Familiar Bible Quotes

You know, we can quote the written Word all day to our friends, but nothing will touch them like our own hunger and love for the Word himself. It is not dutiful love that attracts but love freely lavished from a heart familiar with the gardens of heaven.

When you’re in love with two people, always choose the second. The fact that you are constantly thinking of the second person makes it obvious that the first will never fulfill you, unless the second person did not fulfill you either. At this point, you have to choose the third person because God is getting a little tired of your inattention and indecisiveness, and is planning on sending a fourth person into your life just to slap you around with the bible for not entering the promised land.

And to belove God, to center in God, has an additional crucial meaning. To belove God means to love what God loves. What does God love? The answer is in one of the most familiar Bible verses, John 3.16: “God so loved the world…

It would be a pity if, in a desire (rightly) to treat the Bible as more than a book, we ended up treating it as less than a book by not permitting it the range and use of language, order, and figures of speech that are (or ought to be) familiar to us from our ordinary experience of conversation and reading.

The study of Scripture I find to be quite like mastering an instrument. No one is so good that they cannot get any better; no one knows so much that they can know no more. A professional can spot an amateur or a lack of practice or experience a mile away. His technicality, his spiritual ear is razor-sharp. He is familiar with the common mistakes, the counter-arguments; and insofar as this, he can clearly distinguish the difference between honest critics of the Faith and mere fools who criticize that which they know nothing.

Capacity is Possibility. Study yourself as you would a masterful piece of machinery, for you are the most wonderful Handiwork that has ever been put together. Each day should find you more familiar with your Abilities and Capacity than the day before.

If the Pentateuch is inspired, the civilization of of our day is a mistake and crime. There should be no political liberty. Heresy should be trodden out beneath the bigot's brutal feet. Husbands should divorce their wives at will, and make the mothers of their children houseless and weeping wanderers. Polygamy ought to be practiced; women should become slaves; we should buy the sons and daughters of the heathen and make them bondmen and bondwomen forever. We should sell our own flesh and blood, and have the right to kill our slaves. Men and women should be stoned to death for laboring on the seventh day. 'Mediums,' such as have familiar spirits, should be burned with fire. Every vestige of mental liberty should be destroyed, and reason's holy torch extinguished in the martyr's blood.

We may wish for answers, but God rarely gives us answers. Instead, God gathers us up into soft, familiar arms and says, "Let me tell you a story.

And you decided that it was nice knowing me? Do you mean knowing me in the biblical sense?” Oh, shit. I flush. “I didn’t think you were familiar with the Bible.” “I went to Sunday school, Anastasia. It taught me a great deal.” “I don’t remember reading about nipple clamps in the Bible. Perhaps you were taught from a modern translation.” His lips arch with a trace of a smile, and my eyes are drawn to his mouth. “Well, I thought I should come and remind you how nice it was knowing me.

priest gave a reading of familiar, possibly overfamiliar Bible texts; it was like listening to a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, where the words formed shapes on the air, but the meaning of the words was absent.

At that time in my personal life, I was coming to grips with the end of the world. The familiar world, anyway. Many of us were. Scientists said it was ending now, philosophers said it had always been ending. Historians said there’d been dark ages before. It all came out in the wash, because eventually, if you were patient, enlightenment arrived and then a wide array of Apple devices. Politicians claimed everything would be fine. Adjustments were being made. Much as our human ingenuity had got us into this fine mess, so would it neatly get us out. Maybe more cars would switch to electric. That was how we could tell it was serious. Because they were obviously lying.

Sometimes, we become so familiar with the primal sacred story of the Bible that we need some fresh takes on it, telling us the same thing in different ways, or giving us some new vantage points to see what was always there, things we'd missed before.

The Bible is the inevitable outcome of God's continuous speech. It is the infallible declaration of His mind for us put into our familiar human words.

The Bible is familiar, life is strange. We bring the two together, to shed light on life.

A man of God has many brothers. He is a wounded soldier - he is familiar with the pain one feels in his heart, as a close and loving brother, when a brother falls victim of evil men or turns to evil desires (the latter sometimes even betrayal). Because of this, too, he is and must be well-acquainted with and trained in the strengths of hope and the gentleness of forgiveness and mercy.

Even the iconoclastic poet William Blake hinted that we should read between the lines.” Langdon was familiar with the verse: BOTH READ THE BIBLE DAY AND NIGHT, BUT THOU READ BLACK WHERE I READ WHITE.

If these laws [in the Bible] belonged to any other ancient culture we would approach them very differently. We need not bother to reject the code of Hammurabi. Presumably it is because Moses is still felt to make some claim on us that this project of discrediting his law is persisted in with such energy. The unscholarly character of the project may derive from the supposed familiarity of the subject.

Do you think so?” Annabel felt dismayed. “Does God cause bad things to happen? Does the Bible say that?” The familiar scowl came over his features. “Sometimes God metes out judgment here on earth instead of waiting until the afterlife.” A low growl came from his throat. He shook his head. “I don’t wish to talk about that.” “Of course not, my lord. Forgive me for my presumption.” He blew out a frustrated breath. “It is my own bitterness … It isn’t your fault. The truth is, the Bible says God ‘has compassion on all He has made,’ wanting all to come to him and be saved. And you may ask me anything you wish. What was your question? Do troubles bring us closer to God? The answer is yes, they do, but we must choose it. Otherwise, our troubles do just the opposite. They push us away from God. ‘Cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you.

If we read the Bible as carefully and as regularly as we read the daily papers, we would be as familiar with and as well informed about God as we are about our favorite player’s batting average during baseball season!

A similar attitude causes some people to spurn the use of commentaries and similar resources in their Bible study, as if their own uninformed first impression is just as good as careful study using reference tools. It is becoming more and more common all the time to hear people say, 'I don't read commentaries and books about the Bible. I limit my study to the Bible itself.' That may sound very pious, but is it? Isn't it actually presumptuous? Are the written legacies of godly men of no value to us? Can someone who ignores study aids understand the Bible just as well as someone who is familiar with the scholarship of other godly teachers and pastors?

In the story, the eunuch was riding along the desert road in his chariot reading Isaiah, and he was returning from Jerusalem having gone there to worship. But I started to wonder if he was also familiar with Deuteronomy, specifically 23:1, which says, No one whose testicles are cut off or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord.” (Why John 3:16 is the most popular verse in the Bible and not Deuteronomy 23:1 is beyond me.)

The imported discovery, that human nature is too good to be made better by discipline, that children are enticed from the right way by religious instruction, and driven from it by the rod, and kept in thraldom by the conspiracy of priests and legislators, has united not a few in the noble experiment of emancipating the world by the help of an irreligious, ungoverned progeny. The indolent have rejoiced in the discovery that our fathers were fools and bigots, and have cheerfully let loose their children to help on the glorious work; while thousands of families, having heard from their teachers, or believing, in spite of them, that morality will suffice both for earth and heaven, and not doubting that morality will flourish without religion, have either not reared the family altar, or have put out the sacred fire, and laid aside together the rod and the Bible, as superfluous auxiliaries in the education of children. From the school, too, with pious regard for its sacred honors, the Bible, by some, has been withdrawn, lest, by a too familiar knowledge of its contents, children should learn to despise it; as if ignorance were the mother of devotion, and the efficacy of laws depended upon their not being understood.

Still, as the Mass went on, things seemed more normal; there were Bible readings, quite familiar, and then the accustomed descent into the vaguely pleasant boredom of a sermon, in which the inevitable Christmas annunciations of “peace,” “goodwill,” and “love” rose to the surface of his mind, tranquil as white lilies floating on a pond of words.

