October 2026
Podcasts
Approximately one-third of the Psalms are psalms of lament – and this doesn’t include psalms of other genres that contain portions of lament. Such a prevalence of lament indicates that grief is neither an uncommon experience of God’s people nor is it incompatible with a life of faith. The psalms of lament show us how to grieve in the face of suffering, loss, and confusion while clinging to God in hope and trust. Dave Keehn, author of Living in the Shadow of Grief, recently shared about his personal experience of life-shattering loss, the lessons he learned from grief, and ways to help (and not help) when others are grieving on a recent episode of the Apologetics Resource Center (ARC) podcast. If you’re working through a season of grief, or know people who are, give it a listen.
Back in April, I featured William Tyndale in the 6W Chronicles: Brief Profiles in Church History. This year marks the five hundredth anniversary of Tyndale’s first printed New Testament in the English language. Ten years after its publication, on October 6, 1536, Tyndale was executed. To hear more about his life and his important contributions, listen to this engaging lecture by Brian Edwards on the Christian Heritage London Podcast.
Articles
On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed a list of 95 objections to the door of a church in Germany, igniting the Protestant Reformation. For this reason, many Protestants celebrate Reformation Sunday on the last Sunday in October. With a view to that celebration, read an article by Keith Mathison summarizing the five solas – five central truths of the gospel recovered during the Reformation.
The Thursday men’s Bible study is working through the book of Judges. Judges is marked by a repeated cycle: rebellion by the people followed by retribution (being given over to their enemies) followed by repentance in response to their misery, and finally rescue through a divinely empowered deliverer. I usually adopt a different alliterated summary of the cycle: sin, subjugation, supplication, and salvation. I prefer this alternative because it’s less than clear that genuine repentance is actually a consistent part of the cycle. How can we distinguish between true and false repentance? Check out an article by Chris Brauns for some helpful answers to that question.
“How Do We Know If Repentance is Genuine?”
6W Chronicles: Brief Profiles in Church History
As a way to introduce readers to some influential figures in the church’s past, the 6W Chronicles briefly address six questions: Who? When? Where? What did they do? Why should we know about them? What works can I reference by or about them?
Who? Theodore Beza
When? 1519-1605
Where? Beza was born at Vézelay in Burgundy (France) on June 24, 1519, and ministered in Geneva
What did he do? As a child, Beza showed great intellectual potential and, with the blessing of his parents, was sent to Paris to be educated under the humanist teacher Melchior Wolmar, one of the foremost Greek scholars of his day. Beza eventually earned a law degree in 1537 and practiced for some years. It was during this time that he became seriously ill. The threat of death and the imminence of God’s judgment led to his conversion and his joining the Roman Catholic Church. By 1548 he had renounced Catholicism and embraced the Reformed faith. He served as a prominent scholar of Greek at the University of Lausanne from 1549-1558 before leaving for Geneva in 1558 where he became one of John’s Calvin’s closest devotees. Calvin appointed him the first rector of the Genevan Academy when it opened in 1559 where he continued to teach Greek as well as theology. Upon Calvin’s death in 1564, Beza preached at his funeral and succeeded him as pastor in Geneva, helping the church and city to flourish as a center of Reformed theology until his own death on October 13, 1605.
Why should we know about him? Theodore Beza served as a leading spokesperson for the Reformed faith following Calvin’s death. His impact extended to France, Britain, the Netherlands, Poland, and Germany. He was a staunch defender of the doctrine of predestination (against the teachings of Arminius, his one-time student), advocated for understanding the spiritual presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper, opened Geneva as a safe haven for Protestant refugees fleeing persecution (especially aiding French Huguenots after the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572), and advanced Calvinistic theology by developing it into a more tightly argued, logical body of truth. His Confession of the Christian Faith, published in 1559, enjoyed more than thirty-five printings and was available in French, Latin, English, German, and Dutch – showing the scope of his influence. He also wrote a biography on Calvin called The Life of Calvin. Another significant contribution was his edition of the Greek New Testament (Codex Bezae) used in producing the translations of both the Geneva Bible and the King James Bible.
Works? While a volume of his collected works isn’t available, many of Beza’s writings, including The Life of Calvin, The Table of Predestination, and The Treasure of Gospel Truth, can be purchased online. The Christian Faith can be accessed for free and some other free works are available by clicking here. To read about Beza, the 184 page biography by Donald K. McKim and Jim West titled Theodore Beza: An Introduction to His Life and Theology is a good place to start. For a longer (424 pages), more detailed biography, consider Henry Martyn Baird’s Theodore Beza: The Counsellor of the French Reformation published by Banner of Truth.
Theolingo: Building Your Theological Vocabulary
Theolingo aims to help you expand your learning of important theological terms. The word for this month’s edition is purgatory.
