Our most popular posts of last year dealt with relationships (or the absence thereof), the visions of Zechariah, the importance of thought flow in expository preaching, and the practical implications of Reformed theology. If that seems a mixed bag to you, welcome to ComingUntrue, where we try to come up with a little something for everyone … or possibly you just get stuck with whatever random subject is rattling around in our heads on any given day.
Without further ado, let’s count ’em down!
Anyone who has attempted to maintain an email subscription to ComingUntrue over the years knows Blogger’s email tool is notoriously unreliable. Often, we do not even receive our own posts. Substack is basically a newsletter subscription service that is proving increasingly popular and much more reliable.
Effectively immediately, I’m going to try publishing each post to Substack as we create them in hope this may make life easier for our friends who prefer email delivery to browsing the web. You won’t get all the features available at the regular website (sidebars, archive pages, topical studies, search box, etc.), but you’ll get the content of each post seven days a week (we hope) in a clear, readable form.
We could probably sum up the inadvertent theme of this year’s top ten new posts with the words, “Jews, More Jews and Book Reviews”. If only I had managed a book review of something related to the people of Israel, we could have done it all in a single post.
There’s no denying how personal politics became in 2023. Everybody has an opinion, informed or otherwise. Without further ado, here are our ten most-read new posts of 2023.
Sunday’s post marked ten years of daily commentary, Bible study and engagement with the culture at ComingUntrue. Today’s Anonymous Asks begins a new decade. How far we go down that road remains to be seen, as we continue to append the words “if the Lord wills” to our plans. Friends, family members and co-workers are struggling with the unexpected developments of one sort or another that invariably come with age; it seems improbable we will all continue to cruise along in comparative ease indefinitely.
Either way, we have much for which to be grateful.
Things fall apart.
It’s a sad fact of life that attrition culls the blogosphere on a regular basis. I guess it’s also a vivid demonstration of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in action (believers in the theory of evolution take note). I recently updated our Recommend-a-blog page (one of the gray tabs just below the banner at the top of our home page) to include links to all the posts and blogs I have recommended since December 2013 when we debuted online, only to find that six of the thirty-two either no longer exist or are exclusively available on The Wayback Machine.
That’s almost 20% of the total. Wow. I guess we should be thankful for the ones still alive and kicking.
When we began posting here almost ten years ago, I never planned on doing book reviews. Somehow or other it happened anyway: Andy Stanley even provoked five posts with a single paperback (Irresistible was and remains an epically awful idea).
Anyway, now seems as good a time as any to put links to all my reviews in one place so they can be easily located if anyone is interested. Our most recent posts are at the top, which is the opposite of my usual practice with these pages, but makes the page way easier to edit. (Too bad I didn’t figure that out ten years ago.) You can find the link to the new Book Reviews page with the links to all the rest of our ongoing features at the top of our home page right below our logo, or access individual reviews via the topic sidebar on the right.
Another year, another ±365 blog posts, some of which were read more than others. Happily, none of our ten most popular posts last year had anything to do with either COVID‑19, a subject we would all be delighted to never hear anything about again, or Calvinism, which … ditto.
Just like last year, Immanuel Can managed to snag the number one spot. Unlike some previous years, the ten most-read new posts in 2022 had no real features in common. Among them we have a book review, a series of unconnected reflections, a meditation on the importance of Christ’s death, a structural analysis of an Old Testament book and a couple of housekeeping projects.
Basically a miscellany.
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Somewhere back in December — wait, I should be able to do better than that.
December 11, 2013 was our first post ever. So this post, published on December 10, 2022, marked the completion of our ninth full year of daily publication, though I didn’t notice at the time. Today’s post means we’ve published across eleven different calendar years, for whatever that’s worth. So we thank the Lord for unanticipated longevity and for the endless wonders of the word of God and the person of Christ. We have yet to beg anyone for subject matter.
Let’s just say that in 2013 I didn’t really expect we would still be writing blog posts in 2023. I didn’t expect not to either. In 2013, that sort of thing was just too far away and too unreal to spend time thinking about.
For ease of reference, the links page for our ongoing feature The Commentariat Speaks now displays the topic of each post, something I probably should have done from the beginning. You can find it here.
“Neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.”
There are more than 600 million blogs out there in the web, two million of which post daily. Something like 77% of internet users still read them. You may have heard that blog readership overall is dropping precipitously, but quantifying that is next to impossible since Google has a vested interest in promoting the hobby / business / passion. In 2021 in the U.S. alone, 31.7 million bloggers published roughly 7 million posts per day, 97% of whom used social media to boost their results. We are in the 3% that didn’t: I like social media just slightly less than being boiled in oil.
If 2020 was the strangest year in most of our lives to date, 2021 was more of the same: strange got stranger. Anyone who thinks he knows what’s coming in 2022 is probably wrong. Here at Coming Untrue, we are grateful to continue to experience the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit in our feeble attempts to serve a Master whose yoke is easy and whose burdens are light.
All the rest is detail — as we have had occasion to remind one another all year long — though that “detail” certainly makes a lot of din and clatter around us.
It’s been almost two years since I did one of these “status” posts. Oops.
On some fronts a great deal has happened. I entered my seventh decade, for one, which helps explain why so many much-loved friends and family members have left us in the last two years, temporarily at least, and are now enjoying the presence of the Lord (to date, none due to COVID). My children seem to be at completely different stages of life than they were two years ago. That is reason to rejoice in nearly every respect. Atmospherically and functionally, my workplace is a completely different beast than it was two years ago. That is both good and bad for the company, but it is certainly fun for me.