What I want to show is that because of the very nature of the historical disciplines, historians cannot show whether or not miracles ever happened. Anyone who disagrees with me—who thinks historians can demonstrate that miracles happen—needs to be even-handed about it, across the board. In Jesus’ day there were lots of people who allegedly performed miracles. There were Jewish holy men such as Hanina ben Dosa and Honi the circle drawer. There were pagan holy men such as Apollonius of Tyana, a philosopher who could allegedly heal the sick, cast out demons, and raise the dead. He was allegedly supernaturally born and at the end of his life he allegedly ascended to heaven. Sound familiar? There were pagan demigods, such as Hercules, who could also bring back the dead. Anyone who is willing to believe in the miracles of Jesus needs to concede the possibility of other people performing miracles, in Jesus’ day and in all eras down to the present day and in other religions such as Islam and indigenous religions of Africa and Asia.

For it is not an enemy who taunts me—         then I could bear it;     it is not an adversary who  t deals insolently with me—         then I could hide from him. 13     u But it is you, a man, my equal,         my companion, my familiar friend. 14    We used to take sweet counsel together;         within God’s house we walked in  v the throng.

The similarities with Christianity and Judaism later became a sensitive topic, which was partly dealt with by the dogma that Muammad was illiterate. This insulated him from claims that he was familiar with the teachings of the Torah and the Bible – despite near-contemporaries commenting that he was ‘learned’, and knew both the Old and New Testament.

Familiarity with the Word of God is more than memorizing scriptures. The more time we spend reading the Bible, the more it permeates our beings and clarifies the voices within us. Many confuse things and divide the world of our existence into the interior and the exterior. These are the people who would say that the spirit and the soul are the same thing, but that is not true. Like the Trinity—God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—each of us is also three parts— soul, body, and spirit. How can you tell the difference between the thoughts of your own soul, which come from your mind, will, or emotions; your physical desires, hungers, and urges; and the communications of your spirit, which have ears in the spiritual realm? When a thought comes to mind, where is it coming from— God, evil, your physical urges, or your own psyche? The answer to discerning the difference between these “voices in our heads” is learned through practice and repetition, with the Bible as your personal trainer. It is the mirror into which we look and learn who we truly are. (See James 1:23–25.)

This God disrupts the familiarity of the story by interrupting the sacrifice. Picture an early audience gasping. What? This God stopped the sacrifice? The gods don’t do that! Second, the God in this story provides. Worship and sacrifice was about you giving to the gods. This story is about this God giving to Abraham. A God who does the giving? A God who does the providing?

It’s fine to enjoy familiar surroundings and desire familiar comforts—as long as we understand there may be times when we can’t have them. Sometimes we’re called to larger duties—like a soldier leaving home to go off to war. Second thoughts at such times are natural—but the Bible tells us, “You therefore must endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ” (2 Timothy 2:3 NKJV).

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. I make no claims to have a life in Christ, or with Christ—and certainly not for Christ, which I’ve heard some zealots claim. I’m not very sophisticated in my knowledge of the Old Testament, and I’ve not read the New Testament since my Sunday school days, except for those passages that I hear read aloud to me when I go to church. I’m somewhat more familiar with the passages from the Bible that appear in The Book of Common Prayer; I read my prayer book often, and my Bible only on holy days—the prayer book is so much more orderly. I’ve

Born in the East, and clothed in Oriental form and imagery, the Bible walks the ways of all the world with familiar feet, and enters land after land to find its own everywhere. It has learned to speak in hundreds of languages to the heart of man. It comes into the palace to tell the monarch that he is the servant of the Most High, and into the cottage to assure the peasant that he is the son of God. Children listen to its stories with wonder and delight, and wisemen ponder them as parables of life. It has a word of peace for the time of peril, the hour of darkness. Its oracles are repeated in the assembly of the people, and its counsels whispered in the ear of the lonely. The wise and the proud tremble at its warnings, but to the wounded and penitent it has a mother's voice. The wilderness and the solitary place have been made glad by it, and the fire on the hearth has lighted the reading of its well-worn pages. It has woven itself into our deepest affections, and colored our dearest dreams; so that love and friendship, sympathy and devotion, memory and hope, put on the beautiful garments of its treasured speech, breathing of frankincense and myrrh. Above the cradle and beside the grave its great words come to us uncalled. They fill our prayers with power larger than we know, and the beauty of them lingers in our ear long after the sermons which they have adorned have been forgotten. They return to us swiftly and quietly, like birds flying from far away. They surprise us with new meanings, like springs of water breaking forth from the mountain beside a long-forgotten path. They grow richer, as pearls do when they are worn near the heart. No man is poor or desolate who has this treasure for his own. When the landscape darkens and the trembling pilgrim comes to the valley named the shadow, he is not afraid to enter; he takes the rod and staff of Scripture in his hand; he says to friend and comrade, "Good-by, we shall meet again"; and comforted by that support, he goes toward the lonely pass as one who climbs through darkness into light.

In the biblical world, for example, “knowing” is also a whole-body experience. In the Bible, “knowing” can involve studying, having sex with, showing concern for, entering into a covenant with, being familiar with, understanding the reputation of. God is described as the perfect knower, the seer of all things, the one who sees not only with the objective eye of a scientist but with the grace-filled eye of perfect love.

Boehme makes such leaps, such contradictions, such confusions of thought. It is as though he wishes to vault directly into heaven upon the strength of his logic, but his logic is deeply impaired." She reached across the table for a book and flung it open. "In this chapter here, for instance, he is trying to find keys to God's secrets hidden inside the plants of the Bible- but what are we to make of it, when his information is simply incorrect? He spends a full chapter interpreting 'the lilies of the field' as mentioned in the book of Matthew, dissecting every letter of the word 'lilies,' looking for revelation within the syllables... but Ambrose, 'the lilies of the field' itself is a mistranslation. It would not have 'been' lilies that Christ discussed in his Sermon on the Mount. There are only two varieties of lily native to Palestine, and both are exceedingly rare. They would not have flowered in such abundance as to have ever filled a meadow. They would not have been familiar enough to the common man. Christ, tailoring his lesson to the widest possible audience, would more likely have referred to a ubiquitous flower, in order that his listeners would comprehend his metaphor. For that reason, it is exceedingly probable that Christ was talking about the anemones of the field- probably 'Anemone coronaria'- though we cannot be certain...

The reader who is familiar with the First Edition will note, in the Second Edition, a very slight and subtle shift of focus, a change of emphasis, in the direction of Pragmatism. Some of the later Chapters, if read uncritically, could even lead to a sort of optimism regarding Man’s ultimate ability to take charge of Systems—those created by his own hand as well as those originated by Mother Nature. The reader is hereby warned that any such optimism is the reader’s own responsibility.

Questions are a child’s way of expressing love and trust. They are a child’s way of starting a conversation. So instead of simply insisting over and over again that the object of my son’s attention is, in fact, an elephant, I might tell him about how, in India, elephants are symbols of good luck, or about how some say elephants have the best memories of all the animals. I might tell him about the time I saw an elephant spin a basketball on the tip of his trunk, or about how once there was an elephant named Horton who heard a Who. I might tell him that once upon a time, there was an elephant and four blind men; each man felt a different part of the elephant’s body: the ears, the tail, the side, and the tusk . . . Sometimes, as I’m doing this, my son will crawl into my lap, put his head on my chest, and just listen to the story, his questions quieted, his body relaxed. And I realize this is all he wanted to begin with—to be near me, to hear the familiar cadence of my voice, to know he’s safe and not alone.

