Welcome to my website. My goal is to help you & me grow in our ability to understand, love & live the Bible. On this site you can find training help, resources for your church, and inspiration for engaging the Scriptures. Enjoy!
The gospels stand at the very heart of God’s Story, and how we read them really matters for our Christian life, for our grasp of our place in the Kingdom of God, and for our understanding of the “gospel” as reflected in those gospels.
Let me be honest. At this stage of life, I sometimes struggle with fear. That gut-wrenching, cloud of dread that descends in the dead of night, shooting “what ifs” at my mind and heart. I can fear for my wife, my kids, myself. I am tempted to be afraid about finances, or illness, or the future. I fear incompetence, or making mistakes, or insignificance. Do you know what I mean?
. . . the Old Testament prophets are as fresh and relevant as this morning’s blog roll; if we will but hear them, they speak powerfully to our current events.
So what might they say to us at this very interesting time in world history, especially during this fractious election season? Here are 4 thoughts (with 4 guidelines for reading the prophets explained along the way).
Let's be honest. Certain parts of the Old Testament can seem just plain weird, "recurringly odd and unaccommodating," as Mark Coleridge puts it. And no part of the Old Testament seems more foreign than those sections that detail God's laws for Israel.
In a post last week, I mentioned a bit of “cultural background” behind the story of David and Goliath, noting that David’s sling was not child’s toy but rather a serious weapon. I wrote that sling stones could be 3+ inches in diameter, the size of a peach or even a baseball, and could travel over 100 miles per hour—serious weapon indeed. Through the years I have found that understanding aspects of cultural background can shed great light on passages in the Bible.
The question is, how can we get at reliable information on the cultural background behind Scripture? Let me mention three categories of “power tools” to consider for your Bible reading and study.
