Passages From Bible Quotes

A sort of good-bye without saying good-bye," he said. "It is a reference to a passage in the Bible. 'And Mizpah, for he said, the Lord watch between me and thee when we are absent one from another.

Mizpah," he said. She blinked at him, a little dazed. "What?" "A sort of good-bye without saying good-bye," he said. "It is a reference to a passage in the Bible. 'And Mizpah, for he said, the Lord watch between me and thee when we are absent one from another.

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.

The books I liked became a Bible from which I drew advice and support; I copied out long passages from them; I memorized new canticles and new litanies, psalms, proverbs, and prophecies, and I sanctified every incident in my life by the recital of these sacred texts. My emotions, my tears, and my hopes were no less sincere on account of that; the words and the cadences, the lines and the verses were not aids to make believe: but they rescued from silent oblivion all those intimate adventures of the spirit that I couldn’t speak to anyone about; they created a kind of communion between myself and those twin souls which existed somewhere out of reach; instead of living out my small private existence, I was participating in a great spiritual epic.

You belong to the biblical race of Nephilim. Your real father was an angel who fell from heaven. You're half mortal." The boy's dark eyes lifted, meeting Chauncey's. "Half fallen angel." Chauncey's tutor's voice drifted up from the recesses of his mind, reading passages from the Bible, telling of a deviant race created when angels cast from heaven mated with mortal women. A fearsome and powerful race. A chill that wasn't entirely revulsion crept through Chauncey. "Who are you?

It had been a good day, all things considered. I had managed rather well on my own. I opened Grandfather's Bible. This is what it would be like when I had my own shop, or when I traveled abroad. I would always read before sleeping. One day, I'd be so rich I would have a library full of novel to choose from. But I would always end the evening with a Bible passage.

The soul, in its loneliness, hopes only for "salvation." And yet what is the burden of the Bible if not a sense of the mutuality of influence, rising out of an essential unity, among soul and body and community and world? These are all the works of God, and it is therefore the work of virtue to make or restore harmony among them. The world is certainly thought of as a place of spiritual trial, but it is also the confluence of soul and body, word and flesh, where thoughts must become deeds, where goodness must be enacted. This is the great meeting place, the narrow passage where spirit and flesh, word and world, pass into each other. The Bible's aim, as I read it, is not the freeing of the spirit from the world. It is the handbook of their interaction. It says that they cannot be divided; that their mutuality, their unity, is inescapable; that they are not reconciled in division, but in harmony. What else can be meant by the resurrection of the body? The body should be "filled with light," perfected in understanding. And so everywhere there is the sense of consequence, fear and desire, grief and joy. What is desirable is repeatedly defined in the tensions of the sense of consequence.

The Bible offers a beautiful passage from the heart of one who knew much, suffered much, endured much, and wrote much: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceivedwhat God has prepared for those who love him.” 1 CORINTHIANS 2:9

You can see the same immorality or amorality in the Christian view of guilt and punishment. There are only two texts, both of them extreme and mutually contradictory. The Old Testament injunction is the one to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (it occurs in a passage of perfectly demented detail about the exact rules governing mutual ox-goring; you should look it up in its context (Exodus 21). The second is from the Gospels and says that only those without sin should cast the first stone. The first is a moral basis for capital punishment and other barbarities; the second is so relativistic and "nonjudgmental" that it would not allow the prosecution of Charles Manson. Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultra vindictiveness and ultracompassion.

If the Bible says something once, notice it but don’t count it as a fundamental principle. If it says it twice, think about it twice. If it is repeated many times, then dwell on it and seek to understand it. What you want to believe from the Bible is its message on the whole and use it as a standard for interpreting the peripheral passages.

Being truly biblical means that my counsel reflects what the entire Bible is about. The Bible is a narrative, a story of redemption, and its chief character is Jesus Christ. He is the main theme of the narrative, and he is revealed in every passage in the book. This story reveals how God harnessed nature and controlled history to send his Son to rescue rebellious, foolish, and self-focused men and women. He freed them from bondage to themselves, enabled them to live for his glory, and gifted them with an eternity in his presence, far from the harsh realities of the Fall.