From The Self-Mover's Bible; The Longest Distance between Two Points is a Shortcut Most of us look at a map and instinctively plot a trip based on the shortest distance or as the crow flies. The difference here is that you aren’t flying a crow you’re driving a truck. Unless you are personally familiar with the alternative route your quickest and safest route is the Interstate. 500 miles of smooth sailing on a six-lane highway takes less time to drive than 400 miles on winding two-lane country roads. The Interstate was made for trucks.

Let the systematic theologian spell it out. Let the artists throw out thoughts and slants, maybe even slants no one else has thought of. They should give another view of something familiar to help us learn more about it. They should deal with love, life, good, evil, God, the world and faith. Many of the biblical writers were poets more than they were theologians. Poets and prophets ranted and raved, and storytellers wrote great yarns that all had different slants on God and life and faith. Perhaps the poet's absence from the Church for many centuries has left it deprived of much insight.

Many modern readers assume teachings about wives submitting to their husbands appear exclusively in the pages of Scripture and thus reflect uniquely “biblical” views about women’s roles in the home. But to the people who first heard these letters read aloud in their churches, the words of Peter and Paul would have struck them as both familiar and strange, a sort of Christian remix on familiar Greco-Roman philosophy that positioned the male head of house as the rightful ruler over his subordinate wives, children, and slaves. By instructing men to love their wives and respect their slaves, and by telling everyone to “submit to one another” with Jesus as the ultimate head of house, the apostles offer correctives to cultural norms without upending them. They challenge new believers to reconsider their relationships with one another now that, in Christ, “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female” (Galatians 3:28). The plot thickens when we pay attention to some of the recurring characters in the Epistles and see a progression toward more freedom and autonomy for slaves like Onesimus and women like Nympha, Priscilla, Junia, and Lydia.

In some respects it was quite simple for Jewish thinkers who were intimately familiar with their scriptures to connect them with some of these Stoic and Platonic philosophical ideas. In the Hebrew Bible, God creates all things by speaking a “word”: “And God said, Let there be light. And there was light.” Creation happened by means of God uttering his Logos. The Logos comes from God, and since it is God’s Logos, in a sense it is God. But once he emits it, it stands apart from God as a distinct entity. This entity was sometimes thought of as a person distinct from God. The Logos came to be seen in some Jewish circles as a hypostasis.

..moments of transport, and of comfort, and of a bracing vastness of possibility. That was all there for me sometimes when I plunged my mind into the Bible’s puzzles; and it was always there in the music of church. I wouldn’t have said it this way then. But I would feel all the cells in my body as I sang hymns that connected my little life with the grandeur of the cosmos, the Christian drama across space and time. This was my earliest experience of breath and body, mind and spirit soaring together, alive to both mystery and reality, in kinship with others both familiar and unknown. That’s one way I’d define the feeling of faith now.

The story is like the other stories about gods demanding acts of devotion and obedience. Gods who are never satisfied. The first audience for this story would have heard this before—it would have been familiar. But then it’s not. The story takes a shocking turn that comes out of nowhere. This God disrupts the familiarity of the story by interrupting the sacrifice. Picture an early audience gasping. What? This God stopped the sacrifice? The gods don’t do that! Second, the God in this story provides. Worship and sacrifice was about you giving to the gods. This story is about this God giving to Abraham. A God who does the giving? A God who does the providing?

Although the American Standard Version (1901) had used “Jehovah” to render the tetragrammaton (the sound of y being represented by j and the sound of w by v, as in Latin), for two reasons the Committees that produced the RSV and the NRSV returned to the more familiar usage of the King James Version. (1) The word “Jehovah” does not accurately represent any form of the divine name ever used in Hebrew. (2) The use of any proper name for the one and only God, as though there were other gods from whom the true God had to be distinguished, began to be discontinued in Judaism before the Christian era and is inappropriate for the universal faith of the Christian church.

Humanae Vitae is important for yet another reason. Just as the National Socialists used nationalism and racism, among other levers, to overthrow Christian morality, in modern, liberal society the levers have been sexual liberation and consumerism. These two “freedoms to choose” have replaced objective morality with the dogma of whatever the customer, or the individual, wants is right. In opposing this attitude, the Church is often accused of being “opposed to sex.” Such an accusation reveals the incredible poverty of modern thought. Far from being opposed to sex, the Church affirms that sex is a definable thing: God made them man and woman. The Church affirms the twofold “unitive” and “procreative” purpose and virtue inherent in conjugal activity and cherishes the result: the bonding of man and wife and their commitment to raise their children. And as anyone remotely familiar with the paintings and sculptures in the Vatican can affirm, the Church celebrates the human body, celebrates the reality of sex and the erotic (in the same spirit as the Bible's Song of Solomon), and indeed celebrates marriage as a sacrament. It is modern, liberal secularists who are “opposed to sex” in that they attempt to blur the distinctions between male and female, ignore the objective meaning of sexual activity, and who think that its natural result should be freely and inconsequentially aborted if it cannot otherwise be prevented.

The language of the Bible regarding principalities – the ruling authorities, the angelic powers, the demons, and the like – sounds, I suppose, strange in modern society, but these words in fact refer to familiar realities in contemporary life. The principalities refer to those entities in creation which nowadays are called institutions, ideologies, and images. Thus a nation is a principality. Or the Communist ideology is a principality. Or the public image of a human being, say a movie star or a politician, is a principality. The image or legend of Marilyn Monroe or Franklin Roosevelt is a reality, distinguishable from the person bearing the same name, which survives and has its own existence apart from the existence of the person.

I do blame myself,” said Miss de Vine, less to him than to herself. “Most bitterly. Not for my original action, which was unavoidable, but for the sequel. Nothing you can say to me could make me feel more responsible than I do already.” “I can have nothing to say,” said he. “Like you and every member of this Common Room, I admit the principle and the consequences must follow.” “That won’t do,” said the Fellow, bluntly. “One ought to take some thought for other people. Miss Lydgate would have done what I did in the first place; but she would have made it her business to see what became of that unhappy man and his wife.” “Miss Lydgate is a very great and a very rare person. But she could not prevent other people from suffering for her principles. That seems to be what principles are for, somehow …I don’t claim, you know,” he added, with something of his familiar diffidence, “to be a Christian or anything of that kind. But there’s one thing in the Bible that seems to me to be a mere statement of brutal fact—I mean, about bringing not peace but a sword.” Miss

In the beginning, according to the Doctrine of Hermopolis, there was water, darkness, formlessness, and hidden powers. This is how the ancients understood the primeval Chaos into which the ordered universe was inserted through the actions of the gods. The Hebrew Book of Genesis is merely a variant of pagan Egyptian mythology. The Hebrew God is just Amun, Atum, Ptah or Thoth by another name. He collects all of the powers of the Ogdoad or Ennead into himself, but all the same factors and ingredients are still at play, and there is absolutely no sign of science, mathematics or philosophy. Do you see that the Bible’s Creation myth is of a very familiar nature? If the Book of Genesis were taught alongside Egyptian Creation myths, which long preceded it and set the ground for it, all the believers in the Bible would see that it’s just another story, another myth, and that Yahweh, the Hebrew God is no more real than any of the Egyptian deities. If Yahweh goes, so does his “son” – Jesus Christ! Christianity is just a myth cobbled together from Egyptian, Greek and Persian sources. It’s amazing how Abrahamists are unable to see that their entire religion is in fact derived from the pagan Egyptians.

