Posts Tagged "bible"

“What does he know that I don’t?” David, the writer of Psalm 119, says, “How sweet your words taste to me; they are sweeter than honey.” (Psalm 119:103) Granted, there are some nice things in the Bible, but really, “sweeter than honey?” Here’s what David understands that we often miss when we read the Scriptures.  ALL of the Bible is good news. Good news that God made the world a beautiful place and will return to make it new again. Good news that God made a way for Adam and Eve and has made a way for us. Good news that God is always faithful to His people no matter how long they wander in the desert or how far they go. Good news that His commands lead to life, and life abundantly. Good news that Jesus is the...

Why bother with the genealogies in the Bible? For most of us (myself included), it’s hard to really “get something” out of the long lists of names scattered throughout the Bible. However, with a little digging, you can find some pretty interesting things. For instance… Matthew 1:1-11 records the genealogy of Jesus Christ. I was told that in the original Greek language in which it is written: The total number of words is evenly divisible by 7. The total number of letters is evenly divisible by 7. The total number of vowels & consonants are also divisible by 7. The number of words that begin with a vowel is divisible by 7. The number of words that begin with a consonant is divisible by 7. The number of words that occur more than once,...

New years are new chapters in the stories of our lives. For me, the dawn of a new year is always an exciting time to look back and see what’s unfolded in the year gone by, and begin to plan and think and dream about what God may have for me in the one to come. Each life is a story, unfolding year by year. This year will be my fourth reading of the entire Bible, and I’m pretty excited. Normally I read and dig and cross-reference and look up commentaries, but this year is different. This year I will put aside the commentaries for every verse, the cross-references for every passage, and focus instead on the flow of events as they unfold, asking God to help me read not like a scholar, but like a child, caught up in the wonder of it all. This year I will...

Jesus ruined everything. “The high priest carries the blood of animals into the Most Holy Place as a sin offering, but the bodies are burned outside the camp.  And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through His own blood.  Let us, then, go to Him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace He bore.” (Hebrews 13:11-13) In the mindset of the Jews, the blood sacrifice at the tabernacle (and later, the temple) was one of the key elements of their identity as God’s chosen people.  Here was something that was prescribed to them by God, as a way to not only assure forgiveness of their sins, but also to set themselves apart from the rest of the world.  Theirs was a system of exclusivity – salvation was for the Jews, and...

“Why do You idly look at traitors and remain silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he?” -Habakkuk 1:13b Judas was a traitor, used of God to fulfill His purposes (John 17:12). What of him? Consider the pagan conqueror Cyrus, “whose right hand I [the LORD] have grasped, to subdue nations [including Israel] before him…” (Isaiah 45:1). What of him? Think also of the Pharoah of Exodus, of whom God said, “for this purpose I have raised you up, to show you my power, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.” (Exodus 9:16, Romans 9:17) What of him? What tyranny Pharoah set upon the children of Israel! What hardship came through Cyrus! What betrayal from the lips of Judas, yet all the while it was...