Files Bible Quotes

You can have everything in the world, but if you don't have love, none of it means crap," he said promptly. "Love is patient. Love is kind. Love always forgives, trusts, supports, and endures. Love never fails. When every star in the heavens grows cold, and when silence lies once more on the face of the deep, three things will endure: faith, hope, and love." And the greatest of these is love," I finished. "That's from the Bible." First Corinthians, chapter thirteen," Thomas confirmed. "I paraphrased. Father makes all of us memorize that passage. Like when parents put those green yucky-face stickers on the poisonous cleaning products under the kitchen sink.

On the whole, we're a murderous race. According to Genesis, it took as few as four people to make the planet too crowded to stand, and the first murder was a fratricide. Genesis says that in a fit of jealous rage, the very first child born to mortal parents, Cain, snapped and popped the first metaphorical cap in another human being. The attack was a bloody, brutal, violent, reprehensible killing. Cain's brother Abel probably never saw it coming. As I opened the door to my apartment, I was filled with a sense of empathic sympathy and intuitive understanding. For freaking Cain.

But you'd get arguments from all kinds of people that the Bible has got to be perfect. That God would not permit such errors to be made in the Holy Word." "I thought God gave everyone free will. Which would presumably - and evidently - include the freedom to be incorrect when translating one language into another." "Stop making me think. I'm believing over here.

You don’t understand,” getting mad. “You guys, you’re like Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, words. You know where that play exists, not in that file cabinet, not in any paperback you’re looking for, but—” a hand emerged from the veil of shower-steam to indicate his suspended head—“in here. That’s what I’m for. To give the spirit flesh. The words, who cares? They’re rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barrier around an actor’s memory, right? But the reality is in this head. Mine. I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also.

a single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. and, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. this forest eats itself and lives forever.

First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever.

How can we pick and choose which parts of the Bible to follow? One thing is God’s will and another is just cultural differences? What if it’s all cultural? What if homosexuality or saving yourself for marriage is as outdated as women staying silent in church or Leviticus forbidding tattoos?

I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean....I had miles of Bible in memory: some perforce, but most by hap, like the words to songs. There was no corner of my brain where you couldn't find, among the files of clothing labels and heaps of rocks, among the swarms of protozoans and shelves of novels, whole tapes and snarls and reels of Bible.

Their Bibles had become an idol before God. That the cross, as a symbol, was an idol, even their own self-image was an idol before God.

The ark was like a portable computer hard drive and Noah was a one-man Geek Squad, and he dumped God's most important files onto it before he zorched the virus-ridden computer that was the world.

The empire of the Pharaohs was old before Rome was a twinkling in Odysseus’s eye, wise before China had been discovered, and over and done with before our founding fathers came down from Mount Olympus to give us the Bible and the US Constitution—

The Bible says God has no pleasure in the death of the ungodly and that He wants all to come to repentance (see Ezekiel 18:23, 32; 2 Peter 3:9). That is His will. Anything that happens differently has happened for a reason other than His will. The reality we live with is that the problems we face are often surrounded by many things that we do not yet know how to dismantle. To label something that is evil as coming from God is to credit God with evil. Instead, I keep what I call a mystery file. It is safer than attributing evil to God. The

That's nice." "It is. And so I did not tell her that I'd written most of it while taking a shit. My point is neither you nor I know what will matter to the audience in the long run. The truth? Who gives a fuck? The Bible's full of utter cock and there are ten thousand wankers out there using it as an excuse to behave like total fucking arseholes. Same as the Koran and the Talmud and probably whatever the fuck it is that Buddhists get their spells out of. But on the other hand there's been millions of people, over thousand of years, who've got through the day because of that bullshit, or had their heart lifted, or looked at the world differently for ten minutes.