How do we evaluate the claims of the biblical story? We begin by recognizing that the Bible is not objective history, nor was it ever intended to be. The idea, and much more so the practice, of “objective history” was unavailable to its authors. To state it baldly, the Bible is not history: it is the Bible. The biblical narrative breaks most of the fundamental rules of modern history writing. We find in the biblical story, presented as fact, aspects that no historian could know: private and unverifiable elements, including events that occurred behind closed doors; dialogues; and even internal monologues. We find characterizations of the various individuals in the story that are far from unbiased. And, perhaps most notably, we find the introduction of divine intervention as an explanation for the course of events. We can hardly blame the biblical author for failing to follow conventions of history writing that developed thousands of years after he wrote his narrative. At the same time, however, we cannot read the biblical text as if it were a piece of modern history writing. It may be describing the past, and in that sense it is historical in nature, but it describes the past using conventions more familiar to us from the genre of historical fiction.

The Bible isn’t a cookbook—deviate from the recipe and the soufflé falls flat. It’s not an owner’s manual—with detailed and complicated step-by-step instructions for using your brand-new all-in-one photocopier/FAX machine/scanner/microwave/DVR/home security system. It’s not a legal contract—make sure you read the fine print and follow every word or get ready to be cast into the dungeon. It’s not a manual of assembly—leave out a few bolts and the entire jungle gym collapses on your three-year-old. When we open the Bible and read it, we are eavesdropping on an ancient spiritual journey. That journey was recorded over a thousand-year span of time, by different writers, with different personalities, at different times, under different circumstances, and for different reasons. In the Bible, we read of encounters with God by ancient peoples, in their times and places, asking their questions, and expressed in language and ideas familiar to them. Those encounters with God were, I believe, genuine, authentic, and real. But they were also ancient—and that explains why the Bible behaves the way it does. This kind of Bible—the Bible we have—just doesn’t work well as a point-by-point exhaustive and timelessly binding list of instructions about God and the life of faith.

Jesus is the true and better Adam who passed the test in the garden, a much more difficult garden, and whose obedience is imputed to us. Jesus is the true and better Abel who, though innocently slain, has blood now that cries out, not for our condemnation, but for acquittal. Jesus is the true and better Abraham who answered the call of God to leave all the comfortable and familiar and go out into the void not knowing wither he went to create a new people of God. Jesus is the true and better Jacob who wrestled and took the blow of justice we deserved, so we, like Jacob, only receive the wounds of grace to wake us up and discipline us. Jesus is the true and better Joseph who, at the right hand of the king, forgives those who betrayed and sold him and uses his new power to save them. Jesus is the true and better Moses who stands in the gap between the people and the Lord and who mediates a new covenant. Jesus is the true and better Job, the truly innocent sufferer, who then intercedes for and saves his stupid friends. Jesus is the true and better David whose victory becomes his people’s victory, though they never lifted a stone to accomplish it themselves. Jesus is the true and better Esther who didn’t just risk leaving an earthly palace but lost the ultimate and heavenly one, who didn’t just risk his life, but gave his life to save his people. Jesus is the true and better Jonah who was cast out into the storm so that we could be brought in. The Bible’s really not about you—it’s about him.

Do you know what a humanist is? My parents and grandparents were humanists, what used to be called Free Thinkers. So as a humanist I am honoring my ancestors, which the Bible says is a good thing to do. We humanists try to behave as decently, fairly, and as honorably as we can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. My brother and sister didn't think there was one, my parents and grandparents didn't think there was one. It was enough that they were alive. We humanists serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community. I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, "Isaac is up in heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now." That's my favorite joke. How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists do, "If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?" But if Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I'd just as soon be a rattlesnake.

this I say,—we must never forget that all the education a man's head can receive, will not save his soul from hell, unless he knows the truths of the Bible. A man may have prodigious learning, and yet never be saved. He may be master of half the languages spoken round the globe. He may be acquainted with the highest and deepest things in heaven and earth. He may have read books till he is like a walking cyclopædia. He may be familiar with the stars of heaven,—the birds of the air,—the beasts of the earth, and the fishes of the sea. He may be able, like Solomon, to "speak of trees, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows on the wall, of beasts also, and fowls, and creeping things, and fishes." (1 King iv. 33.) He may be able to discourse of all the secrets of fire, air, earth, and water. And yet, if he dies ignorant of Bible truths, he dies a miserable man! Chemistry never silenced a guilty conscience. Mathematics never healed a broken heart. All the sciences in the world never smoothed down a dying pillow. No earthly philosophy ever supplied hope in death. No natural theology ever gave peace in the prospect of meeting a holy God. All these things are of the earth, earthy, and can never raise a man above the earth's level. They may enable a man to strut and fret his little season here below with a more dignified gait than his fellow-mortals, but they can never give him wings, and enable him to soar towards heaven. He that has the largest share of them, will find at length that without Bible knowledge he has got no lasting possession. Death will make an end of all his attainments, and after death they will do him no good at all. A man may be a very ignorant man, and yet be saved. He may be unable to read a word, or write a letter. He may know nothing of geography beyond the bounds of his own parish, and be utterly unable to say which is nearest to England, Paris or New York. He may know nothing of arithmetic, and not see any difference between a million and a thousand. He may know nothing of history, not even of his own land, and be quite ignorant whether his country owes most to Semiramis, Boadicea, or Queen Elizabeth. He may know nothing of the affairs of his own times, and be incapable of telling you whether the Chancellor of the Exchequer, or the Commander-in-Chief, or the Archbishop of Canterbury is managing the national finances. He may know nothing of science, and its discoveries,—and whether Julius Cæsar won his victories with gunpowder, or the apostles had a printing press, or the sun goes round the earth, may be matters about which he has not an idea. And yet if that very man has heard Bible truth with his ears, and believed it with his heart, he knows enough to save his soul. He will be found at last with Lazarus in Abraham's bosom, while his scientific fellow-creature, who has died unconverted, is lost for ever. There is much talk in these days about science and "useful knowledge." But after all a knowledge of the Bible is the one knowledge that is needful and eternally useful. A man may get to heaven without money, learning, health, or friends,—but without Bible knowledge he will never get there at all. A man may have the mightiest of minds, and a memory stored with all that mighty mind can grasp,—and yet, if he does not know the things of the Bible, he will make shipwreck of his soul for ever. Woe! woe! woe to the man who dies in ignorance of the Bible! This is the Book about which I am addressing the readers of these pages to-day. It is no light matter what you do with such a book. It concerns the life of your soul. I summon you,—I charge you to give an honest answer to my question. What are you doing with the Bible? Do you read it? HOW READEST THOU?

According to Egyptian texts, to eat of this fruit was to eat of the flesh and the fluid of the Goddess, the patroness of sexual pleasure and reproduction. According to the Bible story, the forbidden fruit caused the couple's conscious comprehension of sexuality. Upon eating the fruit, Adam and Eve became aware of the sexual nature of their own bodies, "And they knew that they were naked." So it was that when the male deity found them, they had modestly covered their genitals with aprons of fig leaves. But it was vitally important to the construction of the Levite myth that they did not both decide to eat the forbidden fruit together, which would have been a more logical turn for the tale to take since the fruit symbolised sexual consciousness. No, the priestly scribes make it exceedingly clear that the woman Eve ate of the fruit first - upon the advice and counsel of the serpent. It can hardly have been chance or coincidence that it was a serpent who offerred Eve the advice. For people at that time knew that the serpent was the symbol, perhaps even the instrument, of divine counsel in the religion of the Goddess. It was surely intended in the Paradise myth, as in the Indo-European serpent and dragon myths, that the serpent, as the familiar counsellor of women, be seen as a source of evil and be placed in such a menacing and villainous role that to listen to the prophetesses of the female deity would be to violate the religion of the male deity in the most dangerous manner. {...} We are told that, by eating the fruit first, women possessed sexual consciousness before man and in turn tempted man to partake the forbidden fruit, that is, to join her sinfully in sexual pleasures. This image of Eve as a sexually tempting but god-defying seductress was surely intended as a warning to all Hebrew men to stay away from the sacred women of the temples, for if they succumb to the temptations of these women, they simultaneously accepted the female deity - Her fruit - Her sexuality and, perhaps most important, the resulting matrilineal identity for any children who might be conceived in this manner. It must also, perhaps even more pointedly, have been directed at Hebrew women, cautioning them not to take part in the ancient religion and its sexual customs, as they appear to have continued to do so, despite the warnings and punishments meted out by the Levite priests.