It has been the practice of all Christian commentators on the Bible, and of all Christian priests and preachers, to impose the Bible on the world as a mass of truth, and as the word of God; they have disputed and wrangled, and have anathematized each other about the supposable meaning of particular parts and passages therein; one has said and insisted that such a passage meant such a thing, another that it meant directly the contrary, and a third, that it meant neither one nor the other, but something different from both; and this they have called understanding the Bible. It has happened, that all the answers that I have seen to the former part of 'The Age of Reason' have been written by priests: and these pious men, like their predecessors, contend and wrangle, and understand the Bible; each understands it differently, but each understands it best; and they have agreed in nothing but in telling their readers that Thomas Paine understands it not.

So even very young she saw slavery as an ancient practice arising because rich people would rather not do hard work, and also from the tendency of people to clench hard to advantageous passages in the Bible and dismiss the rest.

The idea that Wisdom could be a divine hypostasis—an aspect of God that is a distinct being from God that nonetheless is itself God—is rooted in a fascinating passage of the Hebrew Bible, Proverbs 8. ... God made all things in his wisdom, so much so that Wisdom is seen as a co-creator of sorts.

The author extols the power of having significant portions of God's Word read in public worship with the following analogy. He says that by reading a few short verses, we are like someone glimpsing nature through window from across the room. But by taking in more lengthy passages of Scripture, we are like someone who, intrigue, gets right next to the window to take in more of the view that it offers, basking in more of the arc of the whole the whole narrative.

In Hebrew, the Lord’s language, the word for time is ZeMaN, which is linked to the word for invitation. This serves to remind us that the passage of time is an invitation to make the most of it, to manage it effectively, and to integrate our understanding of how the world works with a true and accurate perception of the reality of time.

To see God as primarily loving, a person must embrace a liberal interpretation of the Bible, ignoring or rejecting the vindictive passages.

Another way to say this is that the most powerful cultural values are those that go without being said. It is very hard to know what goes without being said in another culture. But often we are not even aware of what goes without being said in our own culture. This is why misunderstanding and misinterpretation happen. When a passage of Scripture appears to leave out a piece of the puzzle because something went without being said, we instinctively fill in the gap with a piece from our own culture-usually a piece that goes without being said.

As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it. (Isaiah 55:10 – 11)

she read a couple of passages from the Bible, which I know is the done thing. I’ve been to many funerals now, and an awful lot of people have walked through the valley of the shadow of death.

I began to picture my children’s hearts as treasure chests of a different sort, and I vowed to fill them with intrinsic treasures: the best stories, memorized Scripture, priceless images of classical art, excellent books, memories from great feasts enjoyed together and special days celebrated, great Bible stories and wisdom passages, plus heart photographs of love given, holidays cherished, lessons learned.

The saints are the true interpreters of Holy Scripture. The meaning of a given passage of the Bible becomes most intelligible in those human beings who have been totally transfixed by it and have lived it out.

In the great Bible passage on spiritual warfare, the word stand appears four times, while the word translated wrestle, battle, fight, or struggle appears only once. In essence, God is asking you to spend the majority of your time in warfare standing!

The moral vacuum we now feel ourselves to be in has always been there, even if we haven’t recognized it Religious people are already entirely accustomed to picking and choosing which texts from holy book they obey and which they reject. There are passages of the Judeo-Christian Bible which no modern Christian or Jew would wish to follow. The story of Isaac’s narrowly averted sacrifice by his father Abraham strikes us moderns as a shocking piece of child abuse, whether we read it literally or symbolically.

In an age of religious violence like ours, people care much less about what you believe, and much more about whether you will kill for what you believe. So if you haven’t figured out what you’re going to do with passages like Deuteronomy 7 and 1 Samuel 15 and Psalms 137:9, you still have some important work to do.3 If you haven’t grappled with these passages and others like them, your Bible is like a loaded gun and your theology is like a license to kill. You have to find a way to disarm your faith as a potential instrument of hate and convert it into an instrument of love.4 You have to convert Christianity from a warrior religion to a reconciling religion. Otherwise, your neighbors around this seminary will tolerate you the way they might tolerate a chemical plant that could at any moment blow up and kill them all.