There was however one real romance in his [J. Gresham Machen's] life, though unhappily it was not destined to blossom into marriage. One would never have learned of it from the files of his personal letters since it seems that he did not trust himself to write on the subject, extraordinary though that may seem when one considers how fully he confided in his mother. He did tell his brother Arthur about it, and in a conference concerning the projected biography in March, 1944, the elder brother told me that the story to be complete would have to include a reference to Gresham's one love affair. He identified the lady by name, as a resident of Boston, and as "intelligent, beautiful, exquisite." He further stated that apparently they were utterly devoted to each other for a time, but that the devotion never developed into an engagement to be married because she was a Unitarian. Miss S., as she may be designated, made a real effort to believe, but could not bring her mind and heart to the point where she could share his faith. On the other hand, as Arthur Machen hardly needed to add, Gresham Machen could not possibly think of uniting his life with one who could not come to basic agreement with him with regard to the Christian faith. . . . Machen had been advising her with respect to study of the Bible. He must have counseled her to read the Gospels through consecutively. He had a copy of his course of Bible study prepared for the Board of Christian education especially bound for her. He sent her copies of his books as they appeared. He had copies of Dr. Erdman's little commentaries and other books sent to her. On her part she indicated an interest in these things, but evidently it was stimulated more by the desire to please Machen than by an earnest agitation of spirit. At any rate her mind was set awhirl as she read some of the books and she was forced to come to the conclusion that, judged by his views as set forth for example in Christianity and Liberalism, published in 1923, if she was a Christian at all, she was a pretty feeble one. How tragic an ending to Machen's one real romance or approach to it! It does serve to underscore once again, however, how utterly devoted he was to his Lord. He could be counted upon in the public and conspicuous arenas of conflict but also in the utterly private relations of life to be true to his dearly-bought convictions.

We put the dogs in a play and invited the parents, since there was no one else to be an audience. But the pets were poorly trained and failed to take direction. There were two soldiers and a fancy lady we’d dressed in a frilly padded bra. The soldiers were cowards. Deserters, basically. They ran away when we issued the battle cry. (A blaring klaxon. It went hoh-onk.) The lady urinated. “Oh, poor old thing, she has a nervous bladder!” exclaimed someone’s chubby mother. “Is that a Persian rug?” Whose mother was it? Unclear. No one would cop to it, of course. We canceled the performance. “Admit it, that was your mother,” said a kid named Rafe to a kid named Sukey, when the parents had filed out. Some of their goblets, highball glasses, and beer bottles were completely empty. Drained. Those parents were in a hurry, then. “No way,” said Sukey firmly, and shook her head. “Then who is your mother? The one with the big ass? Or the one with the clubfoot?” “Neither,” said Sukey. “So fuck you.” THE GREAT HOUSE had been built by robber barons in the nineteenth century, a palatial retreat for the green months. Our parents, those so-called figures of authority, roamed its rooms in vague circuits beneath the broad beams, their objectives murky. And of no general interest.

arrived in Cambridge, and made an appointment to meet the formidable Krister Stendahl, a Swedish scholar of fierce intelligence, now to be my first adviser. We met in his office. I was nervous, but also amused that this tall and severe man, wearing a black shirt and clerical collar, looked to me like an Ingmar Bergman version of God. After preliminary formalities, he abruptly swiveled in his chair and turned sternly to ask, “So really, why did you come here?” I stumbled over the question, then mumbled something about wanting to find the essence of Christianity. Stendahl stared down at me, silent, then asked, “How do you know it has an essence?” In that instant, I thought, That’s exactly why I came here: to be asked a question like that—challenged to rethink everything. Now I knew I had come to the right place. I’d chosen Harvard because it was a secular university, where I wouldn’t be bombarded with church dogma. Yet I still imagined that if we went back to first-century sources, we might hear what Jesus was saying to his followers when they walked by the Sea of Galilee—we might find the “real Christianity,” when the movement was in its golden age. But Harvard quenched these notions; there would be no simple path to what Krister Stendahl ironically called “play Bible land” simply by digging through history. Yet I also saw that this hope of finding “the real Christianity” had driven countless people—including our Harvard professors—to seek its origins. Naive as our questions were, they were driven by a spiritual quest. We discovered that even the earliest surviving texts had been written decades after Jesus’s death, and that none of them are neutral. They reveal explosive controversy between his followers, who loved him, and outsiders like the Roman senator Tacitus and the Roman court historian Suetonius, who likely despised him. Taken together, what the range of sources does show, contrary to those who imagine that Jesus didn’t exist, is that he did: fictional people don’t have real enemies. What came next was a huge surprise: our professors at Harvard had file cabinets filled with facsimiles of secret gospels I had never heard of—the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Truth—and dozens of other writings, transcribed by hand from the original Greek into Coptic, and mimeographed in blue letters on pages stamped TOP SECRET. Discovered in 1945, these texts only recently had become available to scholars. This wasn’t what I’d expected to find in graduate school, or even what I wanted—at least, not so long as I still hoped to find answers instead of more questions