I could not remotely believe any Shepherd was leading me through this dreadful valley, but the familiar words stuffed my mouth like cotton, and it was some relief to know, at least, that one sentence would follow upon another. It was my only way of knowing what to do.

The reality check we need cannot be gained through “listening to our hearts” and telling ourselves who we are. Through God’s Word we gain an eternal perspective through which we can evaluate every heart twinge, relationship, and circumstance. Do you know a timeless, familiar Bible verse that speaks to this? “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Ps. 119:105). What mercy from God that he would give us his illuminating Word and that it is always shining, regardless of whether we perceive it.

The Church is as corrupt as, or more corrupt than, most people. Between the Crusades, the sex scandals over the last few decades, and everything in between, who are they to judge? That’s right: no one. They are far from perfect. Like us. But they keep trying. And they do it in a way that is simple, dependable. Familiar. And that should be worth something to someone who says they are good or are trying to be but who is in actuality bad.

Satan helped Eve shift her focus from all that God had done and given to the one thing he had withheld. And Eve was willing to accept Satan’s viewpoint without checking with God. • Sound familiar? How often is our attention drawn from all that is ours to the little that isn’t? We get that “I’ve got to have it” feeling. Eve was typical of us all, and we consistently show we are her descendants by repeating her mistakes. Our desires, like Eve’s, can be quite easily manipulated. They are not the best basis for actions. We need to keep God central in our decision-making process. His Word, the Bible, is our guidebook in decision making.

Grace. There was that five letter word I had scribbled in my journal and sang about in church. It was a familiar word; a word I had heard preached from pulpits thousands of times, but more like an acquaintance than a dear friend. Grace was a beautiful but vague word adorning the pages of my Bible and the hymn books I grew up with. I knew I was saved by grace, but that didn’t mean I understood the depth of its meaning or how amazing it really was. I didn’t know all the dimensions of grace; the shades of glorious wonder that grace possessed. I didn’t understand the workings of grace, and the strength of grace. But that night, like the first flicker of light in a dark room, grace captivated my attention.

You're familiar with Cinderella, of course? Like Rachel and Jacob--another fairytale." Rachel glared. "The Bible isn't a fairytale." Mr. Schubert pulled his cigarette from his lips, and stared. "Mein Gott, you really are good," he said at last. "I bet you leave the boys sore, as good as you are.

You may be familiar with praying in response to God’s Word, but what does it mean to pray in anticipation of it? What does it look like to approach your Bible prayerfully? It means not rushing into your Bible reading, expecting the pages to magically microwave your cold heart.

AT THAT TIME in my personal life, I was coming to grips with the end of the world. The familiar world, anyway. Many of us were. Scientists said it was ending now, philosophers said it had always been ending. Historians said there’d been dark ages before. It all came out in the wash, because eventually, if you were patient, enlightenment arrived and then a wide array of Apple devices.

Can you hear what I hear?”—now sing to the same tune “Can’s a piece of graaammar…” As grammar, it presumably started as something else, and it did: cunnan in Old English meant “know.” Ben Jonson in The Magnetic Lady has Mistress Polish praise a deceased woman for the fact that “She could the Bible in the holy tongue.” We can’t help at first suspecting a typo—she could what? But could meant, all by itself, “knew.” There was even an old expression “to can by heart” alongside our familiar “know by heart.” Modern English is littered with remnants of that stage: other offshoots of cunnan are cunning and canny, all about having your wits about you. Plus, the past tense of cunnan was a word pronounced “coothe,” from which the couth in uncouth comes: the uncouth person is lacking in know-how, as in the kind that lends one social graces.

Translation is the only means non-Hebrew readers have to access the Scriptures of Israel in their own tongues. Yet the act of translation and principles that govern an individual translation are frequently invisible to many readers, save for expressed preferences for one translation of the Bible over another. Even then, the preference is often based on nonscholarly criteria: what the text sounds like, how familiar it is, how it corresponds to cherished previously held beliefs about what the text ought to say, or even a belief that only one translation of the Bible is authoritative.

Slavery is evil. God did not create it or endorse it. God specified the death penalty for slave traders in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament he clearly said it is sin. The Bible verses on slavery guide us in how to bring better treatment to people caught in a system that was established by humans. • Most of ancient slavery in the time of the Old Testament and New Testament was different from the slavery we are familiar with in modern times. Back then people were bought as servants, the money going to pay a person’s debt. Poverty forced others into servanthood just to stay alive. This slavery, or servanthood,

Slavery is evil. God did not create it or endorse it. God specified the death penalty for slave traders in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament he clearly said it is sin. The Bible verses on slavery guide us in how to bring better treatment to people caught in a system that was established by humans. • Most of ancient slavery in the time of the Old Testament and New Testament was different from the slavery we are familiar with in modern times. Back then people were bought as servants, the money going to pay a person’s debt. Poverty forced others into servanthood just to stay alive. This slavery, or servanthood, was not race based.

Amiably, then, Bea thanked her for her concerns and promised her there was no reason to harbor them. “I feel curiously light, for it was the not knowing that weighed heavily on me. The truth, as they say, has set me free.” Certainly, Aunt Vera was reluctant to quarrel with the Bible, and she nodded briskly at the familiar aphorism.

about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; (Of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. Amish ministers don’t preach with a Bible in hand, nor do they follow an outline. Instead, they memorize a list of familiar Scriptures and quote them throughout their forty minutes of preaching time. Many of these Scriptures are taken from the book of Psalms and various parts of the Old and New Testaments. Along with Matthew 5,

A helpful exercise to revive this tired word is to replace “love” with the concept of attachment as we read these familiar Scriptures. For example, we looked at 1 John 4:11: “Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” We can awaken our senses by replacing love with the idea of a family bond. A paraphrase might be, “Dear friends, since God has joyfully attached himself so firmly to us, we also ought to attach ourselves to each other as family members.” You will awaken and broaden your definition of love in the Bible by doing this exercise as a part of your spiritual practices. When we have an unclear understanding of love, our view of the church becomes distorted.

I believe that much of our religious unbelief is due to a wrong conception of and a wrong feeling for the Scriptures of Truth. A silent God suddenly began to speak in a book and when the book was finished lapsed back into silence again forever. Now we read the book as the record of what God said when He was for a brief time in a speaking mood. With notions like that in our heads how can we believe? The facts are that God is not silent, has never been silent. It is the nature of God to speak. The second Person of the Holy Trinity is called the Word. The Bible is the inevitable outcome of God's continuous speech. It is the infallible declaration of His mind for us put into our familiar human words.

As we are, so is the world to us. The most familiar objects change their aspect with every change of the soul.

God’s process of revelation required that he condescend to us, that he accommodate our humanity, that he express himself in familiar language and metaphors. It should be no surprise then that many of the common elements of the culture of the day were adopted, at times adapted, at times totally converted or transformed, but nevertheless used to accomplish God’s purposes.

