Wade Johnston, Life Under the Cross: A Biography of the Reformer Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis: MO, 2025.
This ancient “tale of two mothers” concerns far more than theological semantics—it is the difference between a God who sends and a God who comes.
This story points us from our unlikely heroes to the even more unlikely, and joyous, good news that Jesus’ birth for us was just as unlikely and unexpected.

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When Jesus appeared again to his disciples on that first Easter evening and again a week later with Thomas and the Emmaus disciples, what did Jesus show them? His hands.
Like the serpent on the pole, God still puts real-life things up for us to look to for salvation.
Don’t get in the habit (or, if you already do it, get out of the habit) of saying, “I could never talk about these things the way my pastor does.”
You are the baptized, for in Christ we are all wet. The demographic dividers are washed away.
We can interpret "be the Church" as either law or gospel.
He declared you what you might not always feel you are, but what you were from the moment he knew you, before you were you, when he foreknew you.
Christ's resurrection does not merely negate the bitterness of sin; it changes it into a source of divine sweetness, embodying the promise of a new life for us and a restored existence overshadowed by heavenly hope.
My goal here isn’t to selfishly reflect on all the reasons I will miss Rod because I know that if you are reading this, you may miss this man, too.
God demonstrates his great love for us in the actions of Jesus, who came down into the flesh and soaked up all our sin.
When the Savior gets on our trail, nothing, not even the grave and hell, can stop him.
When we believe in Jesus as the true and better fulfillment of every promise made to Abraham, we, too, are counted as righteous in the same way that he was — by faith.
God gives his church a story that helps to make sense of this life.