of debates, philosophical arguments, or intellectual defenses of Christianity. While those elements have their place, Scripture presents a far richer vision. The biblical task of apologetics is not primarily the defense of abstract propositions but the faithful interpretation and proclamation of God's self-revelation. Before humanity ever speaks about God, God has spoken about Himself.
Why Ephesians 2 Is Especially Needed When Tragedy Strikes
Every profound tragedy brings with it a particular silence. It is not the silence of peace, but the heavy, stunned hush that settles when the familiar scaffolding of life gives way. Whether the catastrophe arrives as an unexpected diagnosis, the sudden death of someone dearly loved, the slow unraveling of a family, or a community shattered by disaster, the immediate effect is the same: the ordinary resources of explanation and self-management are abruptly exhausted.
Habakkuk’s Tragedy: Part 03
When tragedy strikes, the intellect arrives late. The senses insist the thing is real while the mind keeps saying it cannot be. Prayer erupts. The tragedy occurs anyway. Numbness and piercing awareness occupy the same hour. That collision is likely how Habakkuk felt as Jerusalem came apart, and it is why the opening of his book should not be read as theological analysis.
Habakkuk’s Tragedy: Part 02
There is a creature in the book of Job that God will not let Job tame. After the friends have exhausted every religious explanation for suffering, God speaks from the whirlwind and describes Leviathan: a beast of fearsome strength, armor that cannot be pierced, a mouth ringed with terror, a creature no hook can hold and no human scheme can subdue.
Habakkuk’s Tragedy: Part 01
When the unimaginable has already happened, the ordinary language of faith can feel too thin. A single day divides a life into before and after. The furniture of the world is rearranged, and the questions that rise are not clever. They are the questions of people trying to remain honest before God without pretending their hearts are unbroken.
Matthew 18 Explained: The God Who Entered Our Dust
Matthew 18’s parable of the unforgiving servant is often read as a simple moral lesson about forgiveness. But Jesus is doing far more than teaching ethics, He is revealing the incarnation. The mercy of the king in the parable is so vast, so disproportionate, that it exposes the absurdity of withholding forgiveness from others. But beneath the story lies the deeper truth: the King Himself has come.
Romans 14 Explained: The Life Shaped by Mercy
Romans 14 shows us what happens when the mercy of God becomes the shape of a community. Paul is not offering abstract ethical advice; he is showing how the character of God (Psalm 103) and the mercy of Christ (Matthew 18) reshape the church’s posture toward one another.
Psalm 103 Explained: The God Who Remembers Our Frame
Proper 19A. Psalm 103 gives us one of Scripture’s clearest windows into the heart of God. David does not begin with demands; he begins with blessing. “Bless the Lord, O my soul” (Ps. 103:1). And then he names the God he blesses, a God who forgives, heals, redeems, and crowns His people with steadfast love and mercy (Ps. 103:3–4). A God who does not deal with us according to our sins (Ps. 103:10). A God who remembers our frame and knows that we are dust (Ps. 103:14).
Autotheos and Nicene Orthodoxy: Reconsidering the Son’s Aseity in Light of Pro‑Nicene Grammar and the Limits of Privation Theodicy
This article argues that Calvin’s claim that the Son is autotheos, “God of Himself”, directly addresses a long‑standing tension in how some readers interpret the Nicene Creed. On one hand, the Creed proclaims the Son as “God from God”; on the other, it insists that He is “true God from true God,” fully and eternally divine.
Modern Individualism and the Recovery of Identity, Freedom, and Dignity in the Church: Part II
Here's something that should stop you cold. The words dignity, freedom and identity are everywhere right now. On social media, in therapy offices, in church sermons. And yet, according to theologian Allan Snodgrass, they've kept the words while quietly gutting everything that gave them meaning.
Modern Individualism and the Recovery of Identity, Freedom, and Dignity in the Church
The gospel doesn’t erase individuality; it restores it. In Christ persons are known, loved, and given a secure identity that doesn’t depend on performance, reinvention, or social validation. The biblical story dignifies human beings more deeply than modern individualism ever could because it locates their worth in God’s creative and redemptive love.
What Does the Book of Job Teach about Evil?
Evil is real and agonizing and permitted within the cosmic conflict yet it is never outside God’s sovereign purposes. The book of Job moves the reader from the mystery of suffering through protest and lament to repentance and the quiet trust that says even in the dark I know that my Redeemer lives.
What Is the Leviathan in the Book of Job?
The Leviathan of Job then is no mere monster of the deep. It is Satan himself given dramatic form so that the sufferer may look upon the adversary and discover that even this enemy is the Lord’s. The one who alone can draw out Leviathan is the one who will not abandon his servant to its power. That is the word the whirlwind still speaks to every generation that finds itself contending with the ancient foe.
What Is the Behemoth in the Book of Job?
The Behemoth of Job then is no mere animal of the Jordan marshes. It is Death itself given dramatic form so that the sufferer may look upon the last enemy and discover that even this enemy is the Lord's. The one who made Behemoth with us is the one who will not abandon us to its power. That is the word the whirlwind still speaks to every generation that finds itself walking through the valley of the shadow.
Habakkuk 2:4 ʿuppělâ: Presumptuous Swelling and the Anatomy of Defiance
This reading clarifies that Habakkuk is not a book about divine retribution against God’s people. It is a book about divine reliability in the face of human presumption and divine preservation in the face of devouring evil.
Habakkuk 2:4 napšô as “Throat,” Not “Soul”: Distortion, Devouring, and the Moral Imagination
This reading clarifies that Habakkuk is not a book about divine retribution against God’s people. It is a book about divine reliability in the face of human distortion and divine preservation in the face of devouring evil. The swollen throat of the wicked and the steady reliability of God form the central contrast of the book.
Habakkuk 2:4: ʾEmûnâ: Divine Reliability as the Ground of Life
Habakkuk’s world is one in which the righteous suffer, the wicked prosper, and God seems silent. Into that world, God speaks a word that does not explain the mystery of evil but asserts the certainty of His own reliability. The righteous live because God is faithful. This is the meaning of ʾemûnâ. It is the theological center of Habakkuk 2:4 and the interpretive key to the book as a whole.
Habakkuk 2:4 When God Seems Late but Is Never Unfaithful
There is a particular kind of suffering that does not break a person all at once. It breaks them slowly. It is the suffering of delay, the long stretch of time between God’s promise and God’s fulfillment, between what He has said and what we see, between the hope we cling to and the reality we wake up to each morning.
Habakkuk 2:4 When the Prophet Becomes the Paradigm: Habakkuk’s Journey from Complaint to Joy
There is a quiet dignity in the way Habakkuk’s book unfolds. It begins with a man undone by what he sees; violence, injustice, the devouring of the righteous, the apparent silence of God. It ends with a man who can rejoice even when everything collapses around him.