Though we recognize distinct cultural differences across time and place, the commonalities warrant our attention. To think about how these ancient commonalities need to be differentiated from our modern ways of thinking, we can use the metaphor of a cultural river, where the currents represent ideas and conventional ways of thinking. Among the currents in our modern cultural context we would find fundamentals such as rights, privacy, freedom, capitalism, consumerism, democracy, individualism, globalism, social media, market economy, scientific naturalism, an expanding universe, empiricism, and natural laws, just to name a few. As familiar as these are to us, such ways of thinking were unknown in the ancient world. Conversely, the ancient cultural river had among their shared ideas currents that are totally foreign to us. Included in the list we would find fundamental concepts such as community identity, the comprehensive and ubiquitous control of the gods, the role of kingship, divination, the centrality of the temple, the mediatory role of images, and the reality of the spirit world and magic. It is not easy for us to grasp their shape or rationale, and we often find their expression in texts impenetrable. In today’s world people may find that they dislike some of the currents in our cultural river and wish to resist them. Such resistance is not easy, but even when we might occasionally succeed, we are still in the cultural river—even though we may be swimming upstream rather than floating comfortably on the currents. This was also true in the ancient world. When we read the Old Testament, we may find reason to believe that the Israelites were supposed to resist some of the currents in their cultural river. Be that as it may (and the nuances are not always easy to work with), they remain in that ancient cultural river. We dare not allow ourselves to think that just because the Israelites believed themselves to be distinctive among their neighbors that they thought in the terms of our cultural river (including the dimensions of our theology). We need to read the Old Testament in the context of its own cultural river. We cannot afford to read instinctively because that only results in reading the text through our own cultural lenses. No one reads the Bible free of cultural bias, but we seek to replace our cultural lenses with theirs. Sometimes the best we can do is recognize that we have cultural lenses and try to take them off even if we cannot reconstruct ancient lenses. When we consider similarities and differences between the ancient cultural river and our own, we must be alert to the dangers of maintaining an elevated view of our own superiority or sophistication as a contrast to the naïveté or primitiveness of others. Identification of differences should not imply ancient inferiority. Our rationality may not be their rationality, but that does not mean that they were irrational. Their ways of thinking should not be thought of as primitive or prehistorical. We seek to understand their texts and culture, not to make value judgments on them.

We may wish for answers, but God rarely give us answers. Instead, God gathers us up into soft, familiar arms and says, “Let me tell you a story.

I want people to fill their minds with passages of Scripture while they are well and strong, that they may have sure help in the day of need. I want them to be diligent in studying their Bibles, and becoming familiar with their contents, in order that the grand old Book may stand by them and talk with them when all earthly friends fail.

Words that once teemed with life nettled her mind, and stories that once captured her imagination triggered her doubts and darkest fears. It was as if the roots of beloved and familiar trees had risen up to trip her on the path. There was no map for a world suddenly rearranged, no incantation to light the road ahead.

God's word feels boring and familiar to us, so we turn to shiny entertainment, putting off eternal things until a more pressing time. The Bible seems too demanding or confusing, so we walk away from it, perpetually discouraged. Its words seem insufficient and sometimes irrelevant, so we look elsewhere to hear from Jesus. We fear falling into a legalistic mindset, so we major on grace and minor on obedience.

I buried my face in my hands, thinking he didn’t have to go downstairs and sit at the dinner table with the ice king next. “If this is healing, I’d rather be sick. I need my ability to shut everyone and everything out, but it’s gone. I can’t cope.” To my surprise, Jameson laughed, then crossed the chamber to join me on the window seat. Looking at Edward, he asked, “Does she know the story about the lame man whom Peter healed?” Edward threw his palms up as if to say my religious training was still a mystery to him and that Jameson should leave me be. “I know it,” I said, not in the mood to hear it recited. Gritting my teeth, I looked toward the door, feeling as trapped as I used to with my former vicar. I couldn’t handle people acting as though everything could be solved with the Bible. “All right, I won’t repeat it, then.” Jameson held up innocent hands. “But have you ever considered how costly and painful that healing was for the man?” I rolled my eyes, unable to hide my antagonism toward receiving a religious lecture. “Yes, how he must have hated being able to walk.” “Oh, I’m certain it was exciting at first. A huge miracle, center of attention, a great testimony, and all that.” Jameson rested one foot on the bench, then laced his fingers about his knee. “But afterwards there’s still the business of living to get to. What do you suppose he did for work the following morning?” I touched my temples, not certain how I’d fallen into this conversation and wondering the quickest way out. “Think about it, Mrs. Auburn. He was lame from birth, which meant he was a beggar by trade. He’d never been trained for any occupation, never been apprenticed. Likely he couldn’t read or write. He had to learn to adjust to a half life to survive. The entire way he viewed the world, structured his life, and adapted, all gone—” Jameson snapped his fingers—“in the blink of an eye.” I said nothing but looked at him. At least he wasn’t telling me what I ought to be feeling or thinking. And like it or not, I was now captivated enough to listen. “Everywhere he went, he likely was stared at. Some probably suspected he’d faked being lame for pity and money. To be healed ended up costing him everything he knew. His entire world was deconstructed, leaving him the hard task of rebuilding it.” Jameson’s voice grew tender as I only stared. “Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? I’ve known full-grown men to collapse under less strain than you’ve endured. You’ve been crippled from birth, too, just in a different sort of way. It hurts to be healed, but would you honestly rather be lame at the gate?

Call me old fashioned, but I always think it's important to read scripture from the Bible. Actually, holding the Bible. I think something is lost when the reader holds a piece of paper, or an iPad. It may be more convenient, but it’s important for people to see a real Bible. Even better, the scripture reader should ask everyone to open their pew Bibles and read along. It helps instill a familiarity with the scriptures, and it's just a good practice to do week after week, year after year.

MESSIAH’S APPEARANCE. [Isa. 53:1–3] Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. HIS SUFFERING FOR OUR SINS. [Isa. 53:4–6] Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. HUMILITY OF MESSIAH’S DEATH. [Isa. 53:7–9] He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. By oppression6 and judgment he was taken away. Yet who of his generation protested? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was punished.7 He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.

January 30 Through and Through Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for you are with me.—Psalm 23:4 The 23rd Psalm is one of the best-known and best-loved passages in the Bible, memorized by millions. We read it and quote it when we seek rest, encouragement, comfort and re-assurance. During a time of special need, I found even deeper meaning as I was reading this familiar passage. I was shocked as verse four (cited above) almost leapt off the page. Look at it again. Mentally underline the word through. The psalmist, David, didn’t write from the valley nor away from the valley. He wrote through the valley. Maybe you’re thinking as I sometimes do, that I would prefer to skip some of the throughs. They can be sad, painful, and challenging. But do you find that these valleys, fires, and waters, are often times of greatest learning, times of deepest understanding? They are affirmations that God is with us. We sense his presence even more keenly. If you are experiencing one of these valleys, rivers, waters or fires can you stop and thank God that He is with you in this difficult time? Take time to read Isaiah43:1-5 to hear God’s words to Israel. Be encouraged as you read when you pass through the waters; rivers; fire. Heavenly Father, how I thank You for Your Word, assuring us that You are with us through our tough times. I ask that You make Your presence very real to each person reading these words.

