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in demanding from them precisely what they most want to retain for themselves.” — Tom
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Showing posts with label Christ. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christ. Show all posts
Saturday, May 18, 2019
How Not to Crash and Burn (59)
The first twenty-nine chapters of the book of Proverbs set out the compiled wisdom of Solomon. Obviously not all of it; we’re told he wrote
3,000 proverbs and an additional 1,005 songs, so this is the tip of a large iceberg. It’s a
pretty impressive resume by any standard.
Labels:
Agur
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Christ
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How Not to Crash and Burn
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Proverbs
Wednesday, May 08, 2019
When God Says Things He Doesn’t Mean
“Take your … only son Isaac, and offer him … as a burnt offering.”
“ ‘Rise, go with them’ … But God’s anger was kindled because he went.”
“Let me alone, that I may destroy them and … I will make of you a nation mightier and greater than they.”
Sometimes God says things he doesn’t really mean. Think about that a bit.
Labels:
Balaam
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Christ
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Exodus
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Intercession
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Moses
Wednesday, May 01, 2019
Wagging the Dog
“It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”
Trudy Smith of the Huffington Post asks, “Was Jesus racist?” Her answer, of course, is yes.
That’s hardly surprising. The HuffPost is
the online poster-rag for the New American Left. In their exceedingly well-defined
and ideologically-pristine PC world, even the Son of God takes the knee before
the official progressive racial narrative.
Wednesday, April 03, 2019
Semi-Random Musings (12)
I cannot say what the process of becoming honest is like for the occasional white-liar, but people
who practice deceit definitely have great difficulty quitting.
I have probably detailed in some post or other my own experience of giving up the
practice of lying cold-turkey by forcing myself to publicly confess every
single new falsehood I uttered, and doing so the moment the words left my
lips. It involved a level of red-faced humiliation and personal exposure I was
very much unused to. Rarely was a confession received in quite the way
I expected.
I suppose all bad habits are hard to break.
Sunday, March 31, 2019
That Night
“For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread …”
Well, let me take you back to that night.
Around the table were all the disciples of the Lord, and in the midst of them, the
Lord himself. It was a dinner party of sorts, a Passover seder, actually. Solemn
in the Jewish calendar, but also a time of thankfulness.
Labels:
Christ
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Lord's Supper
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Recycling
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Worship
Sunday, March 17, 2019
Less Different Than We Think
“My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory.”
“Rich” and “poor” are relative terms. Welfare
recipients in Western society are not poor by the standards of East Africa.
Likewise, many Africans would consider our Western middle classes incredibly
rich, and yet hundreds of thousands around us are much better off than we are.
When James speaks of rich and poor, he
specifies the sort of thing he means. The contrast between these two types of men is not
merely a matter of degree; their lives are so different they might
as well be different species. The very least of it is in how they present to the world. The poor man wears shabby clothing, and not
because he didn’t bother to pick up a decent used Arrow shirt from the
local Goodwill. He simply has nothing better. There are no welfare cheques in
his future. The rich man across the way is decked out in fine garments and sports
an ostentatious gold ring. He probably dressed down for the occasion.
That paints the picture for us just fine.
Monday, March 04, 2019
Anonymous Asks (29)
“Does Jesus love us all equally?”
Equality is the signal obsession of our
age. I’m not sure people living hundreds or thousands of years ago would have asked
this question or even thought much about it.
So let’s ask another one: does it really matter?
We already know Jesus loves us. You probably learned it in Sunday School: Jesus loves me, this I know; for the Bible tells me so. And one of the most famous verses in scripture tells us that
“God so loved the world …” God gave his Son for us, and his Son gave himself on our behalf. That’s love.
Labels:
Anonymous Asks
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Christ
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Equality
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John the Apostle
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Love
Wednesday, February 13, 2019
Flesh and Spirit
“If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
“A spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.”
There can be no doubt Jesus Christ was active in the world for thousands of years prior to his incarnation.
Labels:
Bread
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Christ
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Lord's Supper
Tuesday, December 25, 2018
To One and All, A Mary Christmas
“… the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”
“So this is Christmas, and what have you done?”
So sing the children in John Lennon’s wretched ditty. I really don’t know
why he bothered himself about Christmas when he also wanted to “imagine there’s
no heaven”. But each to his own. I’m sure he’s thought better of that since.
At Christmas time, I can’t imagine a more dismal question. Another year
over, Lennon accuses, and you haven’t done anything. The poor are still starving,
the world is still at war. When are you going to get off your haunches and be
worth something?