Of the many, many thousands of serious students of the Bible throughout Christian history who pored over every word—from leading early Christian scholars such as Irenaeus in the second century; to Tertullian and Origen in the third; to Augustine in the fifth; to all the biblical scholars of the Middle Ages up to Aquinas; to the Reformation greats Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin; on to, well, everyone who studied or simply read or even just heard passages from the Bible—this idea of the rapture occurred to no one until John Nelson Darby came up with the idea in the early 1800s (as we will discuss in chapter 3).

I suppose you wish to know what I am going to say to President Roosevelt on my return,” he said. This was an understatement. Churchill was desperate to know how well his courtship of Hopkins was progressing, and what indeed he would tell the president. “Well,” Hopkins said, “I’m going to quote you one verse from that Book of Books in the truth of which Mr. Johnston’s mother and my own Scottish mother were brought up—” Hopkins dropped his voice to a near whisper and recited a passage from the Bible’s Book of Ruth: “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.” Then, softly, he added: “Even to the end.

For a moment or two before the spell took effect, he was aware of all the sounds around him: rain splashing on metal and leather, and running down canvas; horses shuffling and snorting; Englishmen singing and Scotsmen playing bagpipes; two Welsh soldiers arguing over the proper interpretation of a Bible passage; the Scottish captain, John Kincaid, entertaining the American savages and teaching them to drink tea (presumably with the idea that once a man had learnt to drink tea, the other habits and qualities that make up a Briton would naturally follow). Then silence. Men and horses began to disappear, few by few at first, and then more quickly – hundreds, thousands of them vanishing from sight. Great gaps appeared among the close-packed soldiers. A little further to the east an entire regiment was gone, leaving a hole the size of Hanover-square. Where, moments before, all had been life, conversation and activity, there was now nothing but the rain and the twilight and the waving stalks of rye. Strange wiped his mouth because he felt sick.

In Europe, however, a great awakening was beginning. Trade brought in fresh, revolutionary ideas, accelerated by Gutenberg’s printing press. The power of the Church began to weaken after a millennium of domination. The universities slowly turned their attention away from interpreting obscure passages of the Bible to applying the physics of Newton and the chemistry of Dalton and others.

We struggle to find the space between avoiding all biblical arguments and identifying one policy as the only Christian one, but such space exists! Citing biblical passages about caring for the poor and vulnerable in support of tax policy that is intended to serve those people can be a faithful way of engaging in public life. Claiming that your tax policy is the only Christian option is not.

The third moment of silence is in front of Herod and his band of mockers. They wanted a show. The Bible says this: When Herod saw Jesus, he was greatly pleased, because for a long time he had been wanting to see him. From what he had heard about him, he hoped to see him perform some miracle. He plied him with many questions, but Jesus gave him no answer. . . . Then Herod and his soldiers ridiculed and mocked him. Dressing him in an elegant robe, they sent him back to Pilate. That day Herod and Pilate became friends—before this they had been enemies. (Luke 23:8–9, 11–12) This passage tells a fearsome tale. There are many who want Jesus to be nothing more than a miracle worker or an entertainer. And how ironic it is that enemies became friends out of a common desire to be rid of Him. Has anything changed since then? The fourth time Jesus was silent was when Pilate became fearful, hearing that He claimed to be the Son of God. “Where do You come from?” he asked. But Jesus remained silent. He had already told Pilate where He came from. But Pilate did not have the courage to deal with His answer. In the mix of these silent responses, there is a wealth of thought from God to us. A

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

Thirdly, a collection of passages, both prose and verse, from books other than the Bible. There is not perhaps much, in what is called ‘un-inspired’ literature (a misnomer, I hold: if Shakespeare was not inspired, one may well doubt if any man ever was), that will bear the process of being pondered over, a hundred times: still there are such passages — enough, I think, to make a goodly store for the memory.

I could see how you might let yourself get addicted to that kind of discipline, or denial; how it might seem like, if you kept doing it, over and over, that you were somehow living more cleanly or more righteously than other people. It was the same thing as following all those rules Lydia stuck to, and when that got old, making up even more rules to follow and then justifying them with some passage from the Bible.

