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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God and Jeremiah may have been looking at the same person, but they were seeing very different things.
Grace does not emancipate us from any requirement of obedience. Rather, grace allows Jesus to be obedient on our behalf that the righteous demands of the law can be fulfilled.
There are plenty of reasons why you do not already do whatever you want out of fear of the law, and you will find these reasons persist and remain long after the gospel has its way with you.
God has in fact executed his plans for his people, plans of peace (probably a better translation than welfare), a future, and a hope in Jesus Christ.
The goal of language in the mouth of a Christian isn’t to hold power for ourselves but to give it.
Preaching is the first line of defense and catechetical offensive against these corrosive falsehoods.
Man and woman together are complete. Apart, they are incomplete. The two correspond and form “one flesh” when combined in sexual relationships and as helpmates.
Angels minister to us, but Jesus becomes one of us and calls us His brothers and sisters, sharing in our flesh and blood.
God’s promise never to separate us from the love of Jesus means that our security, and our confidence, and our forgiveness—even for our part in past divisions—depends entirely on His faithfulness and not ours.
To repent in his name is done thus: in those who believe in Christ God through the same faith works a change for the better, not for a moment, nor for an hour, but for their whole life.
Except for the Augsburg Confession, Melanchthon’s Loci communes of 1521 were the most important of his writings.
God uses the unlikely, the unexpected, and sometimes even the unsavory to deliver us and to crush the heads of his enemies