Ah, there’s nothing like Christmas pudding and the sounds of self-flagellation
to improve the seasonal mood.
Thursday, December 20, 2018
It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Christ
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Christian Life
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Eternal Reign
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Psalms
Thursday, November 29, 2018
Present Perfect
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Apostle Paul
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Christ
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Law
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Salvation
Sunday, November 11, 2018
The Building Blocks of Reality
For example, I cannot read Abraham’s words to Isaac, “God will provide for himself the lamb,” without marveling at the subtlety of the wording. It works as a double entendre
in either Hebrew or English. Was Abraham a straight man or a prophet? I can’t
tell you, but I love that line. From thousands of years down the road
we look back and say, “He certainly did.”
That’s not a comment on our cleverness, of course.
Sunday, September 16, 2018
Two Baptisms
Matthew’s 3rd chapter records Christ’s
baptism by John; that moment inaugurates Christ’s public ministry.
The background is simple enough: John was
performing a baptism of repentance and many queued up to take their turn under
the water. The baptism John offered was meant to signify that the recipient had
confessed and turned from his or her former sinful choices, and was now
committed to God-honoring conduct.
A baptism of repentance demonstrated in a
very public way, to a large crowd of onlookers, that you were a penitent
sinner.
Labels:
Baptism
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Christ
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John the Baptist
Thursday, September 13, 2018
Perfect Confidence
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Christ
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Perfection
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Sinlessness
Sunday, August 26, 2018
Non-Negotiable Nomenclature
It started before he was born. For example, one well-known prophet
said, “call his name Immanuel.” During his ministry some called him Rabbi,
as Jewish teachers were often known. Later, the high priest asked him, “Are you the
Christ?” As for his disciples, both before and after his resurrection they referred to
him almost exclusively as Lord.
The list of his names and titles is lengthy and something significant would surely be lost if we dismissed even the least of them. That said, there are three without which we cannot possibly preach a
complete gospel or maintain a balanced, accurate perspective on Jesus.
You might call them non-negotiable nomenclature.
Labels:
Bible Names
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Christ
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
What Does Your Proof Text Prove? (10)
Disagreeing with other Christians online is a bit like
pulling off a Band-Aid® stuck to the hairiest part of your arm.
There is what I call the “Big BUT” disagreement. This kind
starts slowly, with a spate of complimentary disclaimers — “Now,
I love this Bible teacher, he’s a great guy and I admire him
immensely” — and always ends with a great big “BUT ...”
Or there’s the exquisitely self-effacing “We’re All Just Learning
Here” disagreement, which makes every biblical issue a matter of opinion and gives
you a convenient way of escaping with a few shreds of dignity intact if it
turns out everyone thinks its your
interpretation that’s out to lunch.
Labels:
Christ
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Douglas Wilson
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Matthew
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Repentance
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What Does Your Proof Text Prove?
Saturday, August 18, 2018
Irrationalization: Call No Man Father
There are two ways for, let’s say, a flabby, aerobically-inadequate
middle aged blogger to approach a task like getting over a six foot hurdle. One
way is to recognize that he is horribly out of shape and begin regular exercise
and training.
The other way is to lower the bar … or maybe even remove it
entirely.
I have always been fascinated by our ability when reading
the Bible to explain away that which would be perfectly clear if understood in
its natural sense. Sadly, doing so is almost always a recipe for spiritual
disaster. A much safer practice is to confirm that the word of God
says what it says, even when it condemns us. To let God be true and to let
every man be a liar, and let the theological chips fall where they may.
All to say, I happened across a spectacular piece of religious
rationalization this morning.
Labels:
Catholicism
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Christ
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Father
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Recycling
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Religious Titles
Sunday, August 05, 2018
Joshua Twice
If you’ve had occasion to visit many Christian homes, you’ve almost certainly seen
this phrase prominently displayed in a frame somewhere near the front door:
“… as for me and for my house, we will serve the Lord.”
It’s a great aspiration for any Christian home and worth
recalling frequently — so it’s certainly suitable as a wall hanging. However,
as is common enough with many pleasant-sounding snippets taken from the pages
of the Bible, the original context is obscured by its popularity.
Thursday, August 02, 2018
Finally! An Elected Official We Can Believe In
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Christ
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Election
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Neo-Calvinism
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Predestination
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TULIP
Sunday, July 29, 2018
A Distinction with a Difference
Isaiah makes the following statement, generally considered
to be messianic:
“But the Lord God helps me; therefore
I have not been disgraced; therefore I have set my face like a flint, and I know that
I shall not be put to shame. He who vindicates me is near. Who will contend with me?”
