Category: What do you think?

What Paul’s instructions about head coverings in 1 Corinthians 11 mean for believers today

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JEFF TURNER

The passage in 1 Corinthians 11 where Paul instructs women to wear head coverings in church is one that raises questions about how much of it applies today, but the underlying principle it is built on has not changed at all. In the culture of Corinth, a woman’s head covering was an outward sign of her submission to male leadership. It was a visible symbol that communicated something real about the order God had established. The symbol may look different today, but the principle behind it is not cultural; it is rooted in the way God created men and women to relate to one another.

I believe Paul’s concern was not the specific clothing custom itself but what it represented. A man covering his head in that setting would have reversed the order, and a woman removing her covering would have been a public act of rejection toward God’s design. Today’s cultures use different outward markers to communicate similar things, and Paul’s point is that whatever those markers are, believers should not use their appearance to send a message of rebellion against God’s order. The submission itself, grounded in how God made human beings, is what matters, and nothing outward should contradict it.

Do you disagree? Please leave comments below.

But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of a woman, and God is the head of Christ.

1 Corinthians 11:3

Who the 144,000 in Revelation 7 are and what they will do during the tribulation

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JEFF TURNER

The number 144,000 in Revelation 7 refers to a specific group of Jewish believers, 12,000 from each of the twelve tribes of Israel, who will be sealed by God during the tribulation. This period falls between the rapture of the church and the return of Christ to establish his thousand-year reign, and it will be marked by a series of escalating judgements on the earth, described in Revelation as seven seals, seven trumpets, and seven bowls, each more intense than the last.

Running alongside that judgement will be a worldwide proclamation of the gospel. Angels will carry the message through the skies, martyrs will be raised back to life to testify, and these 144,000 Jewish men will go out from every tribe to preach. The tribal records were lost when Jerusalem was destroyed, so most Jewish people today have no way of knowing which tribe they belong to, but God knows, and he will call out and ordain these men for this specific mission. The salvation of the nation of Israel as a whole is also part of what Revelation indicates will take place during this remarkable period.

And so we are left with this breathtaking truth: that even in the earth’s darkest hour, when the seals are broken and the trumpets sound and the bowls of wrath are poured out, God will not leave himself without a witness, because he never has, and he never will.

saying, “Do not harm the earth or the sea or the trees until we have sealed the bond-servants of our God on their foreheads.”
And I heard the number of those who were sealed, one hundred and forty-four thousand sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel:

Revelation 7:3-4

Don’t mistake winning an argument for winning a soul

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DAVID INGRAM

If you’ve spent much time defending the Christian faith online or in person, you’ve probably noticed a familiar pattern. It has become so common that it’s almost predictable.

Someone confidently declares, “There is no God.”

When you ask them to support that claim, the response is often, “The burden of proof is on you because you’re the one who believes God exists.”

At first, that may sound reasonable. But think carefully about what has happened.

The statement, “God exists,” is a claim. The statement, “God does not exist,” is also a claim. Both are assertions about reality. The only position that avoids making a claim is, “I don’t know.”

A common mistake in reasoning is to assume that only one side has a burden of proof. This is known as shifting the burden of proof. It occurs when someone makes an assertion but insists that only the other person is responsible for providing evidence. If a person claims there is no God, they have made a claim just as surely as the person who says there is a God. Neither side should be exempt from defending what they affirm.

As Christians, we should never be embarrassed to acknowledge that we are saved by faith given as a gift from God so that no one may boast. To be clear: I believe the Bible tells us that our faith is not something we manufacture on our own or that stems from our own ability to understand.

“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
— Ephesians 2:8-9

We do not hide our faith because it is God’s gift, not our achievement.

What should concern us is when someone confidently declares there is no God while insisting they owe no explanation for that conclusion. That is not skepticism. It is simply another belief being asserted without defense.

Yet even this is not the heart of the matter.

Christians can become so absorbed in debating logical fallacies that we forget why the conversation matters in the first place. We begin treating apologetics as though our mission is to outthink the unbeliever.

It isn’t.

The deepest reason people reject Christ is rarely intellectual. Scripture says the problem is spiritual.

“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.'” (Psalm 14:1)

Notice that Scripture does not say the fool has examined all the evidence and reached an unavoidable conclusion. The issue begins in the heart.

Paul explains that humanity already has sufficient knowledge of God through His creation, yet suppresses that truth.

