One way to use Pascal’s Wager (the way I use it here) is to have four quadrants — what happens if you believe and God exists, what happens if you believe and He doesn’t exist, what happens if you don’t believe and He does exist, and what happens if you don’t believe and He doesn’t … [Read more…]
Let’s cut to the chase: In this collection of hundreds of mostly short, fairly pithy sayings, there is no doubt about the best one. It’s number 43 in book XIV: “Yuan Jang sat waiting with his legs spread wide. The Master said, ‘To be neither modest nor deferential when young, to have passed on nothing … [Read more…]
The prophet Isaiah was considered “the greatest Old Testament prophet,” says my NIV study Bible, and he’s quoted “at least 50 times in the New Testament.” Isaiah was a prophet under five kings, and he talked about both the northern kingdom (Israel) and southern kingdom (Judah), while the other major prophets are predicting the fall of … [Read more…]
Moses is the central figure — besides God, of course — in the the four books of the Pentateuch following Genesis. And those four books have two strands: the historical narrative of Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt and to the Promised Land, and the laws given to Moses by God during that time … [Read more…]
I really liked this passage from Kevin J. Vanhoozer’s article, “Letter to an Aspiring Theologian: How To Speak of God Truly,” in the August/September 2018 issue of First Things: … [T]he best way to stay focused on the subject matter of theology is to stay focused on Scripture. John Calvin viewed his Institutes as help … [Read more…]
In one of our church’s weekly “small group” meetings, we recently discussed Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well, John 4:1-42. It occurred to me that this might be the first non-Jewish convert. My NIV study Bible has a table that puts all four Gospels in single chronological order, and that seems to … [Read more…]
As I noted elsewhere, these are the two post-Moses/pre-monarchical history books, and so it makes some sense to consider them together. What’s more, I think that together they address an important question, namely how Israel would and should deal with the non-Israelites in the Promised Land, and considering them together helps illuminate that matter. Joshua … [Read more…]
Overview I suspect that there are many who, like me, find daunting the twelve books that stretch from Joshua to Esther, between the Pentateuch and the Wisdom books. And no wonder: They cover more or less sequentially a thousand years of Jewish history, from about 1400 B.C. to about 400 B.C. So perhaps an overview of … [Read more…]
Overview David’s reign as king of Israel is recounted in II Samuel and I Chronicles chapters 10-19 (there is a fair amount of duplication between the two books). David’s life before he becomes king is found in I Samuel chapters 16-31, where it is very much intertwined with Saul’s. And David continues to have a … [Read more…]
In this post I’ll be writing about I Chronicles chapters 1-10 and I Samuel. But, despite the title to this post, these texts do not correspond exactly to Saul’s biography, for a couple of reasons. First, once David is introduced in I Samuel chapter 16, his story and Saul’s are intertwined until Saul’s death in … [Read more…]