Psalm 103 gives us a sobering contrast between the life of man and the love of God. One is extremely fragile and short-lived, the other is eternal and unchanging: “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is […]
The way we think about it, careers, businesses and sports teams go from “strength to strength.” And usually they go from “strength to strength” because of hard work and perseverence. But in Psalm 84 both those assumptions are challenged. First of all, it is God’s people who go from “strength to strength.” (Psalm 84:7) Now […]
Your days are numbered. That is a sobering thought. You have a finite number of heart-beats left. When you’ve reached your allotted tally there will be no more. To put it starkly, we are in the queue for the crematorium. It may be a long queue, but it’s getting shorter all the time. Queen Elizabeth […]
It’s a euphemism for death, but these days we rarely talk of people “biting the dust” – not in a final sense anyway. We might say that a plan or project has bitten the dust. But describing a person’s death as biting the dust seems the preserve of tough-talking cowboys. The exact wording – bite […]
When his son Absalom briefly usurped his throne, David withdrew from Jerusalem. He crossed the Kidron valley, ascended the Mount of Olives and escaped to safety. “And all the country wept with a loud voice, and all the people passed over: the king also himself passed over the brook Kidron, and all the people passed […]
In between the Psalm of the cross (Psalm 22) and the Psalm of Christ’s ascension back to heaven (Psalm 24) we have the 23rd Psalm – a Psalm of resurrection. “1The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. 2He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. […]
The beginning of Solomon’s reign was far more illustrious than its end. As with David his father, his downfall was a matter of the heart. He should have been a man after the LORD’s heart. And as christ he should surely have demonstrated faithful love for his bride, “But king Solomon loved many strange women” […]
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 […]
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 […]
The story is told of a wealthy man’s funeral at which “Guide me O thou great Jehovah” was the opening hymn. It may have been a typo or it may have been requested as the deceased’s last laugh, but the final verse read as follows: “When I tread the verge of Jordan Bid my anxious […]
