A Fuller Fulfillment

11 February 2025

When we talk about “fulfilled prophecy,” what we usually mean is a straightforward prediction along the lines of Micah 5:2, which says that Messiah will be born in Bethlehem. Matthew shows how the prophecy was fulfilled. But that’s not the only thing that “fulfilled” can mean.

“Fulfill” has a fuller sense (if you’ll pardon the expression) than just the Micah 5:2 predictive prophecy meaning. In the Hosea 11//Matthew 2 usage, the original sense in Hosea is critical to Matthew’s meaning. Knowing that Israel is God’s son is necessary to understanding the points that Matthew is making: first, that Jesus is Israel (in exactly what sense is a question Matthew will spend the whole book exploring), and second, that the land of Israel has become spiritual Egypt.

Don’t miss that latter point. Matthew invokes “out of Egypt I called My Son” not when Jesus leaves literal Egypt, but when Jesus flees Judea. Judea is the “Egypt” Jesus is fleeing, and Herod is the baby-boy-slaughtering “Pharaoh.” John the Baptist will later reinforce this same point by calling repentant Israelites to come out into the desert to pass through water, a new Exodus forming a new people of God (Jesus joins the new people of God “to fulfill all righteousness”). John the evangelist will much later make the point explicit in Revelation 11:8.

We don’t want to read something into the text that isn’t there, but neither do we want to miss something that is there—and the NT shows us repeatedly that there’s a LOT more there than one might think at first glance. From Jesus Himself proving the resurrection by exegeting a verb tense in Genesis (Matt. 22:32) to the fulfillments of the first few chapters of Matthew to the dizzying displays of Hebrews, the NT shows us a way of reading the OT that we perhaps wouldn’t have come up with on our own, but that’s ok. God is revealing it to us in the way He handles His own revelation.

In conservative circles, we have gotten our hermeneutics from the Book of Nature (mostly as read by E. D. Hirsch), which is very useful as far as it goes. But if that’s all we have, then our hermeneutic will force us to condemn the Holy Spirit’s exegesis of His own work. There has to be something wrong with that picture. What is it? Easy: the Book of Nature isn’t all we have. The Book of Scripture also has something to teach us about how to read.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Reading Both Books

29 October 2024

Read the first few chapters of Matthew, and take note of the Old Testament prophecies he cites. When Matthew cites Micah 5:2, the meaning is very clear. God made a predictive prophecy about where the Messiah would be born, and that prophecy is fulfilled when Jesus is born in that exact town. But that’s not the only thing “fulfill” means here.

Consider “Out of Egypt I called My son.” The son in question in Hosea 11 is Israel—not just the man Jacob (although he’s included) but the whole nation that came from him. “When Israel was a child I loved him” might refer to the man Jacob, but “out of Egypt I called My son” can’t mean just that one guy, because that guy died in Egypt, and what was called out of Egypt was not that one man, but all his descendants, 400 years later. So “Out of Egypt I called My son” is the utterance of a prophet, but it’s not a predictive prophecy; it’s a comment on Israel’s history. In what sense can it be “fulfilled”?

In order to grasp Matthew’s point here, we must first pay careful attention to the meaning of Hosea. Knowing that Israel is God’s son, Matthew shows how Jesus walks in the steps of Israel. He’s making two points: first, that Jesus is Israel (in a meaningful sense that Matthew will spend the whole book exploring), and second, that the land of Israel has become spiritual Egypt—a point that would be reinforced by John the Baptist when he calls the remnant out into the desert to pass through water. Jesus adds to Hosea; we can’t read Hosea 11 anymore without also thinking of Jesus’ flight from Herod as well as the Exodus. The words of the prophet have been “fulfilled,” made more full than they were before.

We don’t want to read something into the text that isn’t there. At the same time, we don’t want to miss something that is there—and the New Testament writers show us repeatedly that there’s a lot more there than one might think at first glance. From Jesus Himself proving the resurrection by exegeting a verb tense in Genesis to the fulfillments of the first few chapters of Matthew to the dizzying displays of Hebrews, the New Testament authors show us a way of reading the Old Testament that we wouldn’t have come up with on our own. It had to be revealed to us.