As I write, I am reminded of that passage from the Bible—the one that is read at every wedding: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child.” Now, I understand as an adult. Maybe for the first time in my life. This article would break my mother’s heart, and perhaps even worse, her spirit. That didn’t matter to me a week ago; in fact, I wanted to hurt her then. My only excuse: then I was a child.

Sleepily Alice reached down and picked up a Bible, the blank side of a menu, and a Sunday School book from the floor beside the bed. She rustled through the tissue pages of the Bible until she reached a certain passage and began reading, pronouncing the words aloud with painful concentration. It was Sunday, and she was preparing the weekly lesson for her class of boys in the Junior Department of her church. ‘Now as he walked by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew his brother casting a net into the sea:

Well,” Hopkins said, “I’m going to quote you one verse from that Book of Books in the truth of which Mr. Johnston’s mother and my own Scottish mother were brought up—” Hopkins dropped his voice to a near whisper and recited a passage from the Bible’s Book of Ruth: “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.” Then, softly, he added: “Even to the end.” This was his own addition, and with it a wave of gratitude and relief seemed to engulf the room. Churchill wept.

Oh, no!” Kennedy shrieked. “I hate this thing.” She was about to rip up her card, but I grabbed it out of her hand. It was full of patches of different writing. There were a few “Happy Birthday”s. But mostly the card was covered with things like “Jesus is our savior. Remember our Lord Jesus died for our sins.” Plus passages from the Bible. I started laughing. And then Kennedy started crying, which she does sometimes. Really, the thing to do is just let it pass. Mom snatched the card. “Don’t worry, Kennedy,” she said. “I’m going to go hunt down those Jesus freaks.

For many in the Arminian tradition, who emphasize the believer’s free will and responsibility, texts like Romans 8:30; 9:18 – 24; Galatians 1:15; and Ephesians 1:4 – 5 are something of an embarrassment. Likewise many Calvinists have their own ways of getting around what is said quite plainly in passages like 1 Corinthians 10:1 – 13; 2 Peter 2:20 – 22; and Hebrews 6:4 – 6. Indeed our experience as teachers is that students from these traditions seldom ask what these texts mean; they want only to know “how to get around” what these various passages seem clearly to affirm!

So, once more, the question is: Does the Bible forbid homosexual behavior? Well, I’ve already said that it does. The Bible is so realistic! You might not expect it to mention a topic like homosexual behavior, but in fact there are six places in the Bible—three in the Old Testament and three in the New Testament—where this issue is directly addressed—not to mention all the passages dealing with marriage and sexuality which have implications for this issue. In all six of these passages homosexual acts are unequivocally condemned. In Leviticus 18.22 it says that it is an abomination for a man to lie with another man as with a woman. In Lev. 20.13 the death penalty is prescribed in Israel for such an act, along with adultery, incest, and bestiality. Now sometimes homosexual advocates make light of these prohibitions by comparing them to prohibitions in the Old Testament against having contact with unclean animals like pigs. Just as Christians today don’t obey all of the Old Testament ceremonial laws, so, they say, we don’t have to obey the prohibitions of homosexual actions. But the problem with this argument is that the New Testament reaffirms the validity of the Old Testament prohibitions of homosexual behavior, as we’ll see below. This shows they were not just part of the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament, which were done away with, but were part of God’s everlasting moral law. Homosexual behavior is in God’s sight a serious sin. The third place where homosexual acts are mentioned in the Old Testament is the horrifying story in Genesis 19 of the attempted gang rape of Lot’s visitors by the men of Sodom, from which our word sodomy derives. God destroyed the city of Sodom because of their wickedness. Now if this weren’t enough, the New Testament also forbids homosexual behavior.

Hear that again: Flesh and blood, skin and bones—those aren’t the places where your real struggles lie. The identity of your real enemy, once the Bible has weighed in, is clear as day. It’s him. It’s all him. It’s always been him. But in the rough-and-tumble of life’s exhausting pace, we can quickly lose touch with a passage like Ephesians 6. Even in knowing the truth, we can lose sight of where these attacks are originating from . . . from back there, behind the curtain. And by failing to take notice and remember, it’s not hard then to lose our cool, our temper, and most of our self-control before we ever find our way back to ultimate reality.

