Lux Lucet

As once again we find ourselves at the end of one year and the start of another, I would like to thank God for blessing me with the opportunity to serve him and his church through this blog.

In March 2018, I will celebrate nine years in the blogosphere, and that’s a pretty long time in blog years. That raises an interesting question, So just what is the average lifespan of a blog anyway? Well, as is often the case, it depends on whom you ask.

According to one post, most blogs die after 100 days. Yikes! That makes Lux Lucet something like 1000 in human years! Another post puts the average blog lifespan at 33 months. Whatever the actual average number is, it appears that this space has continued to be active well past the time when most blogs have become internet history.

And that’s a credit, not to the skill or to the perseverance of the blogger, but God who has graciously provided the opportunity, the desire, the knowledge, the wisdom and the strength to continue.

It has been my prayer that when I sit to write, my words will honor God and edify his people. At the end of the day, if I have achieved these objectives, I consider my efforts to have been well worth it.

Secondly, I would like to thank the late Dr. John Robbins for his superb example of Christian scholarship and for the inspiration he gave me to begin my own writing career.

It was in January 2007 when John – I tried calling him Dr. Robbins, but he insisted I call him John – sat with me in his study in Unicoi, Tennessee and graciously spent three hours talking with me about my experience at Knox Theological Seminary.

Without going into exhaustive detail, let’s just say that Knox Seminary might better have been named The School of Hard Knocks – I actually thought about starting a blog by that name – principally due to the teaching of a certain Old Testament professor, Dr. Warren Gage. Gage pretended to be Reformed, but really more of a Romanist in disguise, who spent the entire semester attacking the very Reformed doctrines he professed to believe.

As my conversation with John progressed, I remember him telling me that he had read some of Gage’s work and thought it was, as he put it, “some of the most bizarre stuff I’ve ever seen.” True that.

After our talk, as I was getting ready to leave, John asked me if I’d like to write about what was going on at the school. I said yes – how could I turn him down? – and the rest is history. Under his tutelage I finished a book on Knox Seminary and Warren Gage titled Imagining A Vain Thing.

To this day if you were to ask me the greatest honor I’ve had in life, unequivocally I would answer this: Having John Robbins as my mentor.

I would liken studying theology and philosophy with John to learning martial arts from Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris. I had the best teacher. Period.

Then as now, there is no one whose work I hold in higher regard than John’s. Without him, I doubt I would have ever started writing in the first place, let alone continued in it for so long.

But as brilliant was he was intellectually, he was just as good a Christian and one of the easiest people to talk to I’ve ever known.

Apart from the knowledge of theology and philosophy that I learned, and continue to learn, from studying his works, there’s another big takeaway I got from John’s taking time with me: The importance of personal Christian mentorship.

As Christians, we are called to worship God in a congregation with other believers. Among other things, this means sitting as a body under the preaching of God’s Word.

That said, one-to-one mentoring can be a priceless gift for developing a Christian’s mind. God used John to make a tremendous positive difference in my life. And I believe as Christians we should take opportunities, as God presents them, do likewise for others. You never know how God might use you to change someone’s life.

Lux Lucet By The Numbers

By God’s grace in A.D. 2017 95 posts were added to this blog. Oddly enough, that’s exactly the same number as were added in 2016. I didn’t plan it that way. Honest!

The title for the most popular post published in 2017 goes to, drum roll please………… On Hurricanes, Karma and the Providence of God published on September 10, 2017.

In this post, prompted by a tweet from University of Tampa professor Ken Storey in which he blamed the flooding in Houston caused by Hurricane Harvey on the voters of that state going for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, I sought to apply the Bible to that great natural disaster. In particular, used Gordon Clark’s theodicy God And Evil, The Problem Solved to show that while on one hand, God was the cause of Hurricane Harvey, on the other he was not responsible for the damage caused by the storm.

How can that be? Am I not just talking nonsense when I say that God is the cause of Hurricane Harvey and at the same time not responsible for it? In short, no. The key is understanding what “responsible” means. As Clark explains in his book, “responsible” means liable to, or required to, give an answer. A student is responsible to his teacher for doing his homework. An employee is responsible to his boss to do his job. But to whom is God required to give an answer? To no one. Although God caused Hurricane Harvey, he owes no one an answer as to why he caused the storm and is, therefore, by definition not responsible for it.

Lest I be remiss in not giving credit where credit’s due, I’d like to thank Sean Gerety over at God’s Hammer
for reblogging this post on his site. Sean’s been writing God’s Hammer since 2007, which may very well qualify him as the most senior Scripturalist blogger out there.

Of the 95 posts, 4 of them were podcasts. I must admit, I didn’t do as many podcasts as I had hoped in 2017. Mostly this was due to technical challenges. From the beginning, it was my intention to use Radio Lux Lucet as an interview platform, but getting everything set up to do interviews proved a bit of a challenge.

I am pleased to report that the technical challenges have been resolved. So, Lord willing, it is my plan to do more podcasting in the coming year. I have already gotten verbal commitments from a number of very interesting people and hope to start up the podcast again on a more regular basis in 2018.

And speaking of podcasts, I have a special announcement for those of you who follow the Trinity Foundation. This is still kind of a secret, but just between you and me I have it from a good source that sometime in the not too distant future the first episode of Trinity Foundation Radio will be posted to the Foundation’s website.

The first podcast is an interview with Timothy Kauffmann and Tim Shaughnessy about their December 2017 Trinity Review, John Piper on Final Justification by Works. Lord willing, Trinity Foundation Radio will be a regular feature on the website, and it all begins very soon. Stay tuned!

Video Killed the Radio Star

Back in the day – and this really was a long time ago – MTV actually played music. And in 1979, the new channel kicked off its first broadcast with Video Killed The Radio Star by the Buggles.

Well, just as music videos became, at least for a while, the dominant pop music medium, so too in our day YouTube videos have become a dominant, perhaps the dominant, medium for spreading new ideas.

There’s some amazing work going on in the so-called alt-media – the alt-media being independent bloggers, podcasters and YouTubers – some of it very sound, some of it a little nutty, but the big takeaway is that new, independent voices are getting their message out in a way that has never before in history been possible. It’s almost as if Guttenberg reinvented his printing press for the 21st century.

For a number of years now, I’ve kicked around the idea of starting a YouTube channel. I was further intrigued by the possibility of using video after watching Paul Flynn’s work on Megiddo TV. By the way, if you haven’t see his work, check it out. Along with Richard Bennett’s Berean Beacon it’s the best Reformed YouTube channel I know of.

But as with a lot of things, life has a tendency of getting in the way and the YouTube channel project fell by the wayside.

But in September 2017, I finally got around to posting my first video. From a technical standpoint, it leaves something to be desired, although the content itself isn’t too bad.

It’s going to take some practice to master making videos, but I’m excited about the possibilities that this medium holds for getting out the Word of God. Lord willing, there will be more and better videos to come throughout 2018.

Happy New Year!

That about wraps it up for this year’s edition of the Year in Review post.

It has been my great privilege to serve you over the past 12 months. And by God’s grace I hope to continue to do so in the year to come.

In closing, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish you and your family, a happy, safe, prosperous and, most of all, blessed New Year.

God is good and God is faithful. As Christians we can face the future with the knowledge that God is our Father through faith in his Son Jesus Christ alone. And with that in mind, let us face 2018 with hope and holy boldness, knowing that God is in charge, and that come what may, it will redound to his glory and to our good.