In theologically conservative circles, we have gotten our hermeneutics from the Book of Nature (mostly as read by E. D. Hirsch), which is very useful as far as it goes. But there’s two books, and the Book of Scripture also has something to teach us about how to read. We should read both books.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Trying on a Mind

5 December 2023

I was raised to be a student of great thinkers. My parents were modeling and teaching good hermeneutics in family Bible study before I could even read. My whole life, I was taught to do the research and expend the imaginal effort to grasp the situation of the writing: what was happening for the writer? For the readers? What was their culture, language, cause for writing the message? It was understood (long before I ever heard of speech act theory) that writing is hard work, and the writer isn’t just spouting off for self-expression; he’s trying to do something to the readers. What are the readers supposed to see and hear? What are they supposed to do?

All this is just basic to being a good student of the humanities, but being raised on the sacred text, there was also an additional dimension: application. Of course a good teacher can bend your ear at length about the value of, say, Abraham Lincoln’s discourses on slavery or St. Patrick’s Confessio for our present day, but a student can just add them to his fund of knowledge of history with no particular thought to present-day lessons. A faithful Christian student of Leviticus has no such luxury. Our fundamental orientation toward the Scriptures is obedience.

Some Scriptures are written closer to our immediate situation (e.g. Romans), and others (Leviticus) further away, but toward all of them we bring a desire to hear what the Holy Spirit will say “Today, if you will hear His voice….” Failure to bring that desire to the text is a moral failure, as demonstrated in the next breath: “…do not harden your hearts as in the Rebellion.”

Coming into my own as a student of the humanities in high school, I applied all my background to my studies. My biblical lessons gave me a leg up on my classmates in grasping the underlying source material for the (Western) literature we studied. More than that, my reflexive habit of looking for application added dimension and depth to my study and commentary. Which is not to say that I had nothing to learn: I came out of high school with two big additional pieces. First, I fell in love with the beauty of the arts. I didn’t come from a background that appreciated beauty, so waking me up was not a trivial task. I was blessed with teachers that tackled the job with great enthusiasm. (Bornarth, Brinkley, Kuyper, and Virgo: Thank you all!) Second, I learned how to drill down into an author’s biography and body of work, to become a student of that author in particular and begin to see the world as he or she saw it.

My first project of that nature was a months-long team effort with two other students, focused on George Bernard Shaw. It had honestly never occurred to me that one could develop that kind of grasp of a particular person’s work. I was hooked. Since then, I’ve devoted serious attention to authors as diverse as Plato, Euclid, Flannery O’Connor, St. Patrick, Matteo Ricci, Stephen Barnes, Rex Stout, George Leonard, Peter Leithart, Orson Scott Card, Frank Herbert, and N. D. Wilson.

Every human is handcrafted for eternity; there’s not the slightest chance that even a prolific writer will successfully convey all their own depths to even the most apt of readers. Happily, you need not be the most apt of readers to immerse yourself in a particular person’s thought for a time. The strength of this sort of experiment is that you get a chance to try on someone else’s mind, see what they see, think what they think. It’s never a perfect fit. Of course it’s not. The places that fit don’t fit easily are the whole point.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Those Little Old Ladies

30 July 2023

“We have to cultivate a certain kind of character in order to read well. It’s not just a matter of applying hermeneutical rules or a typological framework; it’s about the kind of person you are.  That’s why the little old ladies at your church who’ve never been to a hermeneutics class in their life, but have spent a life in the word, spent a life in prayer, have suffered and seen the Lord deliver them from suffering—those little old ladies understand so much of the Bible that you don’t. Because they are disciples, and they know that they are encountering God in the pages of Scripture.”

-Peter Leithart on hermeneutics

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Taking it Literally…Literally?

2 May 2023

In the tribe I come from, we regularly talk about Literal-Grammatical-Historical hermeneutics. We’ll call it LGH for short, or (many of us) “literal hermeneutics.”

We all know what we mean, but the terminology is a bit strange for newcomers, because — how to put it delicately? — we don’t mean the word “literal” literally.

