We love to tell jokes about stupid politicians. Try this one on for size: The President’s aide briefs him about international affairs: “‘Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed.” “Please no! How terrible!” exclaims the President, aghast. His staff are amazed at such emotion. He continues: “Tell me again, how many is a brazillion?” You might […]
“Cor,” they might say in some regional accent or other, “It would take the wisdom of Solomon to sort that lot out!” Solomon was the son of David and as such there must have been high hopes for him. It was prophesied that the seed of David would build the house of God and sit […]
Call it entropy, call it decay, call it “the ravages of time” or “sands through the hour glass” – “the way of all the earth” is not upward! We are perishing. That’s the bible word – repeated over a hundred times in the King James Bible. Like milk on a hot day. Like the rubber […]
“Your faith was strong, but you needed proof, You saw her bathing on the roof Her beauty and the moonlight over-threw you.” (Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah) David was famously a man after the LORD’s heart. He was the second King, succeeding where Israel’s first King, Saul, had failed. He was messiah – christ – an anointed king. […]
Any time a little guy takes on a big corporation it’s called ‘a David and Goliath story.’ Any time a 2nd division football club beats a Premiere League team it’s called ‘Giant Killing.’ Everyone thinks they know what David and Goliath is about. It’s about the underdog gritting their teeth and pulling off a surprising […]
“You’re a man after my own heart” says one country music fan to another. “You’re a woman after my own heart” says the man to his new girlfriend as she serves him his favourite dessert. These are common ways that we use the phrase today. But they are subtly different from each other. In the […]
This blog highlights the impact of the King James Bible on English. Yet this phrase shows that many times the influence went the other way. It was the culture that shaped the translation of this verse. It comes in 1 Samuel after the people had asked for a king (1 Samuel 8:5-9). There had been […]
Here’s two quick questions for a Monday morning: What’s the meaning of life? And what’s the message of the bible? You might think that those are impossibly difficult questions. Surely they can’t be answered with any final clarity or certainty. Not in a blog post anyway. Well I think they can be answered, not just […]
After the brutality of Judges, Ruth is often seen as a nice little love story. A rom com to take our minds off all the raping and genocide! But if we think like that perhaps we need to rehabilitate our view of romantic comedy. The story of Scripture is most certainly a romance – the […]
George Carlin once observed a universal rule of the road: every driver slower than you is an idiot. And every driver faster is a maniac. You on the other hand… You are the golden mean. And you are, because you say you are. And who would dare contradict. We all naturally “do what is right […]