Then one evening he reached the last chapter, and then the last page, the last verse. And there it was! That unforgivable and unfathomable misprint that had caused the owner of the books to order them to be pulped. Now Bosse handed a copy to each of them sitting round the table, and they thumbed through to the very last verse, and one by one burst out laughing. Bosse was happy enough to find the misprint. He had no interest in finding out how it got there. He had satisfied his curiosity, and in the process had read his first book since his schooldays, and even got a bit religious while he was at it. Not that Bosse allowed God to have any opinion about Bellringer Farm’s business enterprise, nor did he allow the Lord to be present when he filed his tax return, but – in other respects – Bosse now placed his life in the hands of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And surely none of them would worry about the fact that he set up his stall at markets on Saturdays and sold bibles with a tiny misprint in them? (‘Only ninety-nine crowns each! Jesus! What a bargain!’) But if Bosse had cared, and if, against all odds, he had managed to get to the bottom of it, then after what he had told his friends, he would have continued: A typesetter in a Rotterdam suburb had been through a personal crisis. Several years earlier, he had been recruited by Jehovah’s Witnesses but they had thrown him out when he discovered, and questioned rather too loudly, the fact that the congregation had predicted the return of Jesus on no less than fourteen occasions between 1799 and 1980 – and sensationally managed to get it wrong all fourteen times. Upon which, the typesetter had joined the Pentecostal Church; he liked their teachings about the Last Judgment, he could embrace the idea of God’s final victory over evil, the return of Jesus (without their actually naming a date) and how most of the people from the typesetter’s childhood including his own father, would burn in hell. But this new congregation sent him packing too. A whole month’s collections had gone astray while in the care of the typesetter. He had sworn by all that was holy that the disappearance had nothing to do with him. Besides, shouldn’t Christians forgive? And what choice did he have when his car broke down and he needed a new one to keep his job? As bitter as bile, the typesetter started the layout for that day’s jobs, which ironically happened to consist of printing two thousand bibles! And besides, it was an order from Sweden where as far as the typesetter knew, his father still lived after having abandoned his family when the typesetter was six years old. With tears in his eyes, the typesetter set the text of chapter upon chapter. When he came to the very last chapter – the Book of Revelation – he just lost it. How could Jesus ever want to come back to Earth? Here where Evil had once and for all conquered Good, so what was the point of anything? And the Bible… It was just a joke! So it came about that the typesetter with the shattered nerves made a little addition to the very last verse in the very last chapter in the Swedish bible that was just about to be printed. The typesetter didn’t remember much of his father’s tongue, but he could at least recall a nursery rhyme that was well suited in the context. Thus the bible’s last two verses plus the typesetter’s extra verse were printed as: 20. He who testifies to these things says, Surely I am coming quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus!21. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.22. And they all lived happily ever after.