That’s not as crazy as it sounds. Within the history of biblical interpretation, there have been eras when the text was subjected to the most ridiculous flights of fancy. Things like the four rivers flowing out of Eden being a reference to the four cardinal virtues, or the Levitical dietary laws actually prohibiting, not the eating of certain animals, but the vices figuratively associated with those animals. There’s nary a hint in the actual text itself (nor in the later inspired references to it) of such interpretations. Against that backdrop, “literal” interpretation meant that the four rivers flowing out of Eden were actual rivers, and the prohibition against shellfish meant — follow me closely here — that Israelites weren’t allowed to eat shellfish.

Pretty straightforward, right?

So then what do we do with “He shall cover you with his pinions”? If we’re interpreting it literally, then don’t we take that to mean that God has feathers?

“Of course not,” we say. “Don’t be silly.”

But the thing is, a newcomer who asks such a question is not being silly. He’s taking the word “literal” in its ordinary sense: literal as opposed to metaphorical. Take a look at some basic dictionary definitions:

in accordance with, involving, or being the primary or strict meaning of the word or words; not figurative or metaphorical:the literal meaning of a word.

following the words of the original very closely and exactly:a literal translation of Goethe.

true to fact; not exaggerated; actual or factual:a literal description of conditions.

being actually such, without exaggeration or inaccuracy:the literal extermination of a city.

(of persons) tending to construe words in the strict sense or in an unimaginative way; matter-of-fact; prosaic.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/literal

To a normal person’s ears, when we talk about “interpreting the Bible literally” we are the ones that sound crazy. Many passages are obviously metaphorical, and even we admit that. So if you read a metaphor literally, wouldn’t that be a very basic hermeneutical mistake?

“Well, yes, it would,” we say. “But that’s not what we mean by it.”

And it’s not. We mean that we interpret the utterance according to the original author’s intent, not according to some exercise of allegorical ingenuity imposed on the text after the fact. But again, this is not a particularly obvious way to take the word “literal.”

New Zealand pastor Bnonn Tennant had an interesting take on this recently. I quote:

I think the term literal is functionally meaningless; it is just a pious way of begging the question in favor of whatever interpretation “seems” obvious to the person reading it. In other words, “literal” is a shorthand way of saying that scripture should be read according to the normal rules of communication….

The problem with this, he goes on to point out, is that what we think of today as the normal rules of communication are not the standard everywhere and for all time:

As a simple example, consider how scripture speaks of the moon being turned to blood. A “literal” hermeneutic will say this means the physical moon becomes perceptibly red. This is the most “natural” way to read it—for a 21st century Western Christian. If a newspaper said such a thing, we would assume that the physical moon is in view; but also that physically being transformed into blood is not. That’s the “literal” sense to 21st century English readers inculcated in an Enlightenment worldview.

But what makes us think that worldview is the natural way to read the text of Scripture? It’s certainly not the worldview of the people who wrote it. To the extent that we intend to be guided by authorial intent, we obviously have no business substituting our worldview for theirs.

Tennant suggests dropping “literal” from our description of the hermeneutic and substituting “theological.” His argument is that “literal” doesn’t really mean what we’re trying to say (as above) and that “theological” better captures our desire to read the text as a theologically coherent whole. I would be concerned that “grammatical-historical-theological” hermeneutic signals a tendency to use our theology as a background assumption of our interpretation, rather than allowing our theology to be chastened by the text as we should. That’s not, of course, what Tennant means — but I’m concerned he’s just trading one set of “that’s not what I mean by it” conversations for another.

What do you think?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Taking Another Swing

28 February 2023

I’ve taken up the matter of pleading “descriptive, not prescriptive” to avoid actual narrative hermeneutics before…but apparently I didn’t hit it hard enough, so we’ll be taking another swing here. So let’s talk about this.

“Descriptive, not prescriptive” is such an oversimplification, even in narrative, that it’s practically lying by omission. Applied consistently, it would undermine Jesus’ prohibition of divorce in Matthew 19, Paul’s case for justification by faith in Romans 4, the case for the priesthood of Christ in Hebrews 7, and many other crucial passages.