The Bible is full of evidence that God’s attention is indeed fixed on the little things. But this is not because God is a Great Cosmic Cop, eager to catch us in minor transgressions, but simply because God loves us—loves us so much that the divine presence is revealed even in the meaningless workings of daily life. It is in the ordinary, the here—and—now, that God asks us to recognize that the creation is indeed refreshed like dew—laden grass that is “renewed in the morning” (Ps 90:5), or to put it in more personal and also theological terms, “our inner nature is being renewed every day” (2 Cor 4:16). Seen in this light, what strikes many modern readers as the ludicrous attention to detail in the book of Leviticus, involving God in the minutiae of daily life—all the cooking and cleaning of a people’s domestic life—might be revisioned as the very love of God. A God who cares so much as to desire to be present to us in everything we do. It is this God who speaks to us through the psalmist as he wakes from sleep, amazed, to declare, “I will bless you, Lord, you give me counsel, and even at night direct my heart” (Ps 16:7, GR). It is this God who speaks to us through the prophets, reminding us that by meeting the daily needs of the poor and vulnerable, characterized in the scriptures as the widows and orphans, we prepare the way of the Lord and make our own hearts ready for the day of salvation. When it comes to the nitty—gritty, what ties these threads of biblical narrative together into a revelation of God’s love is that God has commanded us to refrain from grumbling about the dailiness of life. Instead we are meant to accept it gratefully, as a reality that humbles us even as it gives us cause for praise. The rhythm of sunrise and sunset marks a passage of time that makes each day rich with the possibility of salvation, a concept that is beautifully summed up in an ancient saying from the monastic tradition: “Abba Poeman said concerning Abba Pior that every day he made a new beginning.

She does not read it the way she and Kat used to read books - devouring them with the speed of two people famished for words, ideas, and beautiful sentences that make you feel everything. No, she reads Endurance the way a person might read the Bible - in small passages, repeated again and again, to help her stay grounded. To help her persevere, and understand her place in the world. She has missed books, but she's been afraid of them, same as music. Books make you feel things hard. They hit the tender spots. Books remind her of her and Kat, but also of her old self, too, the mostly carefree self. The girl who was just so happy to come home from the library with a big stack of new stuff to read. Books were dangerous.

If you have the impression that I am minimizing the place of the Bible in the life of the Christian, you are missing my point. I know the Bible speaks about the importance of feeding from God’s Word daily. However when a person’s goal is simply to read the Bible, he isn’t seeing the big picture. We should read the Bible because we want to know Christ in a more intimate way, not just to fulfill a religious duty. Nobody in the New Testament was more committed to studying the Bible than the Pharisees. They could quote long passages from memory. They knew the content of their Bible because they pored over it daily. But Jesus had a word to say about their kind of Bible study: “You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal

What is the meaning of the phrase “shall be bound in heaven... shall be loosed in heaven?” Williams, the Bible translator, points out for us that the verb form is the perfect passive participle, so the reference is to things in a state of having been already forbidden (or permitted). This tells us that whatever is bound or loosed by the believer is done on the basis that it has already been done “in heaven,” i.e. by the Lord himself. What is it, then, that the Lord has already bound and which he has given us power to bind again? Jesus teaches us: Or else how can one enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man? and then he will spoil his house. Matt. 12:29 The context of this passage finds Jesus casting out demons. His authority for thus doing is challenged by the religious authorities. They accuse him of doing it by the power of the devil himself. Jesus is explaining that he is able to control demon spirits and make them obey him because he has already bound the strong man — Satan. The fact that the demons obey Him is evidence of Satan being bound. Satan is already bound “in heaven” — by heaven’s power. His power is broken. The key is given to us. We have power over him, too. Amen! The Greek word for “bind” in the passage before us is deo. It means to fasten or tie — as with chains, as an animal tied to keep it from straying. This is glorious! When Satan is bound he is made inoperable. He loses his ability to act against us.

