Phil Gons

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Don Garlington’s Commentary on Galatians—Free!

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Don GarlingtonI just found out that Don Garlington‘s commentary on Galatians is available as a free PDF from the Paul Page. It appears to be his contribution to the forthcoming volume 11 of the revised EBC rather than his 2002 Galatians commentary or his revised 2004 commentary, since it has citations from sources in 2006. I’m not positive on this, but it seems fairly likely. Regardless of which one it is, it’s worth downloading for future reference. For those who aren’t aware: Garlington supports the essence of the new perspective.

HT: Matthew D. Montonini

Update: The Paul Page is rather sporadic. It took me numerous attempts before being able to access the page and the PDF. It appears they are upgrading their server software or having problems. In the meantime, you can download the PDF from my site.

Update 2: See my updated post Garlington’s Galatians Commentaries.

The Spirit Communicating: Logos Syntax Search

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My Bible reading plan had me in Acts 13 the other day (I’m following Carson’s slight variation of the M’Cheyne plan). Verse 2 reads, “While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.'” Curious about the nature of the Spirit’s speaking, I wanted to explore the other passages where the Holy Spirit communicates something. It would have been difficult to get a complete list of relevant passages were it not for Logos’s OpenText syntax database.

Here’s the search I constructed:

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Fighting for a Clean Conscience

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I just posted an excerpt from John Ensor’s The Great Work of the Gospel: How We Experience God’s Grace. It’s an encouraging read that I needed. I commend it to you. Here is a portion of that excerpt:

INSTRUCTING OUR CONSCIENCE ABOUT THE CROSS

Not that this sense of liberty is always there and never flags. It surely does. One problem is that our conscience is not sufficiently informed about the gospel. It needs training in righteousness. In terms of human experience, we must often “reassure our heart before him; for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart” (1 John 3:19-20). I take this to mean that we need to bring the work of God in Christ to bear on our stubborn conscience. We must grasp the truth of the cross and wrestle our conscience into alignment and conformity. We must instruct our conscience about the cross until our conviction of guilt gives way to joy and confidence. Hebrews 10:22 calls this having “our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil [burdened] conscience.”

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Firefox 2.0 Is Here

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If you’ve been using Firefox 1.5, you might be interested to know that Firefox 2.0 was officially released yesterday. (If you haven’t been using Firefox, now’s a great time to start.) It’s got a lot of great features that keep it a couple steps ahead of the new Internet Explorer 7. E.g., FF 2 (1) has a built-in auto spell checker that will underline misspelled words in red when you type text into text boxes (I love it! It’s great for bloggers!), (2) forces a new window to open as a tab instead of a new browser window (very nice), (3) implements improved tabbed browsing, and (4) will reopen your browser exactly how it was before if it happens to crash (which isn’t very often). Download it now.

Copernic Desktop Search 2.0

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The newest version of the Copernic Desktop Search is now available. If you don’t use a desktop search program, you’re missing out a real timesaver. If you use Google’s desktop search, you’re still missing out. (BTW, I love most of Google’s software, but their desktop search has some weaknesses that make it an inferior product–detailed quote searching being one of them.) Copernic’s desktop search is the best available–at least for the PC. Fast, intuitive, and incredibly accurate. There are plenty of new features in version 2 that make it even better. One I especially like is the ability to narrow down a search if it’s bringing up too many results. Narrow it by a word in the title, or the file type, size, date or folder. Check it out; you’ll be glad you did.

PrimoPDF 3.0

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Every theologian has the need to make PDFs, but not every theologian has the money for Adobe’s Acrobat Professional, now in version 8. By far the best free PDF maker out there is PrimoPDF. No strings attached. No annoying labels added to your documents. Full functionality. Lots of great features. Version 3 was just released. If you don’t have it, I’d strongly encourage you to get it. You’ll be glad you did.

However, once MS Office 2007 is released, it’ll finally have the ability to save documents as PDFs. Until then, PrimoPDF is the way to go.

Update: I’ve been disappointed with the Office PDF feature. It does have the advantage of maintaining all link functionality and preserving your document map for easier navigation, but the quality of the type is poor and the size of the file is unusually large. If you need links and/or document maps for navigation, the Office PDF feature is probably what you want. If you don’t, I’d recommend continuing to use PrimoPDF as it will give you a smaller and sharper looking document.