Josephus does not tell us that Christianity is true, and Christians do not need Josephus to tell them that Christ is risen. But Christianity makes claims about things that happened in public history under identifiable rulers, priests, and governors. For that reason, testimony from outside the church matters.
Today, the longing for cultural Christianity on both the left and the right hearkens back to an older version of Christendom that was a mixed blessing for the church in the western world. The cultural mediation of Christian views on created order has certainly benefitted the civilization we’ve inherited. But the gospel itself isn’t something that can be reduced to cultural mediation either. Instead, the gospel as a message stands apart from all human accomplishments and achievements, no matter how beneficial they might be.
The student of Scripture should always have a map open next to their Bible as they read. If possible, they should also travel to Israel, not to make a pilgrimage, but to see the context of the land in which these stories took place. These are not fairy tales made up about fictional fantasy lands; these are stories about real people in real places interacting with a real God.

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The Gospel is simple to confess. That is, we are justified by faith alone, through Christ alone, without the works of the Law.
It may seem like a strange place to begin: the end of the beginning.
The force of our love is violent. It is love acted out as, “I will love you in a way that’s best for me, and you’ll like it, and celebrate it, and reward me for it.
No matter which side, it’s easy for all of us to build Bible verses into grenades aimed at obliterating the political other.
You may have seen the uproar from a recent blog post suggesting that virgins who forego college, learn to cook big meals and abstain from tattoos make more desirable wives.
Our meditation listens to the King of Kings when He says; it is finished.
We expect that if it is God’s word, it must have fallen out of the sky on golden plates.
When we imagine we’re living an evil-shunning, virtue-practicing, morally superior Christian life, the problem is not that our halos are too small, but that our heads are too big.
The Law gets a bad rap. There is certainly a negative component to the Law. The work of the Law is very different than the work of the Gospel.
The reason the U.S. is blessed by God is that we are essentially a “good” nation. And this is the root of Bob’s problem (and that of all civil religion).
I’ve found that most people struggle to agree with God that we are fully forgiven, redeemed and justified by pure grace alone, for the sake of Jesus Christ alone.
We should take great care in observing how the psalmist relates to God. Our eyes and hearts should be open to seeing what the psalmist appeals to and how he addresses God.