Now, hold up there for a moment. We know beyond a shadow of
a doubt that the Lord Jesus was both shamed and
humiliated.
Sunday, June 24, 2018
Was Christ Made Sin?
Patience ... all will become apparent ... |
I’ve never had even a remotely heated discussion about this verse with anyone else. It may provoke arguments in some quarters, but not many. Still, it’s worth considering for a moment what Paul is actually saying here as it may help us elsewhere.
Sunday, June 17, 2018
Root and Shoot
There’s an odd and rather bleak passage in
Job in which he compares human beings to trees. “A man dies and is laid low,”
says the beleaguered believer, but “there is hope for a tree.”
Why? “Though its root grow old in the earth, and its stump die in the soil, yet at the scent of
water it will bud and put out branches like a young plant.”
Pouring water on a headstone does not generally produce similar results.
Labels:
Christ
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David
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Isaiah
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John the Baptist
Saturday, April 21, 2018
Fatherhood Expounded
In a previous post, I pointed out that very little is said
in the Old Testament about the fatherhood of God. It took the coming of the Son to
fully expound the ways in which God’s relationship to believers is paternal.
Or perhaps we have that the wrong way round. Perhaps instead
we should say something like this: The human father/child relationship was
designed by God to illustrate how he relates to his creations and his creations
to him. In other words, we can expect that human fatherhood done right will
be “Godly” in character. I don’t think that’s too much to assume.
Either way, until the Son came and made the Father
known — not simply as God but in his role as Father — only a very
small number of the faithful understood God’s parental care for his people, and
only in the most limited of ways.
Wednesday, April 18, 2018
Fatherhood Foreshadowed
For me it’s thousands upon thousands. Tens of thousands, perhaps. I can’t even begin to guess. In fact, it is fairly
common for Christians to address God as their father, though I know many whose
prayers customarily begin with “Dear God”, which, when you think about it, is a
little perplexing.
How many of us think much about the fact
that the family relationship with God into which we have been brought through faith in
Jesus Christ is not only intimate but also unprecedented?
Wednesday, April 04, 2018
The New Head
That decision runs
counter to customary business practice, which dictates that management
functions are best performed by those trained and accredited to manage. However,
the conventional wisdom fails to take into account that the learning curve for
a manager in a new environment is long and steep. More importantly, the staff can
have no confidence in or loyalty to someone who has been merely parachuted in;
who knows nothing about the company’s product, processes and people — let
alone someone who has no investment in what they are working to accomplish (beyond,
of course, nailing down and taking home his annual bonus package).
So you appoint from within. At least, that’s how God did it.
Labels:
Christ
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Daniel
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Son of Man
Wednesday, March 28, 2018
All the Time You Need
“Those who were crucified with him also reviled him.”
How long does it take to get saved?
Some people spend their whole lives working at it. They go
to church, they provide for their families, they confess their sins, they
contribute to religious causes, they try to treat people well, they “do unto
others”. Some follow laws and religious regulations year after year.
But it’s not a trick question, nor a particularly
complicated one.
Labels:
Christ
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Crucifixion
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Faith
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Recycling
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Repentance
Thursday, February 22, 2018
Thursday, February 08, 2018
All By My Self
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Authenticity
/
Christ
Saturday, February 03, 2018
Forests and Trees
When I pick up a Bible and try to understand a particular
verse or passage, I am at a slight disadvantage compared to the writer’s original audience.
“Slight?” you might well ask, taking out your logical 2x4
and preparing to give me a smart tap on the frontal lobe, hopefully in the interest of bringing me to my senses.
“How can you possibly call the disadvantage of living
thousands of years after the original writer slight? Sure, you can read the
words that the author penned, assuming there has been no significant textual
corruption along the way, but you have no idea what was in the author’s mind.
You’re not a Hebrew, and you didn’t live in his day. You don’t know the cultural
baggage with which his language was freighted. You didn’t have his experiences.
You don’t know Greek idioms or how they came about.
“Chances are quite high that
you are coming to the text with all kinds of modern assumptions that influence
how you read things.”
Saturday, January 27, 2018
Wintry Landscapes
“A wintry landscape of unrelieved
bleakness.” That’s Lutheran scholar Martin Marty’s take on Psalm 88.
