The Works of William Perkins, Volume 1: Digest or Harmony of the Books of the Old and New Testaments, Combat Between Christ and the Devil, Sermon on the Mount - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

William Perkins (1558-1602) was a well-respected preacher and teacher at Christ's College, Cambridge. His influence on students there produced a generation of Puritan-minded ministers.

Stephen Yuille is director of Puritan publishing at Reformation Heritage Books. He also serves as a pastor at Fairview Covenant Church in Granbury, Texas, and as a professor of church history at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

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The present volume contains three of Perkins's treatises. The first is A Digest or Harmony of the Books of the Old and New Testament, which offers a synopsis of the Bible that relates sacred history to the chronology of the world. Dating God's creation of the universe in 3967 BC, Perkins develops his overview of redemptive history that culminates in the final judgment.

The second treatise is The Combat between Christ and the Devil Displayed. Expounding Matthew 4:1"€"11, Perkins shows how Christ's temptation in the wilderness (1) set Jesus up to serve as the second Adam, overcoming Satan's temptation in a way the first Adam did not; (2) reveals how the devil assaults the church so that we might be better prepared to resist his temptations; and (3) equipped Christ to be a sympathetic high priest to those who are tempted.

The third and most significant treatise is A Godly and Learned Exposition upon Christ's Sermon in the Mount. "Hereof I have chosen to entreat," says Perkins, "because it is a most divine and learned sermon, and may not unfitly be called the 'Key to the whole Bible'; for here Christ opens the sum of the Old and New Testaments." The fact that Perkins saw the Sermon on the Mount as unlocking the meaning of Scripture in its entirety suggests that his understanding of what Christ declares in Matthew 5"€"7 was pivotal to the development of his theology and piety.