Though Hoover conceded that some might deem him a “fanatic,” he reacted with fury to any violations of the rules. In the spring of 1925, when White was still based in Houston, Hoover expressed outrage to him that several agents in the San Francisco field office were drinking liquor. He immediately fired these agents and ordered White—who, unlike his brother Doc and many of the other Cowboys, wasn’t much of a drinker—to inform all of his personnel that they would meet a similar fate if caught using intoxicants. He told White, “I believe that when a man becomes a part of the forces of this Bureau he must so conduct himself as to remove the slightest possibility of causing criticism or attack upon the Bureau.” The new policies, which were collected into a thick manual, the bible of Hoover’s bureau, went beyond codes of conduct. They dictated how agents gathered and processed information. In the past, agents had filed reports by phone or telegram, or by briefing a superior in person. As a result, critical information, including entire case files, was often lost. Before joining the Justice Department, Hoover had been a clerk at the Library of Congress—“ I’m sure he would be the Chief Librarian if he’d stayed with us,” a co-worker said—and Hoover had mastered how to classify reams of data using its Dewey decimal–like system. Hoover adopted a similar model, with its classifications and numbered subdivisions, to organize the bureau’s Central Files and General Indices. (Hoover’s “Personal File,” which included information that could be used to blackmail politicians, would be stored separately, in his secretary’s office.) Agents were now expected to standardize the way they filed their case reports, on single sheets of paper. This cut down not only on paperwork—another statistical measurement of efficiency—but also on the time it took for a prosecutor to assess whether a case should be pursued.

Adventists urged to study women’s ordination for themselves Adventist Church President Ted N. C. Wilson appealed to members to study the Bible regarding the theology of ordination as the Church continues to examine the matter at Annual Council next month and at General Conference Session next year. Above, Wilson delivers the Sabbath sermon at Annual Council last year. [ANN file photo] President Wilson and TOSC chair Stele also ask for prayers for Holy Spirit to guide proceedings September 24, 2014 | Silver Spring, Maryland, United States | Andrew McChesney/Adventist Review Ted N. C. Wilson, president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, appealed to church members worldwide to earnestly read what the Bible says about women’s ordination and to pray that he and other church leaders humbly follow the Holy Spirit’s guidance on the matter. Church members wishing to understand what the Bible teaches on women’s ordination have no reason to worry about where to start, said Artur A. Stele, who oversaw an unprecedented, two-year study on women’s ordination as chair of the church-commissioned Theology of Ordination Study Committee. Stele, who echoed Wilson’s call for church members to read the Bible and pray on the issue, recommended reading the study’s three brief “Way Forward Statements,” which cite Bible texts and Adventist Church co-founder Ellen G. White to support each of the three positions on women’s ordination that emerged during the committee’s research. The results of the study will be discussed in October at the Annual Council, a major business meeting of church leaders. The Annual Council will then decide whether to ask the nearly 2,600 delegates of the world church to make a final call on women’s ordination in a vote at the General Conference Session next July. Wilson, speaking in an interview, urged each of the church’s 18 million members to prayerfully read the study materials, available on the website of the church’s Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research. "Look to see how the papers and presentations were based on an understanding of a clear reading of Scripture,” Wilson said in his office at General Conference headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland. “The Spirit of Prophecy tells us that we are to take the Bible just as it reads,” he said. “And I would encourage each church member, and certainly each representative at the Annual Council and those who will be delegates to the General Conference Session, to prayerfully review those presentations and then ask the Holy Spirit to help them know God’s will.” The Spirit of Prophecy refers to the writings of White, who among her statements on how to read the Bible wrote in The Great Controversy (p. 598), “The language of the Bible should be explained according to its obvious meaning, unless a symbol or figure is employed.” “We don’t have the luxury of having the Urim and the Thummim,” Wilson said, in a nod to the stones that the Israelite high priest used in Old Testament times to learn God’s will. “Nor do we have a living prophet with us. So we must rely upon the Holy Spirit’s leading in our own Bible study as we review the plain teachings of Scripture.” He said world church leadership was committed to “a very open, fair, and careful process” on the issue of women’s ordination. Wilson added that the crucial question facing the church wasn’t whether women should be ordained but whether church members who disagreed with the final decision on ordination, whatever it might be, would be willing to set aside their differences to focus on the church’s 151-year mission: proclaiming Revelation 14 and the three angels’ messages that Jesus is coming soon. 3 Views on Women’s Ordination In an effort to better understand the Bible’s teaching on ordination, the church established the Theology of Ordination Study Committee, a group of 106 members commonly referred to by church leaders as TOSC. It was not organized

The last Bible I looked at contained over 2000 pages, and you humans managed to get yourself kicked out Paradise by page 5. That has to be some kind of record.

One file's worth all the Bibles in the world.