Let me explain: If we consistently apply the “descriptive, not prescriptive” rubric to biblical narrative passages, then…

  • We respond to Paul’s argument from Genesis 12-17 in Romans 4: “What Rabbi Paul fails to understand, you see, is that the events of the Abram narrative – promise before circumcision – are descriptive, not prescriptive. You can’t just run away with a thing like that and decide it applies to you.”
  • We respond to Jesus’ application of Genesis 1-2 in Matthew 19: “Rabbi Jesus, of course, makes the same mistake in applying Genesis 1-2 to complex contemporary problems of marriage and divorce.”
  • We respond to Hebrews’ application of Genesis 14 in Hebrews 7: “The anonymous author of Hebrews attempts to draw from the simple facts of the Melchizedek account a prescription for bypassing the divinely inspired Levitical priesthood, but what he fails to grasp, of course, is that the Genesis account is descriptive, not prescriptive.”

Now of course, we actually don’t do any of that,* although here’s a little challenge for you: go ahead and take your “descriptive, not prescriptive” reading of Acts and show how it differs in any significant respect from the three above dismissals of the plain teaching of the New Testament. I’ll wait….

As I say, we don’t apply the principle consistently at all, because this is not really a matter of principle. We’re happy enough to ignore our blanket proscription on applying narrative when we like the application. We just trot it out when something makes us uncomfortable – some idiot wants multiple wives because David had them, or someone wants to actually emulate the church order Paul describes, or sing what the early church sang. “Descriptive, not prescriptive” is a handy–if lazy–substitute for having an actual hermeneutics of narrative and having to discern what faithful application looks like.

I don’t mean that everyone who invokes “descriptive, not prescriptive” is lazy. Some of them are (otherwise) hardworking exegetes whose training failed them by not teaching them how to exegete narrative (I understand — my training didn’t cover it either!) They’re following their teachers, who bilked them out of a chance to productively read the 2/3 of the Bible that is narrative. There’s a kind of tragic sincerity to some of these folks, in the same way there would be to a devout village synagogue member who really did believe the gold sanctified the altar, because his rabbi told him so. But devout as the person might be, the position deserves scathing mockery.

All this gets particularly rich when we turn to the book of Acts. Here, we’re not talking about some other period of history where things were genuinely different – before the Fall, say, or Israel under the Law. We’re talking about the founding of the Church. Pleading “descriptive, not prescriptive” about Acts would be like pleading “descriptive, not prescriptive” about the War for Independence, and the Declaration of Independence. It’s our founding! We need not all go about in tricorn hats to believe that our founding history and documents have important prescriptions for us.

It’s amazing how theological conservatives understand the prescriptive nature of America’s Christian founding, but can’t grasp the book of Acts in the same way. Unfortunately — as is generally the case with a hermeneutical cancer like this one — the slimy little thing won’t stay where they want to keep it (in the narrative passages alone). I saw a guy just this week opining that he didn’t see how it made sense to “model yourself off an obscure passage in a letter to a categorically messed up church.” He was talking about the prescriptions for church order in 1 Corinthians 14.

I can’t wait to see him apply the same rubric to 5:1-3!

*We know that we’re justified by faith because Abraham received the promise before he was circumcised. We know that severe sin after justification doesn’t cause us to lose it, because God didn’t impute sin to David after he committed adultery and murder (Romans 4). We know that we shouldn’t divorce for “incompatibility” because from the beginning it was not so (Matthew 19). We know that we should follow Jesus rather than going over to Judaism because Jesus has a superior priesthood – and we know that because Levi paid a tithe to Melchizedek (Hebrews 7).
While we’re at it, we know that we should not continue in sin that grace may abound because Jesus died and rose, and we died and rose with Him.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Everything But Interpretation

6 December 2022

“What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you’d like it to mean?”
-Antonin Scalia

Many Bible ‘interpreters’ just don’t read the text that’s actually in front of them.

Invoking the old saw that “no passage stands alone” and an unconscionably loose application of the regula fidei, they will find meaning everywhere but the passage at hand. Confronted with a difficult passage in (say) the Gospel of Mark, they will veer off like meth-driven hummingbirds to passages in 1 Corinthians, Revelation, and James. Mark’s original audience didn’t necessarily have access to any of those books, but never mind that.

But no. If the passage at hand is in Mark, and somebody is getting it wrong, then the first place to show it wrong is right here, in the passage at hand. If it’s a misinterpretation, then it’s a misinterpretation here. Conversely, if you’re hoping to establish what this passage means, there’s no substitute for demonstrating your point from this passage right here. Hermeneutics is reading what’s in front of you, not free-associating from the text in front of you to three other–allegedly clearer–passages, taking an average of those passages, then reading that back into the text in front of you. That’s everything but interpretation.

