Posted in Bible on Dec 29th, 2011
Many people say, “I ‘get’ Paul and John and Peter… And I love reading [insert favorite Christian author]…but Jesus Himself is so…abstract.” Of course there are also many less-thoughtful Christians who “like to think” of Jesus as their best friend from High School, or as Obi Wan Kenobi, or their favorite famous Christians – or [...]
Posted in Bible, random thoughts on Nov 24th, 2010
Why did God like Abel’s offering better than Cain’s in Genesis 4? A couple of people have asked about this, and lots of people have heard messages on this – and it’s easy to walk away with the wrong message… The first part everyone gets: Why did God like Abel’s offering better? Because Abel’s offering [...]
Posted in Bible on Jun 12th, 2010
There were two common approaches to culture in the early church. The traditionalists saw cultural values as absolute: What’s wrong in our culture is always wrong. So if it’s wrong in our (Middle Eastern) culture for women to show their long hair in public, then it’s wrong everywhere! This is still the idea behind Islamic [...]
Posted in Bible on Apr 6th, 2010
So what was the cross about?Many ancient civilizations did similar things: the most common was to impale convicted criminals in public places. European civilizations publicly beheaded or disemboweled or hanged criminals. As barbaric as it sounds, it was useful for these societies… Imagine if rapists and pedophiles and murderers today were publicly crucified and to die [...]
Posted in Bible on May 27th, 2009
So this is the title of a mini-series we’re doing on Sundays this summer, “How to Live Like a King” looking at the life of King David. If you’re reading along you should know in advance that David, along with all the people in the Bible (and the world) are flawed characters. He’s not supposed [...]
Posted in Bible on Mar 31st, 2009
What does a Door, a Shepherd (and a Birkin) have in common? Well you’ll have to listen to the mp3 to find out… The point of sermons is to bring out and explain the Bible passage. So if you like, take a look at John 10:1-18 and then if you’re still curious, you can download [...]
Posted in Bible on Mar 24th, 2009
You might notice that people in the Bible seemed to read the “Law” of God a little differently than we might be inclined to. King David said, “O how I LOVE your Law, I can meditate on it all day!” He saw a beauty in the Law. Jesus talked about how the Law could never [...]
Posted in Bible on Mar 10th, 2009
The hard part about recognizing Jesus as the God of the Old Testament (in human form) is there are two variables and three ways to go wrong. So a person can have a wrong idea of what “Jesus” is and a wrong idea of the OT “God” or have a right idea of Jesus and [...]
Posted in Bible on Mar 4th, 2009
Most people (in the U.S.) don’t “get” the Old Testament. Touchy feely types dislike the violence and anger that they see in the stories; rational scientific types dislike narratives because they don’t present propositional truth (like New Testament letters such as Romans) neither do they present hard scientific data. But the trick to reading anything [...]