While King Ahasuerus has been rotating his guests during these six months, these seven princes have most likely been with him the whole time as well. To Ahasuerus, it may have seemed that these were the right men to go to for advice, but Ahasuerus is not at his sharpest after these six months of celebrating. We can only imagine that these advisors are as bored and as drunk as King Ahasuerus, even though earlier in this chapter (verse 8) the historian makes a point of telling us that the guests were not required to drink. These men may have been “partying” right along with Ahasuerus for these six months, and their judgement may be hindered by the atmosphere as much as the king’s judgement has been hindered. On a more personal note, can you think of any time when you sought out the wrong person for advice or counsel? I sure can! You would not seek advice on your finances from someone who filed bankruptcy yesterday, nor would you seek advice on marriage from a child. When you need wise counsel, you need to find someone who has experienced victory in the same situation in which you are experiencing difficulty. Of course, when I catch myself looking to the wrong people for advice, many times I realize something: I am not really looking for advice, I am looking for support. Sometimes we seek out people that we expect will be sympathetic to our cause. Ahasuerus may have done this very thing in choosing these men. Maybe Ahasuerus has already determined what he wants to do with Vashti, and now he is looking for validation. Big mistake! Here is a lesson we can take from Ahasuerus: there are situations in our lives when we should seek an opinion from an objective party. The Bible encourages us to seek wise counsel. We should use wisdom and choose someone with more experience and wisdom than we have ourselves. If Ahasuerus wanted approval, he found it in these seven advisors. If he merely wanted a decisive opinion on what course of action to take, he has found that. And Memucan answered before the king and the princes: “Queen Vashti has not only wronged the king, but also all the princes, and all the people who are in all the provinces of King Ahasuerus. For the queen’s behavior will become known to all women, so that they will despise their husbands in their eyes, when they report, ‘King Ahasuerus commanded Queen Vashti to be brought in before him, but she did not come.’ Esther 1:16-17 When Ahasuerus asks for advice, one of the advisors speaks out quickly. Memucan answers Ahasuerus, and apparently he has taken Vashti’s refusal pretty personally himself. Perhaps Memucan’s wife is among those women that Vashti is entertaining. Memucan exaggerates this situation to make it seem like a very serious infraction indeed, and he wants the king to see it his way. Memucan says, “Queen Vashti has not only wronged the king, but also all the princes, and all the people who are in all the provinces” (v. 16). He suggests that the queen’s refusal will make all women despise their husbands (v. 17). … Is Memucan taking this situation a little far? This very day the noble ladies of Persia and Media will say to all the king’s officials that they have heard of the behavior of the queen. Thus there will be excessive contempt and wrath. If it pleases the king, let a royal decree go out from him, and let it be recorded in the laws of the Persians and the Medes, so that it will not be altered, that Vashti shall come no more before King Ahasuerus; and let the king give her royal position to

You can file your nails, make appointments, clean a shelf, throw in a load of laundry, or write a thank-you note. One pastor gave a copy of the book of Psalms to everyone in his congregation. He suggests they use it when they have a minute or so of "waiting" time. Why not make a list of what you can accomplish in five minutes so you'll be ready the next time you have a little spare time? ant some quick reminders to get more out of life? • In your Bible underline verses that remind you of how much you're loved by God. Check back when you need to be reminded. • Mend a broken relationship. Don't hesitate to say you're sorry. • Hang around with loving, giving people. Their attitude and joy are contagious. And we need all the love we can get, don't we? • Practice delight! The more you notice and rejoice in what God has done, the more positive and loving you'll feel. e spontaneous and throw a party. You can make just about any occasion special. Now don't laugh, but being spontaneous sometimes takes a little planning. For instance, you'll want to have something fun to eat in the freezer that you can prepare

A lady says to a priest, “Father, I have a problem. I have these two talking female parrots, but they only know how to say one thing.” “What do they say?” the priest asks “They only know how to say, ‘Hi, we are prostitutes. Do you want to have some fun?’” “That’s terrible! But I have a solution to your problem. Bring your two talking female parrots over to my house and I will put them with my two male talking parrots. I have taught my birds to pray and read the Bible. My parrots will teach your parrots to stop saying that terrible phrase and your parrots will learn to pray and worship.” “Thank you, Father, that’s very helpful.” The next day, the lady brings her parrots to the priest’s house. The two male birds are holding rosary beads and praying in their cage. The lady puts her females in with them and the birds immediately say, “Hi, we are prostitutes! Do you want to have some fun?” One male parrot looks over to the other one and screams, “Frank! Put the Bibles away, our prayers have been answered!