A man who can’t be trusted to address the passage in front of him, can’t be trusted with two or three witnesses elsewhere. Bet you dollars against bent toenail clippings that when you get into those passages, he does the same thing: run to three other passages rather than deal with what’s in front of him. Again, everything but interpretation.

And this is to say nothing of the even worse case where the man free-associates from the words in the passage at hand to his favorite systematic theology. No. Pace Niles Eldridge, meaning cannot forever be going on somewhere else. Reading a tendentious interpretation of a handful of cross-references back into everything else in the Bible, and justifying it with an appeal to regula fidei, is just cowardly. Face the passage in front of you. Be corrected by the passage in front of you.

It’s true enough that no passage stands alone. If we’re working with a passage in Mark, then it is first of all contained by the other passages in the Gospel of Mark. Attend to the context it actually has, and see where that takes you.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Not Literal Enough

2 June 2021

I looked into Progressive Dispensationalism briefly 20+ years ago, didn’t find it remotely compelling, and haven’t felt a need to revisit it. I might be missing something, but life is short, and I kinda don’t think so. It seemed to me at the time that PD was something of a mediating position between Covenant Theology and classic dispensationalism, and I don’t think the weaknesses of dispensationalism lie in that direction. The problem is that dispensationalists don’t read literally enough.

That sounds weird, but it’s true. A dispensationalist sounds like a wooden literalist when he’s standing next to, say, Ken Gentry talking about Matthew 24, or Richard Gaffin talking up the Church as the new Israel. But stand that same dispensationalist next to Jim Reitman talking about Abraham’s children in Galatians, and see what happens. The problem with dispensationalists isn’t so much hermeneutics as a failure of nerve: they won’t apply their own hermeneutic consistently in places where the Scriptures don’t perfectly match the system.

At the end of the day, dispensationalism is a bit like Calvinism — a clever system that takes in some genuinely biblical insights and was God’s gift for a particular historical moment, but can’t be organically generated from the text, and has to flatly contradict Scripture occasionally in order to keep the system going. The biblical insights are well worth keeping, but why try to digest the whole carcass when we can loot the corpse and move on?

One of the major sticky points is the Kingdom of God. Classic dispensationalists tend to hold that there is no present reality to the Kingdom of God because the lion is not presently lying down with the lamb and Jesus is not sitting on David’s literal throne. Against that, I note that Jesus Himself said “if I cast out demons by the finger of God, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you.” Has come. The lion wasn’t lying down with the lamb then either, but Jesus still said what He said.

The lion really will lay down with the lamb, and Jesus really will sit on David’s literal throne when the Kingdom has come in its fullness. By speaking of the Kingdom as a present reality in His own time, Jesus forces us to acknowledge that it’s possible for the Kingdom to be truly present without being fully present in its final consummation — and what good news that is! Jesus is King now. If He is ruling within the reach of my arm, then His Kingdom is here now.

So with (say) a guy like Grant Hawley (whose book I recommend reading, even though I heartily disagree in spots), I find I agree with him far more than not when it comes to particulars like our present relationship to the covenant with Noah, our relationship to the Law, the future of Israel, and so on. However, the bubbles-on-a-string dispensational charts don’t represent those truths well; they tend to emphasize the discontinuity at the expense of things that really do continue. Our discontinuous relationship with the Law is based on our continuous relationship with Abraham and the (Noahide) priesthood of Melchizedek expressed in our older Brother Jesus (as the book of Hebrews elegantly explains). It’s all One Story, and a lot of the power to read our present circumstances in biblical categories comes from being able to see it as all a single story with motifs and themes that repeat, but like themes in music or dance — never exactly the same. In biblical studies, typology is not first and foremost a feature of literary texts; it is a philosophy of history. Typology in the real world is a mark of authorship, and the world is being authored by the same God who wrote the biblical texts.

In the nature of the case, you can always claim that this instance of the motif is different from the others, because something about it always will be different. The head-crushing women of Judges, David taking on Goliath, and Jesus crushing the serpent’s head are all quite different in certain respects, but the differences are not the most important thing about them.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

One Book or Two?