One of the difficulties encountered by
those of us who like to go scratching around the Bible to background its
characters is that, just like in the phone directory, lots of different people have the same
name. That makes certainty an issue. Names like Mary, John and James appear all
over the place. Disambiguators help, of course, and the Holy Spirit provides them
here and there: Mary Magdalene, James the son of Alphaeus, and so on.
This morning I’m more than a little curious
about Heman the Ezrahite, the poet credited with the aforementioned “wintry
landscape”.
Labels:
Christ
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Heman
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Psalms
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Resurrection
Saturday, January 20, 2018
A Better Idea
My head is a tangle of ideas this morning,
so let me set about trying to untangle them for you.
Thread One: Dr. Emidio Campi is convinced that “the
Christian message of salvation becomes futile unless its implications are
extended throughout the whole of human life, into political, social and international structures.”
Thread Two: John Calvin’s view of the Church,
which provoked the aforementioned rather ecumenical outburst.
Thread Three: Psalm 80, an Asaphian
meditation on the restoration of Israel.
Whew! How would you like a bowl of that for
breakfast?
Labels:
Christ
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Israel
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John Calvin
/
Psalms
Monday, January 15, 2018
The 1,600 Year Conspiracy
Or so goes the story. By “him” I mean Jesus Christ. By “we” I mean human beings with an agenda.
On the surface it’s not
a bad thesis. After all, you can’t rigorously prove biblical inspiration. Oh, you
can make the claim, and you can demonstrate from the text that the apostles,
prophets and Jesus himself claimed it too. You can make the case that inspiration
is a reasonable and logical inference, and you can argue it from the sorts of
behaviors these supposedly sacred words produce in the lives of those who
obey them.
But can you
demonstrate with 100% scientific certainty that the text of our Bibles is
really God speaking? No.
And if it isn’t? Well, then ... we made him up.
Labels:
Christ
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History
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Inspiration
Monday, December 25, 2017
What It’s All About
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to
appreciate some surprising things. In my twenties, I finally “got” Shakespeare.
How many people, like me, loathed him at first meeting, usually in high school?
I guess there are some things you just have to be old enough to understand. And
some people never do.
By my thirties, I suddenly found I had a
feel for non-fiction reading. In my forties, I developed a taste for
comparative religions and philosophy, then for apologetics. Now, in my fifties,
I suddenly discover that some of the music styles of songsters more celebrated
by my parents’ generation have started to speak to me with very strange
poignancy. Again, I guess sometimes you just have to reach an age.
Lately, I’ve found myself strangely
compelled by the work of Burt Bacharach.
Sunday, December 24, 2017
Friday, December 22, 2017
Too Hot to Handle: The “Divinity” of Christ
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Christ
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Deity of Christ
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Divinity
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Too Hot to Handle
Tuesday, November 28, 2017
Quiet, Not Silent
“For they do not speak peace, but against those
who are quiet in the land they devise words of deceit.”
Contentious, evil people always take advantage
of those who can’t or won’t fight back. If that’s not a universal truism, it’s
as close to one as matters.
Our political, legal and social structures
are so constructed as to allow the forceful and aggressive to dominate the peaceful.
Labels:
Christ
/
Matthew
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Social Justice
Saturday, November 11, 2017
Wednesday, November 01, 2017
On the Mount (2)
In this series of posts I’m working my way
through Matthew 5-7 attempting (however feebly) to hear the words of
Christ from the same cultural and religious perspective as the Lord’s original
audience.
Since I’m not William MacDonald, and since
this is a blog post rather than an exhaustive commentary, I make no apology for
skipping lightly over some sections of the Sermon and dwelling at length on
others as they may currently interest me.
All I can really promise you is that it’ll
be consecutive and that it’ll be as Jewish as I can make it, and with
any luck almost as Jewish as it actually is.
Ready? Let’s go.
Labels:
Christ
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Galilee
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Judaism
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Matthew
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On the Mount
Sunday, October 29, 2017
On the Mount (1)
I’m working my way
through the Sermon on the Mount again (Matthew 5-7). It’s a pretty pivotal
piece in Christ’s teaching ministry, and one that seems to invite scrutiny on
multiple levels.
Infogalactic’s entry
on the Sermon lists eight different categories of views about it, the most commonly held of which is that it “contains the
central tenets of Christian discipleship”. Augustine called it “a perfect
standard of the Christian life”.
I struggle with that. See,
the Sermon is fundamentally Jewish; and while Christianity has its roots in Judaism and would not exist without it, the two are not interchangeable.