One of my great moments in camp,’ recalled child internee Kari Torjesen Malcolm, ‘came when I was alone in a kitchen, singlehandedly trying to kill hundreds of flies before 600 people would file in for their rations. Then Eric Liddell was passing by. I knew him well, both as my softball coach and as a Bible teacher. Now he stopped in and gave me his undivided attention for a few charged moments. With his steel-blue, penetrating and laughing eyes and disarming smile, he had my complete attention. He told me that as a Christian I was bringing people nearer Christ by doing something as simple as killing flies for them. I had heard him teach that we either repel people from Christ or bring them closer. Then he heartily thanked me for what I was doing just then with no one but God to notice what I was doing, or to give me proper credit.

Have we not been claimed? Adopted? Rom 8:15 God searched you out. Before you knew you needed adopting, He'd already filed the papers and selected the wallpaper for your room. Rm 8:29. Abandon you to a fatherless world? No way. Those privy to God's family Bible can read your name. He wrote it there. What's more? He covered the adoption fees. I could not pay my way ou tof the orphanage, so God sent Christ to buy freedom for us. Gal 4:5. We don't finance our adoption, but we do accept it. You could tell God to get lost. But you wouldn't dare would you? The moment we accept his offer we go from orphans to heirs. Rm 8:17. You are headed home. Oh but we forget. Don't we grow accustomed to hard bunks and tin plates? 1 Peter 2:11 How long has it been since you showed someone your pictures? Adopted but not transported. A new family but not our new house. Know our Father's name but not his face. He has claimed but has yet to come for us. So here we are. Caught between what is and what will be. No longer orphans, but not yet home. How do we live in the MEANtime? Rm 8:23-25

Jesus didn’t send His apostles out to start a social club, a special interest group, or a new “religion” that could be filed in the yellow pages, right there between Cats and Creeps. Jesus didn’t send His apostles out to make deals, to compromise, and offer alternative lifestyles. Jesus claimed all authority in heaven and on earth. He claimed all of it, and sent His apostles to announce that claim in the words of the gospel and to enact it with water, bread, and wine, with His full authority.

I didn’t realize you’d read much of the Bible.” “Proverbs always made a lot of sense to me,

What made Jesus the power he was of his time? In the first place, there was an inexplicable charm about his personality which drew all the common people to him, as iron filings are drawn by a magnet. He loved the people, who instinctively felt it, and loved him. Then there was his intellectual power of speech. Most of the sayings of Jesus are not original in the sense that nobody else ever uttered any similar truths before. Confucius, six thousand years before Jesus, gave utterance to the Golden Rule. And then there was the pity, the sympathy, the tenderness of the man. And then he had trust in God—

Whose mother was it? Unclear. No one would cop to it, of course. We canceled the performance. “Admit it, that was your mother,” said a kid named Rafe to a kid named Sukey, when the parents had filed out. Some of their goblets, highball glasses, and beer bottles were completely empty. Drained. Those parents were in a hurry, then. “No way,” said Sukey firmly, and shook her head. “Then who is your mother? The one with the big ass? Or the one with the clubfoot?” “Neither,” said Sukey. “So fuck you.

