“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. […]
Ever since Adam, humanity has craved a good king to set the world to rights. Adam was set over creation to rule but dragged it down to death and curse. But from the beginning the Messiah was promised – in Greek it’s the word “Christ.” It just means Spirit-filled King. He would raise this world […]
We can’t credit the Authorized Version with this one. But it is from the bible. And it goes back a lot further than people think. Its origins don’t lie with Mafia bosses, nor even with Judas but with Moses. Here’s how it happened… Moses has finished the last of his Deuteronomy sermons to the Israelites. […]
What is faith? Often people think of faith as a special quality that the religious happen to possess. It’s like some magic elixir. Apparently some people have lots of faith coursing through their veins, others have very little. But how does Jesus think of faith? Well when Jesus wanted to explain faith to a bible […]
What’s the law all about? A supposed expert in the law asked Jesus that very question. Jesus boiled it all down to ‘love’. He quoted from two places in the Old Testament: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” (Deuteronomy 6:5) […]
We don’t like hearing about “scapegoating”. It sounds like bullying. A group picks on a weakling, identifies all its maladies with this one individual and punishes the scapegoat for the sins of the community. That’s horrible. But it’s horrible because of the power relationship. The strong sacrifice the weak. The original scapegoat was modelling something […]
Can the young girl atone for her mistake? Can the sportsman atone for his blunder? Can the husband atone for his callous remark? If we answer ‘yes’ it’s usually an answer about the guilty party’s need to make amends. But the bible has a fresh angle on the atonement question. In fact the bible gave […]
If a ploughman’s ox refuses to turn the way he wants, he calls the obstinate beast “stiff-necked.” And nine times in the bible, that’s what the LORD calls His people. The first occasion is in Exodus 32: “I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people: Now therefore let me alone, that […]
It’s right there in the midst of the ten words from Mount Sinai: “I the LORD thy God am a jealous God” (Exodus 20:5) What a horrible idea, we might think, a jealous God!? What kind of a God gets jealous? Well Mount Sinai is no unguarded moment of candour. The LORD is very open […]
“I never knew Christ was all I needed until Christ was all I had.” I heard this saying from an African Bishop recently. But Christians the world over can attest to the truth of it. It’s the very essence of what God was teaching the Israelites in the wilderness. And it’s exactly what Christians are […]