If we miss that, we’re missing more than we might think.
Labels:
Christ
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Israel
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Matthew
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On the Mount
Saturday, October 28, 2017
What Does Your Proof Text Prove? (4)
A commenter at Christian Forums attempts to
refute the Dispensational view of the Bible. Leimeng says:
“Much of Dispensationalism is a false teaching in the same way that calvinism,
arminianism and pelegarianism are. The Bible clearly states that God is not a
God of Changes, and that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.”
The statement that Jesus Christ is the same
yesterday, today and forever comes word-for-word from the book of Hebrews, but
I don’t believe it means at all what Leimeng claims it means.
Labels:
Change
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Christ
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Hebrews
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What Does Your Proof Text Prove?
Tuesday, October 10, 2017
Jesus@Home
At the beginning of
his public ministry, Jesus established a base of operations near the Sea of
Galilee at Capernaum, about 40 miles from Nazareth where he had grown up. Matthew
tells us he made this move right after the arrest of John the Baptist, in fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy.
It was near Capernaum
that he called his first disciples, preached the Sermon on the Mount and calmed
the storm. It was from the same region that he sent out the Twelve into the
rest of Israel to proclaim the kingdom of heaven.
Sunday, September 10, 2017
Analyzing the Narrative
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Christ
/
Disciples
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Resurrection
Sunday, July 30, 2017
Monday, July 17, 2017
Elementary, My Dear Christian
The giving of the law
to Israel through Moses at Sinai was a truly spectacular event, attended by “blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made
the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them,” as the writer to
the Hebrews so eloquently puts it.
The law that God gave
on that grand occasion is described in glowing terms by the psalmist: wondrous,
delightful, sufficient for all sorts of situations, sweeter than honey, perfect, sure, right and true. Of all legal codes by which men have ordered their
societies down through the centuries, the law of Sinai was the very best.
But law itself did not
originate at Sinai. Laws were no new thing.
Sunday, July 02, 2017
If You Don’t Know, Just Say So
Some people just can’t bring themselves to say it, sadly.
This poor soul dared to pose a question on an
internet forum a while back. The silly fellow had been reading his Bible (on his own, possibly) and had the temerity to come across
this verse:
“As he said these things, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, ‘Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts at which you nursed!’ But he said, ‘Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!’ ”
Hooboy. Some people just know how to pick ’em.
Sunday, June 11, 2017
Too Big to Fail
“God is too big to fit inside one religion.”
Interesting. On the
surface it sounds like a compliment — this guy has a big god. Big is good, right?
Well, yes and no.
Labels:
Christ
/
Communication
/
Hebrews
Sunday, May 21, 2017
A Better Word
“Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?”
Washed in the blood. I’ll
be frank: that’s kind of a grisly image, though a very popular one in late 19th
and 20th century hymnology. If some of our modern churchgoers cringe
at the mental picture it conjures, we can hardly blame them.
Elisha Hoffman’s lyric
presumably riffs on Revelation 7, where John sees an innumerable multitude
of worshipers in front of the throne of God and is told, “They have washed their
robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”
In Revelation it is
the robes that are washed in the
blood, not the worshipers themselves. Hoffman probably understood this, though
his title is a bit too ambiguous for me.
What we do find much
more often in scripture is sprinkled
blood.
Labels:
Blood
/
Christ
/
Sacrifice
/
Sprinkling
Sunday, April 30, 2017
The House Jesus Built
If you don’t like the color of your walls, you can repaint any time you have the energy. If your
living room is too small, you can tear down the wall that separates it from the
dining room and go open concept. If you don’t like the tarmac driveway, you can
redo it with cobblestone. After all, it’s yours.
Sure, city ordinances will
probably prevent you from doing off-the-wall things like adding a
sub-sub-basement or a swimming pool in the kitchen, but the variety of family
homes in my neighbourhood is evidence that it’s the owner’s budget and imagination
that are the most common limitations on their creativity.
Monday, April 24, 2017
John Was Not Surprised
Once in a while the force of an expression gets a little buried in translation. Take this verse, for example:
“Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.”
Here are two related statements tied together with
the word “so”. First, we are told that Jesus loved Martha, Mary and Lazarus.
Next, we are told that Jesus deliberately took his time going to see someone he
loved who was seriously ill.
The word “so” might seem an odd way to
connect these two ideas.
Saturday, April 22, 2017
Do You Want to Go Out?
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Christ
/
Persecution
/
Reproach
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