“For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them… So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.”
— Romans 1:19-21

The Bible teaches that unbelief is not caused by a lack of information. It is a suppression of truth. Sin affects not only what we desire but also how we think.

This does not mean every objection to Christianity is dishonest. People often have sincere questions that deserve thoughtful answers. We should always be prepared to give a reason for the hope within us, doing so “with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15).

But we should never imagine that the right argument alone can produce saving faith.

Paul wrote,

“For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
— 1 Corinthians 1:18

And again,

“The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him… because they are spiritually discerned.”
— 1 Corinthians 2:14

No one is argued into the Kingdom apart from the work of the Holy Spirit.

That should change the way we engage unbelievers.

Yes, expose faulty reasoning when it appears. Correct logical fallacies when necessary. Defend the truth faithfully. But do not mistake exposing an error in logic for addressing the real issue. A person can lose every argument and still reject Christ. Another can ask difficult questions and, by God’s grace, come to faith.

Our confidence should never rest in our ability to corner someone intellectually. Scripture warns us, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5).

Don’t work so hard to open the door of human reason that you neglect the door only the Holy Spirit can open.

Winning an argument is not the mission.

Leading people to the Savior is.

A song for the darkest night: how despair becomes prayer

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WILLIAM KILLIAN

There is a particular kind of suffering that does not knock before it enters. It simply arrives, and suddenly the warmth you had known is gone. The church has not always been kind to such moments. There is a strain of Christian thinking, well-intentioned but deeply harmful, that treats joy as a spiritual obligation and sorrow as a symptom of weak faith. And so suffering people learn to perform a wellness they do not possess, pressing a smile over a wound that quietly festers in the dark. But the scriptures will not allow this. Tucked within the Psalms, that great songbook of God’s people, is a psalm so extraordinarily dark that it ends on the word darkness and simply stops. God put it there. He preserved it through the centuries and placed it in the worship book of his people, declaring something profound: there is no emotional territory so bleak that he refuses to meet us there.

To lament is not to despair without direction. It is to take your pain and aim it at God, to cry out rather than shut down, to bring the full weight of your suffering into the presence of the One who made you and has not, despite every feeling to the contrary, abandoned you. The psalmist in Psalm 88 is drowning, and he says so plainly. He feels buried, forsaken, cut off from companions and from light. And yet he is talking to God. His theology has not resolved his suffering. His faith has not produced relief. But his despair has become a prayer, and that prayer is enough. Silence, for the suffering soul, is a kind of death. But speech, even broken and anguished speech aimed at heaven, is a refusal to let go.

And here is the Word that changes everything: there was One who descended into that darkness fully and completely, not because of his own sin but because of ours. When Jesus cried out from the cross, asking why God had forsaken him, he was experiencing, in the most literal and devastating sense, everything this psalm describes. He went all the way to the bottom, and then he rose. Because he has been there, no suffering Christian descends to a place where Christ has not already walked.

When you are in a season of Psalm 88, if you have prayed and heard only silence, you still have one thing: a voice. Use it. Cry out. Grief given to God is never wasted, and the darkest songs, faithfully sung, are still songs of praise.

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:38-39

The purifying fire of the trial you cannot handle

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JEFF TURNER

There is a moment in certain trials when you come to the end of what you can manage. You have brought everything you have, every resource, every strategy, every reserve of strength and patience and faith, and none of it is sufficient. You cannot handle what you are in the middle of. And it is precisely at that moment, when the self-sufficiency runs out, that something God has been waiting for becomes possible.

Because what happens when you face something you cannot handle? You go to your knees. And on your knees, something shifts. The heart that was perhaps moving through its days with a kind of spiritual self-confidence, checking its own boxes and keeping its own accounts, is now searching itself before God, asking hard questions, repenting of what the ordinary days allowed to accumulate, clearing the ground so that the voice of God can be heard without obstruction. This is the purifying process, and it is not incidental to the trial. It is the point of it. The fire does not destroy the believer. It refines them. This is why the psalmist, looking back across his own suffering with the clarity that only distance provides, arrived at what sounds like a startling conclusion: it was good for him. Not easy. Not painless. Good. The God who loves you enough to allow the fire is the same God who is standing in it with you, and he will not remove you until the work is done.

For it is time for judgment to begin with the household of God; and if it begins with us first, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God?

1 Peter 4:17