7 January 2020

In Matthew’s usage, “fulfill” has a fuller sense (if you’ll pardon the expression) than just the Micah 5:2//Matthew 2:5-6 predictive prophecy usage. For example, the Hosea 11//Matthew 2 usage is real fulfillment, but it’s not predictive prophecy. The Hosea passage is not a prediction of the future Messiah, but a reflection on Israel’s history: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called My son.”

The original sense in Hosea is critical to Matthew’s meaning. Knowing that Israel is God’s son is necessary to understanding the points that Matthew is making: first, that Jesus is Israel (in a meaningful sense that Matthew will spend the whole book exploring), and second, that the land of Israel has become spiritual Egypt – a point that will be reinforced by John the Baptist when he calls the remnant out into the desert to pass through water.

We don’t want to read something into the text that isn’t there. At the same time, we don’t want to miss something that *is* there—and the NT shows us repeatedly that there’s a LOT more there than one might think at first glance. From Jesus Himself proving the resurrection by exegeting a verb tense in Genesis (Luke 20:37-38) to the fulfillments of the first few chapters of Matthew (1:22-23, 2:15, 17-18, 23) to the dizzying displays of Hebrews, the NT shows us a way of reading the OT that we wouldn’t have come up with on our own. It had to be revealed to us.

In conservative circles, we have gotten our hermeneutics from the Book of Nature (mostly as read by E. D. Hirsch), which is very useful as far as it goes. But God wrote two books–God’s Word and God’s world–and the Book of Scripture also has something to teach us about how to read well. We should not refuse to learn that set of lessons as well.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

An Invitation to Theology

15 March 2019

The first thing to know about theology is that it operates from the inside; it is inherently a believing endeavor. Sociology of religion, comparative religion, cultural anthropology, history of philosophy–these endeavors focus on believers (and the beliefs they hold) as the object of study. They operate, in other words, by looking from the outside in.

But theology cannot be practiced in that way. Theology is not a study of beliefs but an experience of the One about whom people hold those beliefs. To engage in theology is to have your own beliefs about the divine shaped by knowing God yourself, by partaking in the divine nature yourself. In this way, theology is less something you study, and more something you participate in, something you practice, and perhaps something that–to a degree, by God’s grace–you may attain.

***

Theology is not an objective discipline, any more than romancing your spouse is an objective discipline. Objectivity seeks to elide the observer/interpreter, such that anyone might–through a scientifically valid method–come to the exact same understanding. This sort of method is entirely appropriate to the natural sciences, in which we are doomed to observe the objects of our study from the outside. Partaking in the nature of, say, a granite boulder is entirely beyond us. The best we can do is subject it to study.

But where the nature of the endeavor is to know another p/Person, we proceed differently. We seek the other person’s self-revelation. We communicate. If we are successful, there is a kind of mutual indwelling (or to use the old word, perichoresis). All of these are inherently relational acts; it matters who the parties are. To elide the observer/interpreter is to miss the whole point.

***

In hermeneutics texts, much is made of the gap between us and the original author and audience–gaps of time, culture, language, geography, and more. We work diligently to overcome those gaps and try to grasp the situation of the original author and audience in order to better understand the text.

Little is made–at least in the hermeneutics books I was reared on–of the gap between us and the divine Author, although in some respects, that gap is easier to bridge. This side of eternity, Paul is beyond my reach. The Corinthian church was the product of time, place, culture, and circumstances that no longer exist. Through diligent study and imagination, I get as close as I can, but some aspect of a passage may remain forever opaque to me through simple ignorance of an idiom, crucial archaeological fact, or tidbit of cultural knowledge. Many things that were obvious to them are now lost to me in the mists of time. Gary Derickson has given us a window into the viticulture behind John 15, for example. How many other such things are yet to be discovered and articulated?

The divine Author is entirely beyond my reach as well. But I am not beyond His reach, any more than the biblical authors were. And so it is that, unchanged by the passing years, is as present to us now as He was to them then. (More than under the Old Covenant, now that we have the indwelling Spirit.) He offers us the opportunity–if the promises of the sacred text mean anything at all–to know Him directly, in a way that is consonant with, but not limited to, what can be mediated by the Scriptures themselves.

***

tl;dr: God is real. God is present. God speaks. Here. Now. Yes, even to you. Are you listening?

 

 

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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