Josiah Cook > Recent Status Updates

This is going to be the best grammar I’ve read. This is a very engaging way to teach the language. Grammar concepts are taught through short funny stories in Greek.

Having taught through the whole noun system now, I like and have grown to prefer Mounce’s method of covering the whole noun system first before introducing any verbs.

Ever since I disappointedly finished Mere Christianity a while ago, I’ve wondered if there was a reformed alternative somewhere. I think I’ve found it in Machen’s early 20th century radio addresses on the Christian faith here.

Really insightful section on honoring your father and mother as an adult. It is an important truth to consider that our parents owe us nothing. Anything they choose to give us after we leave home is grace. The obligation is ours to honor them until they die.

This is excellent so far.

The redeemed man prepares for and keeps the Lord’s Day holy. -Conrad Mbewe

Book 2 done.

Really good stuff on methodologies. Our presentation must make clear that this is a serious matter, a matter of life and death. Our presentation must not trivialize the Gospel, and our seriousness in presentation cannot be artificial. We will only do it if we know really and personally that the things of God concern life and death and eternity.

“why should any man prefer his composures before David’s Psalms, is it because they are more excellent?”

The book is “…intended for the more ignorant, (such as the most are who question, or deny the singing of David’s Psalms) and therefore contrived and framed with the greatest plainness, so as they might best serve to give understanding to the simple.”

So far this book is Christian Hedonism’s bigger, stronger, smarter, more pious brother. It’s a fountain to a thirsty soul.

Pretty solid so far. A very concise guide to reformed systematic theology like this is really helpful.

Very insightful and convicting that wandering thoughts in worship is the sin of hypocrisy. The mouth, eyes, and ears may be engaged, but the heart is not.

I really like that Mounce emphasizes recognizing patterns over rote memorization.

Chapter one may be the best thing I’ve read on conversion.

While I’m not sure I would have appreciated it then, I really wish I had this book as a freshman in Bible college. It should be required reading for first year divinity and seminary students.

Calvin’s chapter on each part of the world governed by providence is terrifying and delightful.

Haldane gives another very compelling argument for Sabbatarianism from Isaiah. In Isaiah’s prophecies of the Messianic age, there is an expectation of Sabbath keeping (56:2-7). Jesus even quotes one of these passages, “my house will be a house of prayer for all nations,” announcing the Messianic age at the cleansing of the temple. Just a few verses before in Isaiah the Gentile keeping the Sabbath is prophesied.

Haldane gives a compelling argument for Sabbatarianism that I have not heard before. In Mt 24, Jesus speaks of the destruction of the temple, i.e., a time where ceremonial Jewish rites are explicitly abolished and yet he tells his disciples to hope that they do not have to flee on the Sabbath, showing that the Sabbath is not abrogated with the abrogation of those ceremonial rites (Mt 24:20).