Purgatory is a doctrine taught by Roman Catholic Church (and Eastern Orthodox churches as well) concerning a realm related to the intermediate state – the state between a believer’s physical death and bodily resurrection. In this realm, the souls of the redeemed undergo a period of purification in order to remove the remaining stains of sin before reaching a level of fitness required to enter the presence of God. In the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church §1030, “all who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.” The idea is that since few people are so pure at the time of death as to be free from sinful blemishes intolerable before a holy God (though some are), there must be some place where souls are purified before they are admitted into heaven. This place is purgatory.
It should be stressed that according to Roman Catholic teaching purgatory does not afford unbelievers an additional opportunity to repent after death. Purgatory is a domain in which only believers, dying in a state of grace, are detained until purified enough to enter into heaven. Purgatory is not hell nor does it ever serve as a precursor to hell for those in it. However, the process of purging involves pain and suffering – indeed, suffering described by some Roman Catholic teachers as “most severe or terrible.” The duration of purgatory is not known and varies from person to person but it can be reduced by suffering voluntary penance or by special sufferings inflicted by God in this life. It can also be shortened after death by the church and others still living through such things as prayers, vicarious acts of penance, masses for the deceased, almsgiving, and other charitable works.
The doctrine of purgatory was made official Roman Catholic doctrine at the councils of Lyons in 1274, Florence in 1439, and Trent in 1563. In an effort to defend the doctrine, appeal is made to the writings of some church fathers, including St. Augustine and Gregory the Great (from whom the doctrine finds its most detailed development in the early church), as well as to passages such as Matthew 12:31-32; 1 Corinthians 3:15; 1 Peter 3:19 and the deuterocanonical text of 2 Maccabees 12:43–45. These verses, however, provide little support. For this reason, belief in purgatory has historically been rejected by Protestants. The Scriptures speak of departed souls going immediately to a fixed state of either happiness or misery with no hint of a third realm serving as a halfway house (see Isaiah 57:1-2; Luke 16:22; 2 Corinthians 5:8; Philippians 1:23; Revelation 14:13). Additionally, the idea of purgatory diminishes the sufficiency of Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice on the cross (see Hebrews 10:10) by introducing the need for additional personal suffering in order to atone for sin. Purgatory suggests there are some sins which are to be cleansed by our own meritorious suffering and/or by the prayers and good works of others. But 1 John 1:7 assures us: “The blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanses us from all sin.”
The Bible’s teaching on the intermediate state is aptly summarized in the Westminster Confession of Faith, XXXII.1: “The bodies of men, after death, return to dust, and see corruption: but their souls, which neither die nor sleep, having an immortal subsistence, immediately return to God who gave them: the souls of the righteous, being then made perfect in holiness, are received into the highest heavens, where they behold the face of God, in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies. And the souls of the wicked are cast into hell, where they remain in torments and utter darkness, reserved to the judgment of the great day. Besides these two places, for souls separated from their bodies, the Scripture acknowledges none.”
Quotes
Violence hit very close to home on October 5 when Chris Wilson, a Yorktown High School senior, was shot and killed. In her book, Where Is God in All the Suffering, Amy Orr-Ewing asks: “How can we hold a view that there is a good God when such terrible things do happen and he appears to do nothing about it?” She goes on to offer this encouragement:
“In Christ, God himself has suffered violence and so if I suffer at the aggressive hands of others, I can turn for help and comfort to a God who is not remote or distant but one who is able to bear my sorrows with me. God was prepared to suffer with and for us, offering us the real and tangible possibility of hope, healing, forgiveness, justice and redemption in the midst of a dark and often violent world. He also stands as the ultimate Judge of all and, in the end, will bring perpetrators of violence to justice. That means that we can have confidence that God will call the violent to account and that those who appear to get away with their crimes in this life will need to face justice for them in the next.” – Amy Orr-Ewing
Martin Luther’s nailing of the 95 Theses on the church door at Wittenberg might have sparked the Protestant Reformation, but it was Luther’s earlier Spirit-enabled discovery of the gospel that guided his feet on that path and put the hammer to the nail. In his book Reformation Sketches, W. Robert Godfrey recalls Luther’s experience:
“In his famous 1545 preface to his Latin works, [Luther] reflected on his life as a monk and on how much he was trapped in this works-righteousness. He said:
Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction. I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God ... I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience.
That was the anguish of the soul of Martin Luther as a monk. It was that anguish that drove him into the Scriptures and led ultimately to what we know as his evangelical breakthrough. He came to a realization that when God speaks of righteousness, he is not speaking of the righteousness that he demands, but when he speaks of righteousness in the gospel, he is speaking of the righteousness that he gives in Christ. And Luther said that this apparently small difference turned his world upside down. Again he wrote about his discovery: ‘Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.’” – W. Robert Godfrey
Final Thought
Remember, God’s “No” is as much an expression of his love as his “Yes.”
