Paul wrote some of the most soaring, theologically rich prose in the New Testament from inside a prison cell. As he closes his letter to the Ephesians, he doesn't end with pleasantries. He ends with a warning, a call to arms, and one of the most vivid metaphors in all of Scripture: the full armor of God. But before we talk about the armor, we have to get one thing straight. The Victory Is Already Won The outcome is set. But the fight is real. I heard that line years ago from a wrestler who...

Few topics make modern Christians more uncomfortable than slavery in Scripture. We rush past those passages or explain them away. But if we're honest with the text, and honest with history, there's something far more radical happening than most of us realize. The World Paul Was Writing Into To understand Paul's household codes in Ephesians and Colossians, we have to understand the world that produced them. In Aristotle's framework, which shaped the entire Greco-Roman social imagination, the...

Paul is writing to a church in the middle of the Roman Empire, and the Roman Empire had very strong opinions about how a household should run. At the top sat the paterfamilias, the father of the household. His word was law. Husbands held full authority over their wives, who were essentially viewed as property. Fathers decided where their children went to school, who they would marry, and even, in a chilling practice common across the empire, whether a newborn infant would be allowed to live....