A tree is a blessing from God for his creation, even in those wild places where no human being has set foot. (more…)
Category Archives: Bible insights
The end of Mark’s Gospel
Life
To anyone who reads it, the end of Mark seems like an enigma. While there are longer endings, the oldest and most reliable manuscripts come to a stop at verse 8.
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Do not judge!
Life
What do you think is the best known verse in the Bible? Without a second thought, most of us would say John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life”. Almost every Christian knows this verse. There are organizations named after it. In the 1980s, there was a man named Rollen Stewart (aka Rainbow Man) who donned a rainbow wig, wrote the verse on a sign and held it up at various prominent American sporting events. (more…)
Preaching the gospel from Ruth
Pastoral Ministry
Five Festal Garments: Christian Reflections on the Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther
Barry Webb
Inter-Varsity Press, Leicester, 2000, pp. 192.
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Bible resistance
Up front, Sola Panel
This is a public health warning for the attention of all those involved in the cure of souls. A particularly insidious threat to spiritual wellbeing has been identified, and we need your help to eradicate it. The phenomenon has been dubbed ‘Bible resistance’. Those most at risk are Christians who identify themselves as members of ‘good’, ‘faithful’ or ‘Bible-believing’ congregations. (more…)
Guilt-edged pages?
Up front
While ploughing my way through The Shack recently (and it was a matter of ploughing!), a thought occurred to me about the dynamic at work in our culture and in our sinful hearts—the dynamic that generates books like this one and makes them such big sellers. (more…)
The image of Jesus?
Thought
At first glance, most Christians would dismiss this as blasphemous. The idea that Jesus was controlled by the unjust prejudices of his culture, that he did not understand God’s compassionate love and that he needed a Canaanite woman to teach him God’s ways is an attack on the incarnate Son of God. (more…)
The church on the move: An interview with David Cook
David Cook, Principal of Sydney Missionary and Bible College (SMBC) in Croydon, NSW, Australia, recently authored an excellent guide for those wanting to preach through the book of Acts: Teaching Acts (Christian Focus, 2007). Peter Hastie speaks to him about preaching, mission and what the book of Acts has to say about church growth.
Peter Hastie: The book of Acts is said to be a ‘tonic for the soul’. What are some of the things that Luke says are crucial for our spiritual strength and vitality? (more…)
Fire in the bones: Truly meek
Then let me go further; the man who is meek is not even sensitive about himself. He is not always watching himself and his own interests. He is not always on the defensive. We all know about this, do we not? Is it not one of the greatest curses in life as a result of the fall—this sensitivity about self? We spend the whole of our lives watching ourselves. But when a man becomes meek he has finished with all that; he no longer worries about himself and what other people say. To be truly meek means we no longer protect ourselves, because we see there is nothing worth defending. So we are not on the defensive; all that is gone. The man who is truly meek never pities himself, he is never sorry for himself. He never talks to himself and says, ‘You are having a hard time, how unkind these people are not to understand you’. He never thinks: ‘How wonderful I really am, if only other people gave me a chance.’ Self-pity! What hours and years we waste in this! But the man who has become meek has finished with all that. To be meek, in other words, means that you have finished with yourself altogether, and you come to see you have no rights or deserts at all. You come to realize that nobody can harm you. John Bunyan puts it perfectly. ‘He that is down need fear no fall.’ When a man truly sees himself, he knows nobody can say anything about him that is too bad. You need not worry about what men may say or do; you know you deserve it all and more. Once again, therefore, I would define meekness like this. The man who is truly meek is the one who is amazed that God and man can think of him as well as they do and treat him as well as they do. That, it seems to me, is its essential quality.
From D Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount Vol. 1 (Matthew 5:1-48), Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1971, pp. 57-8. Originally published by Inter-Varsity Press, Leicester, 1959-60. Used with kind permission from Inter-Varsity Press. (more…)
What makes you angry?
Up front, Sola Panel
There was a surprising level of anger in our Bible study group the other night. We were studying Mark 2:13-3:6, and looking at four controversies between Jesus and religious leaders (particularly the Pharisees). We discussed the Pharisees’ religious background: they were very serious about keeping God’s law—so serious, they built up a whole bunch of other laws to protect themselves from going anywhere near breaking God’s law. For example, to protect themselves from breaking commandment #4 (don’t work on Saturday), they had a rule that one mustn’t even look into a mirror on the Sabbath because one might see a grey hair and be tempted to pluck it out, which might be construed as ‘work’. Our group sympathized with them a little: in much the same way that a modern Christian might make a blanket rule not to drink alcohol or visit a pub to protect himself from the possibility of causing offence or temptation to an alcoholic Christian brother, the Pharisees made rules to help them to honour God in all areas of life. (more…)
Environmentalism
Life, Word Watch
It’s the ‘ism’ that makes all the difference. The ‘environment’ is just all the stuff around us. ‘Environment’ is first recorded in 1830, and comes from the much earlier word ‘environ’, which, in turn, is first recorded in one of Wycliffe’s sermons from 1375. ‘Environ’ comes from an Old French word meaning “that which makes a circuit (or veers) around us”.
Literally
Life, Word Watch
Literally no-one understands the word ‘literally’ anymore. I suspect that the meaning of the word has changed over the last generation or two. ‘Literally’ came into English from Old French (so blame William the Conqueror). It came from a French word meaning ‘letter’. So when it was first recorded (which was around 1475), it meant ‘to the letter’ or ‘by the letter’. In other words, ‘literally’ began with the meaning that the words were an exact representation of what they said. But that is no longer the case.
Mansions
Thought, Word Watch
As a child, I found the architecture of heaven a little baffling. What puzzled me was John 14:2: “In my Father’s house are many mansions” (KJV). According to the Macquarie Dictionary, a ‘mansion’ is “an imposing or stately residence”. A ‘house’, on the other hand, is a suburban cottage—the sort of place I lived in with my parents and brothers. So how do you fit mansions into a house? Is heaven like Dr Who’s Tardis—bigger on the inside than the outside?
Biography
Thought, Word Watch
Are the four Gospels biographies of Jesus? At one level, this can be answered by New Testament scholars who study the genre of biographical writing in the first century. But there is also a linguistic answer to this question—and linguistically, all four Gospels are most definitely biographies.
Cumber
Life, Word Watch
‘Cumber’ is a rather quaint, old-fashioned word that we don’t hear much any more. We still talk occasionally about something being an ‘encumbrance’, but ‘cumber’ (the shorter verb from which this noun is constructed) has largely disappeared.