We will close this chapter with a lengthy quote from Tim Keller about how we should read the Bible and think about Christ even in the Old Testament: Jesus is the true and better Adam who passed the test in the garden and whose obedience is imputed to us. Jesus is the true and better Abel who, though innocently slain, has blood now that cries out, not for our condemnation, but for acquittal. Jesus is the true and better Abraham who answered the call of God to leave all the comfortable and familiar and go out into the void not knowing whither he went to create a new people of God. Jesus is the true and better Isaac who was not just offered up by his father on the mount but was truly sacrificed for us. And when God said to Abraham, “Now I know you love me because you did not withhold your son, your only son whom you love from me,” now we can look at God taking his Son up the mountain and sacrificing him and say, “Now we know that you love us because you did not withhold your Son, your only Son, whom you love from us.” Jesus is the true and better Jacob who wrestled and took the blow of justice we deserved, so we, like Jacob, only receive the wounds of grace to wake us up and discipline us. Jesus is the true and better Joseph who, at the right hand of the king, forgives those who betrayed and sold him and uses his new power to save them. Jesus is the true and better Moses who stands in the gap between the people and the Lord and who mediates a new covenant. Jesus is the true and better Rock of Moses who, struck with the rod of God’s justice, now gives us water in the desert. Jesus is the true and better Job, the truly innocent sufferer, who then intercedes for and saves his stupid friends. Jesus is the true and better David whose victory becomes his people’s victory, though they never lifted a stone to accomplish it themselves. Jesus is the true and better Esther who didn’t just risk leaving an earthly palace but lost the ultimate and heavenly one, who didn’t just risk his life, but gave his life to save his people. Jesus is the true and better Jonah who was cast out into the storm so that we could be brought in. Jesus is the real Rock of Moses, the real Passover Lamb, innocent, perfect, helpless, slain so the angel of death will pass over us. He’s the true temple, the true prophet, the true priest, the true king, the true sacrifice, the true lamb, the true light, the true bread. The Bible’s really not about you—it’s about him.51

...(I)t can be stated that the spread of the ideology connecting Africa and black people in general with the Jews has been spectacular. It arose in the European and Middle Eastern imagination in the early Middle Ages and may be attributed in part to the ignorance of much of the world brought about by the breakdown of communications between the Islamic Middle East and what lay beyond it and Christian Europe. It became an axiomatic feature of medieval thinking about the world. It was used, exploited, and reinvented by colonialism in many distinct places in Africa, where it served missionary and colonial interests. The construction of Jewish and Israelite racial and cultural identities was an innate feature of Western colonialism throughout the world. Jews were constructed everywhere--not only in Africa but in Great Britain. The invention or discovery of Israelites reinforced the idea of Europe by providing Europe with a limitless periphery of known and understood racial others. The re-racialization of the world using the Bible as a road map may be seen as an overreliance on the one ethnography, often the one book, that missionaries were familiar with but also as an attempt to "other" the unknown worlds of Africa and Asia with a known, trusted, and malleable "other" of Europe. This discourse is a potent and immanent aspect of the imagined past and the lived present of a surprising number of black Africans and African Americans, as well as millions of other people.

We have to be careful, however, to distinguish between evidence and artifacts. The testimony of an eyewitness can be properly viewed as evidence, but anything added to the account after the fact should be viewed with caution as a possible artifact (something that exists in the text when it shouldn’t). The Gospels claim to be eyewitness accounts, but you may be surprised to find that there are a few added textual artifacts nestled in with the evidential statements. It appears that scribes, in copying the texts over the years, added lines to the narrative that were not there at the time of the original writing. Let me give you an example. Most of us are familiar with the biblical story in the gospel of John in which Jesus was presented with a woman who had been accused of committing adultery (John 8:1–11). The Jewish men who brought the woman to Jesus wanted her to be stoned, but Jesus refused to condemn her and told the men, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” When the men leave, Jesus tells the woman, “I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more.” This story is one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture. Too bad that it appears to be an artifact. While the story may, in fact, be absolutely true, the earliest copies of John’s gospel recovered over the centuries fail to contain any part of it. The last verse of chapter 7 and the first eleven verses of chapter 8 are missing in the oldest manuscripts available to us. The story doesn’t appear until it is discovered in later copies of John’s gospel, centuries after the life of Jesus on earth. In fact, some ancient biblical manuscripts place it in a different location in John’s gospel. Some ancient copies of the Bible even place it in the gospel of Luke. While there is much about the story that seems consistent with Jesus’s character and teaching, most scholars do not believe it was part of John’s original account. It is a biblical artifact, and it is identified as such in nearly every modern translation of the Bible (where it is typically noted in the margin or bracketed to separate it from the reliable account).

Kingdom In Biblical languages, the term translated into English as “kingdom” usually meant “reign,” “rule,” or “authority.” Jewish people recognized that God reigned as king over the world he created (Ps 22:28; 145:12–13; Da 4:3, 34). Some believed that they affirmed this whenever they recited the Shema, acknowledging that there was just one true God (Dt 6:4). But while Jewish people acknowledged God’s present rule, most looked for God’s unchallenged reign in the age to come (Da 2:44–45; 7:14, 27). Many prayed regularly for God’s future kingdom—for him to reign unopposed, to fulfill his purposes of justice and peace for the world. One familiar prayer that came to be prayed daily was the Kaddish, which in its ancient form began: “Exalted and hallowed be his great name . . . May he cause his kingdom to reign.

By Jesus’ day, many were familiar with Daniel’s prophecy about four kingdoms and believed the fourth and final kingdom to be the current Roman Empire (Da 2:37–43). Daniel prophesied that in the time of that fourth kingdom, God would establish an eternal kingdom, overthrowing the other ones (Da 2:44). This kingdom belonged to a “Son of man,” a human one, whose rule was associated with the deliverance of God’s people and contrasted with the preceding empires that were compared with beasts (Da 7:12–14, 17–18, 21–22). Daniel spoke of these truths as “mysteries” (Da 2:28–29; cf. 2:47). Thus it is not surprising that the Gospels speak of the “secret” or “secrets” of the kingdom (Mt 13:11; Mk 4:11; Lk 8:10).

tn The expression ῾Ωσαννά (hōsanna, literally in Hebrew, “O Lord, save”) in the quotation from Ps 118:25-26 was probably by this time a familiar liturgical expression of praise, on the order of “Hail to the king,” although both the underlying Aramaic and Hebrew expressions meant “O Lord, save us.” In words familiar to every Jew, the author is indicating that at this point every messianic expectation is now at the point of realization. It is clear from the words of the psalm shouted by the crowd that Jesus is being proclaimed as messianic king. See E. Lohse, TDNT 9:682-84. sn Hosanna is an Aramaic expression that literally means, “help, I pray,” or “save, I pray.” By Jesus’ time it had become a strictly liturgical formula of praise, however, and was used as an exclamation of praise to God. 16 sn A quotation from Ps 118:25-26.

Darkness, weeping, and gnashing of teeth. This language in Matthew 25:30 would have been familiar to a Jewish audience. It was used to describe a place of judgment (hell, Gehenna) in literature that had been written in the centuries between the Old and New Testaments. The third steward was not a true member of the kingdom and would suffer the consequences.

Sometimes, reading to my children at night, the perverse thought would come to me that in rehashing for them the same fairy stories, Bible stories, and myths, I was not giving them a gift but rather taking something from them. Night after night i was instructing them in convention. Here are the various forms life can take, I was telling them. And yet i still remembered the time when my older son's mind did not produce known forms or follow familiar patterns, when his urgent strange questions about the world revealed it anew to us. We saw his perspective as a form of brilliance and yet went on educating him in the conventional forms, even while they chafed us.

At family worship let the children take a part. Let all bring their Bibles and each read a verse or two. Then let some familiar hymn be sung, followed by prayer. For this, Christ has given a model. The Lord’s Prayer was not intended to be repeated merely as a form, but it is an illustration of what our prayers should be—simple, earnest, and comprehensive.