The Bible Is Full of Hypocrites It’s not just modern people who struggle to live consistently with what they believe. The Bible reveals again and again the timeless tension of humanity grappling with hypocrisy. Moses, the prophet of Israel, doubted God and resisted God’s call on his life. Abraham and Isaac, two of the three great patriarchs of Israel, both put their wives in harm’s way in order to protect themselves. Jacob, the third great patriarch, was a liar. Joseph, who would later save Israel from ruin, arrogantly taunted his brothers. David, the man after God’s own heart and author of most of the Psalms, committed adultery and murder. Solomon, the son of David and the wisest king of his time, was a womanizer. Rahab, a hero of the faith who protected and hid the Israelite spies, was a prostitute. Many of the great kings such as Asa and Hezekiah, who “did right in the eyes of the LORD,”[8] flirted with idolatry and finished poorly. That’s just the Old Testament. I can allow my hypocrisy to be brought into the light by God and others. In the New Testament, we also see plenty of hypocrisy. Thomas initially refused to believe that Jesus rose from the dead. Paul admitted to “all kinds of covetousness.”[9] Peter had an abrasive personality. Peter and Barnabas fell into old patterns of elitism and exclusion, retreating relationally from their Gentile brothers and sisters. The Corinthian church, affectionately referred to by Paul as “saints” and daughters and sons of the Father, also bore some rotten fruit. They judged one another, created major divisions over minor doctrines, committed adultery, filed lawsuits against one another, had more divorces than healthy marriages, paraded their “Christian liberty” before those with a sensitive conscience, and slighted the poor, disadvantaged, and disabled in their midst.

Verse after verse follows, her voice rising to a crescendo and then falling, only to rise again with a new passage, each echoing the same refrain. I never realized how many verses of the Bible boil down to, I tried to tell you idiots, but no—you wouldn’t listen.

Indeed, anyone inclined to blame psychopathic violence on a killer's favorite books or movies must deal with the discomfiting fact that a significant number of serial murderers have been devoted students of the Bible.

One day, when Jon and I must have been nine or ten, we were talking about God. This was a big moment, because Jon’s family didn’t go to church, and he didn’t talk about God very much, but now, while we stood in my driveway, he was being open and sharing his beliefs. Jon said he thought God was like a filing clerk. His desk was full of cards, and those cards comprised our reality. This divine Clerk had cards for physics, biology, historical events, future events, people, and everything everywhere. God spent his time filling out these cards and keeping them organized. I laughed at him. I couldn’t help it. Jon’s idea about God was so ridiculous and wrong. After all, I was an expert on God—I studied him every week at church, and I even knew him personally. I’d been saved and baptized. Here was Jon, so much smarter than I, and he didn’t understand God at all. I have to admit, the thought made me feel pretty proud of myself. After I stopped laughing, I started to tell Jon about the one true God of the Bible and His Son, Jesus. But Jon didn’t want to listen. His eyes were watering, and his face was red, too. I couldn’t tell if he wanted to cry or yell at me. I think a lot of us do what I did in that moment. We have experiences with God that are beautiful and moving, but over time, they just become things that make us feel superior to other people.

The first American serial killer of the twentieth century was a strangler—Earle Leonard Nelson, aka the “Gorilla Murderer,” a Bible-quoting psycho who traveled from coast to coast, choking women to death before raping their corpses (Alfred Hitchcock also made a movie loosely inspired by this notorious case: his 1943 masterpiece, Shadow of a Doubt).

And inevitably, a neutered “Jesus” gives us piles of little neutered Christians. But what God has in mind is the complete renovation of the world. Jesus didn’t send His apostles out to start a social club, a special interest group, or a new “religion” that could be filed in the yellow pages, right there between Cats and Creeps. Jesus didn’t send His apostles out to make deals, to compromise, and offer alternative lifestyles. Jesus claimed all authority in heaven and on earth. He claimed all of it, and sent His apostles to announce that claim in the words of the gospel and to enact it with water, bread, and wine, with His full authority.

We walked single file around the lake, inhaling the unmistakable smell of life poised and ready - fish stirring under the ice, green bulbs awakening below the ground. Soon the water would be free, the leaves would unfold like handkerchiefs, the flowers swell with pollen, the butterflies return. The risks of spring were still trapped under the ice but one good thaw and they would be released.

