The Book of Psalms has been called the Hymn Book of the Church. Here we have 150 songs that take in the whole gamut of human experience. There are songs of love and hate, of joy and sorrow, of deep intimacy and of profound disillusionment with God. We love the Psalms because we can find […]
From the very first verse of the book, Job is presented as a blameless and upright man. The LORD is proud of Job’s matchless virtue (1:8; 2:3). Job fears God and shuns evil. And even when calamity falls he does not sin by cursing God (1:22; 2:10). Instead, through all his laments and complaints, the […]
Job is a very old book. Many scholars think Job would have been a rough contemporary of Abraham. That’s almost 2000 years before Jesus took flesh. It might well have been the first biblical book to be written down. Yet it appears fairly much in the middle of our bibles. This is because of the […]
Apologies for this one – out of order! No time to write something new today. So here’s one I prepared earlier…. As they all gather around the newborn, they coo and smile and remark “What a gorgeous little nose!” “What soft skin!” “Isn’t she perfect!?” Then uncle Alan butts in. With a frown and a […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
It’s one of those sayings that trip off the tongue. It’s said by a doting father to his son; a protective husband to his wife; perhaps even a musician to their favourite instrument: “You’re the apple of my eye.” We know that it means “my beloved”. But for most of us, we’re not really sure […]
At the end of the 40 years of wilderness wandering the people come to the brink of the promised land. This is the setting for the book of Deuteronomy. Moses will not be going with the people into the land of milk and honey. He is the leader of the old Israel and the bringer […]
“Feelings are feelings, they’re neither right nor wrong, it’s what you do with them that counts.” How often have you heard this kind of sentiment? (And interestingly, it is a sentiment!). You’re probably as likely to hear it in church as anywhere else these days. Even Christians will say we should only put acts of […]