The Ninevites apparently did not witness the sign of Jonah in the fish’s belly; they repented instead through his preaching. One Jewish tradition claims that Jonah tried to avoid preaching to Ninevites lest their repentance shame Israel for failing to do likewise (Mekilta Pisha 1.80–82; cf. Jnh 3:10–4:2); if any of Jesus’ hearers were familiar with this tradition, it would make Jesus’ comparison here all the more graphic.

Karl opened his eyes wider, and Wells questioned: “Why, you don’t suppose the Bible will be taken to Heaven, do you?” Mr. Keith laughed a little. “Well, as to that, I don’t know as it would be a very interesting book in Heaven. We shall probably not care much more about it than we would for a good guide book about Europe, after it had shown us the way there, and we were perfectly familiar with the country and had not the least desire to go from it to any other country. I meant that it was the only book which told us anything about the other world where all our life is to be spent, except the very little bit that we spend on this side. It is strange to be so taken up with the things we are to use here, that we forget all about what we are here for, and forget to get ready for our journey; now isn’t it?

I think that the problem that Catholics have, then, is not a lack of familiarity with the Bible so much as an indifference toward it from repeated exposure to the same passages.

Memorization Through Association Memorization through association is taking something familiar to you and correlating it to what you’re trying to remember. So for example sometimes certain lyrics in a song remind you of a person you know. The theory is that these combined memories can help you remember more. If you have 2 or 3 memories tied to a single one it should be easier to recall. Some people when they smell bacon in the morning they might be reminded of the mornings they woke up as little child with their parents cooking breakfast. So the smell of bacon may bring to mind a mental image of bacon and a past experience with bacon. Due to these similarities people try to create an association between an object and a memory thus to bring to mind what they’re trying to memorize more easily. This may work well for a list of objects, and this may work well for numbers, past experiences and the like. But this may not be an appropriate option for memorizing vast amounts of scripture while attempting to retain the meaning behind them. We need to retain the meaning of the scripture when we memorize them that when we recall it, it can be put to use accurately. Therefore it is necessary focus on the things which help us recall the scripture while being able to accurately apply it. Memorization by association may work well for others but it is not appropriate for memorizing pages and verses of scripture. It may help you memorize a few verses but it will not help you memorize a multitude of verses, which is our goal.

The familiar phrase “the authority of scripture” thus turns out to be more complicated than it might at first sight appear. This hidden complication may perhaps be the reason why some current debates remain so sterile. This kind of problem, though, is endemic in many disciplines, and we ought to be grown-up enough to cope with it. Slogans and clichés are often shorthand ways of making more complex statements. In Christian theology, such phrases regularly act as “portable stories”—that is, ways of packing up longer narratives about God, Jesus, the church and the world, folding them away into convenient suitcases, and then carrying them about with us. (A good example is the phrase “the atonement.” This phrase is rare in the Bible itself; instead, we find things like “The Messiah died for our sins according to the scriptures”; “God so loved the world that he gave his only son,” and so on. But if we are to discuss the atonement, it is easier to do so with a single phrase, assumed to “contain” all these sentences, than by repeating one or more of them each time.) Shorthands, in other words, are useful in the same way that suitcases are. They enable us to pick up lots of complicated things and carry them around all together. But we should never forget that the point of doing so, like the point of carrying belongings in a suitcase, is that what has been packed away can then be unpacked and put to use in the new location. Too much debate about scriptural authority has had the form of people hitting one another with locked suitcases. It is time to unpack our shorthand doctrines, to lay them out and inspect them. Long years in a suitcase may have made some of the contents go moldy. They will benefit from fresh air, and perhaps a hot iron.

You’re familiar with the old written law, ‘Love your friend,’ and its unwritten companion, ‘Hate your enemy.’ I’m challenging that. I’m telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. He gives his best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that. 48 “In a word, what I’m saying is, Grow up. You’re kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.” THE WORLD IS NOT A STAGE

Perhaps you grew up in a legalistic spiritual environment as I did. With legalism, Christianity is all about conforming to a code of conduct that has been added to the precepts and principles of the Bible and then judging people on the degree to which they conform to the extrabiblical code. “I’m a good Christian because I don’t do the ‘filthy five’ (or the ‘dirty dozen’).” That kind of legalistic focus produces external conformity, like in the military, but not the kind of true life change we are looking for. Actually, I believe there’s more disobedience to God in the legalistic Christian subculture than anywhere else, because so often there has been no real heart change. Instead, sinful patterns that God wants to change are forced under the surface—a sort of conspiracy of silence. Legalistic Christians are hiding the real truth of who they are from everyone around them. The result? Biblical fellowship is hindered and true life change becomes very difficult. Legalism is a stifling environment where lasting heart change is impossible. Over the Christmas holidays, my family and I visited a church caught in legalism. I didn’t want to go, but I had no choice and so I went. The problem was I forgot about the dress code. I was sort of “dress casual,” if you know what I mean. Then we got in the building. Oops! Every single male from three years of age to ninety-nine had a suit on, and those ties sure looked tight. Now to their credit, they were friendly, but even the handshake itself was kind of compassionate. “Oh, poor brother. We hope you’ll soon be within the reach of the gospel.” You know, that feeling you get when people are judging you because you’re not quite like they are. Anyway, I snuggled up my coat, brought my kids in, and sat down. Being familiar with this approach, I was doing really well until they started a baptismal service where the pastor walked right into the baptistery with his suit on, coat and all. I just wanted to stand up and go, “What are you thinking! It’s not about rules! Jesus died so we could have a genuine intimacy with Him, not just look the part, or what you think looks the part. Won’t you ever learn that rules by themselves don’t change us? They just force our sinful natures under the surface and help us hide behind externals and pretend we’re closer to God than we really are.” Of course, God is not for or against suits. Dressing up for church when motivated by reverence and not religion can be good. Similarly, dressing down can be

Even the God of the Bible uses different names for himself in different instances to communicate his different attributes. While this is not familiar to modern readers and can cause difficulty in keeping all the names and identities straight, I have chosen to employ that peculiar technique as a way of incarnating the ancient worldview and mindset. So reader be warned to watch names carefully and expect them to be changing on you even when you are not looking.

Do we realize that there is nothing the Devil dreads so much as prayer? His great concern is to keep us from praying. He loves to see us “up to our eyes” in work—provided we do not pray. He does not fear that we are eager and earnest Bible students—provided we are little in prayer. Samuel Chadwick, an English pastor from the late 1800s, once said, “Satan laughs at our toiling, mocks at our wisdom, but trembles when we pray.” All this is so familiar to us—but do we really pray? If not, then failure must dog our footsteps, whatever signs of apparent success there may be.

What is interesting to me is people tend to congregate around whatever aspect of God is most familiar to them. Holiness folks, God’s righteousness and abhorrence for sin. Pentecostals, God’s indwelling Spirit and the signs that follow. There are others but those are two I know most about. I’ve seen many a person project their ego, their upbringing, their beliefs onto different passages in the Bible. For a person who grew up in a loving and welcoming environment, the thought of God not listening, not accepting, not loving them is as foreign as hearing another language.

Rather than allowing the safety and familiarity of forms to permit our hearts to disengage, or allowing a hip beat or guitar rift to generate superficial emotion, it is imperative that our walk with God remain real, that our dialogue with his Spirit be moment to moment, that our communication of his truth be accurate, engaging, and authentic.

The Bible is the inevitable outcome of God’s continuous speech. It is the infallible declaration of His mind for us, put into our familiar human words.