The early experience of Elisabeth Elliot, widow and biographer of a martyred missionary husband, strikingly illustrates this. Confident of God’s guidance, she went to an Ecuador tribe to reduce their language to writing so that the Bible might be translated for them. The only person who could or would help her was a Spanish-speaking Christian who lived with the tribe, but within a month he was shot dead in an argument. She struggled on with virtually no help for eight months more. Then she moved to another field, leaving her full file of linguistic material with colleagues so that they could carry on where she had left off. Within a fortnight she heard that the file had been stolen. No copy existed; all her work was wasted. That, humanly speaking, was the end of the story. She comments: I simply had to bow in the knowledge that God was his own interpreter. . . . We must allow God to do what he wants to do. And if you are thinking that you know the will of God for your life and you are anxious to do that, you are probably in for a very rude awakening because nobody knows the will of God for his entire life. (Quoted from Eternity, January 1969, p. 18) This is right. Sooner or later, God’s guidance, which brings us out of darkness into light, will also bring us out of light into darkness. It is part of the way of the cross.

Tryphena?” “It’s Greek. Means ‘delicate.’ Brin came across it the other day somewhere in the Bible,

It divides the Bible into sections fitted to the days of the year, and compels the Christian to read according to rule. No matter what the Holy Spirit may be trying to say to a man, still he goes on reading where the card tells him, dutifully checking it off each day. Every Spirit-led saint knows that there are times when he is held by an inward pressure to one chapter, or even one verse, for days at a time while he wrestles with God till some truth does its work within him. To leave that present passage to follow a pre-arranged reading schedule is for him wholly impossible. He is in the hand of the free Spirit, and reality is appearing before him to break and humble and lift and liberate and cheer. But only the free soul can know the glory of this. To this the heart bound by system will be forever a stranger. The slave to the file card soon finds that his prayers lose their freedom and become less spontaneous, less effective.

It’s why we need to be praying and in our Bibles all the time. Why we need to be thinking before we act, asking what would please God. It’s when we start asking what would best serve us or even those around us first that we get into trouble.

God may not require her to read her Bible, but Kate knew she needed that time every day to remind herself of what was important.

Paleontology has a sordid history of frauds and deceit. In 120 years since Darwin, no one has found a fossil of a legitimate intermediate stage of any kind. The textbook examples of our supposed ancestors have all been discredited, some of them as deliberate frauds. The Heidelberg Man was built from a jawbone; the Nebraska Man (1922) was made from just one tooth that was later discovered to be part of an extinct pig; the Piltdown Man (1912) was made from the jawbone of a modern ape and was filed and treated with iron salts to make it look old. Neanderthal Man was found in the Neander valley near Dusseldorf. The International Congress of Zoology (1958) determined that it was just an old man suffering from arthritis. The Java Man (1922) was built by an 1891 skull cap and a femur; the teeth were from an orangutan. These well-documented frauds continue to be promoted in most school textbooks, however.

As one writer comments: Mr. Pink's view of the Scriptures, of doctrine and of Christian practice was not the view of many of his contemporary evangelicals. Few men have traveled so widely and yet remained so uninfluenced by prevailing opinions and accepted customs. Independent Bible study convinced him that much of modern evangelism was defective at its foundation; when Puritan and Reformed books were being thrown out, he advanced the majority of their principles with untiring zeal.13 Another writer says that Pink has become more popular today because of the awakening of an interest in the truths he so faithfully presented in his writings.14 That statement certainly has a measure of truth to it, but one also wonders how much Arthur W. Pink was responsible for the above mentioned awakening of interest in these old truths of the past. The present writer has on file numerous letters from pastors, who attribute their theological journey from Arminian theology to Calvinistic theology to A. W. Pink and his influence upon them. These letters are small in number to those who have encountered Biblical truth in a personal way by the means of Pink's writings.

How can you introduce error into the Bible? Have a human open it. The moment he reads it, the Bible because weighted down with his biases and expectations.

So what’s love look like?” “You can have everything in the world, but if you don’t have love, none of it means crap,” he said promptly. “Love is patient. Love is kind. Love always forgives, trusts, supports, and endures. Love never fails. When every star in the heavens grows cold, and when silence lies once more on the face of the deep, three things will endure: faith, hope, and love.” “And the greatest of these is love,” I finished. “That’s from the Bible.” “First Corinthians, chapter thirteen,