Early on I realized the people I most mirrored in the Bible were those blasted Pharisees, the ones who tried so hard their entire lives to be good, to work hard, to correct the thinking of others. They too were probably grimly proud of the way they memorized passages of scripture, how they could out-argue anyone, how they kept their society neat and clean of any moral gray. And so when I was in Bible college, when I read and read and read the words of Jesus, when I saw how his life was a continuous announcement of some mysterious amorphous thing called the kingdom of God, I became very scared indeed— because I didn’t understand what the good news of the kingdom was, or how to bring it to earth, or how to be a Christian in a world that doesn’t value taking care of others.

The glorious truth is that the Bible does not teach that all men are separated and cut off from God because of sin.  It is a mythical conclusion, arrived at by men philosophizing in accordance with the fallen mind; men who, in their scramble for proof texts, read their preconceived ideas into passages that are irrelevant to their argument.  What the Bible actually teaches is that it was us who separated ourselves from God.  The guilt, shame and fear that accompanied sin caused us to run and hide, but God was right where He’d always been. Remember, man’s mind had become corrupted by the knowledge of good and evil, rendering him incapable of perceiving God rightly.  Over the years, people born with this same inability began viewing their loving Father as someone to be terrified of. 

But sound Bible study is rooted in a celebration of delayed gratification. Gaining Bible literacy requires allowing our study to have a cumulative effect—across weeks, months, years—so that the interrelation of one part of Scripture to another reveals itself slowly and gracefully, like a dust cloth slipping inch by inch from the face of a masterpiece. The Bible does not want to be neatly packaged into three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day increments. It does not want to be reduced to truisms and action points. It wants to introduce dissonance into your thinking, to stretch your understanding. It wants to reveal a mosaic of the majesty of God one passage at a time, one day at a time, across a lifetime. By all means, bring eagerness to your study time. Yes, bring hunger. But certainly bring patience—come ready to study for the long term.

There comes a time in most of our lives in which we no longer have the strength to lift ourselves out or to pretend ourselves strong. Sometimes our minds want to break because life stomped on us and God didn’t stop it. Like a family who watches their loved one slip and fall onto the rocks on a mountainside vacation when all was supposed to be beautiful and fun; or like a parent whose child was mistreated or shot while at school. Charles and those who lost their loved ones that terrible day had to come to terms with suffering in a house of God while the word was preached and a prankster cackled. Questions fill our lungs. We mentally wheeze. We go numb. When on vacation or at school or at church, that kind of thing is not supposed to happen there. Even the knees of a Jesus-follower will buckle. Charles’ wife, Susannah, said of Charles at that time, “My beloved’s anguish was so deep and violent, that reason seemed to totter in her throne, and we sometimes feared that he would never preach again.”5 Though it cannot be said for all of us or for every person that we have loved, it remains true that, in this cherished case, Charles Spurgeon did preach again. But sorrows of many kinds haunted and hounded him for the rest of his life. His depression came, not only from circumstances, or from questions about whether or not he was consecrated to God, but also from the chemistry of his body. God gave to us a preacher who knew firsthand what it felt like for his reason to totter, not just once, but many times during his life and ministry. And somehow this fellow sufferer named Charles and his dear wife Susannah (who also suffered physically most of her adult life) still made a go of it, insisting to each other and to their generation that the sorrowing have a Savior. On that November morning, in weakness, Charles did what some of us are not yet able to do in our sorrows; he read the Bible. Perhaps it will comfort you to learn that for a while “the very sight of the Bible” made Charles cry.6 Many of us know what this feels like. But this Scripture passage, Philippians 2:9-11, “had such a power of comfort upon [his] distressed spirit.” And being found in human form, he [Jesus] humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name (Phil. 2:8-9). From this Scripture, Charles set the larger story of his hope before us. The same Heavenly Father who picked up His son out of the muck, misery and mistreatment can do the same for us.

Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried." When she had finished, Rides the Wind demanded that she repeat it.Three times he asked her to repeat the passage. Then, setting the Bible aside, he took her hands in his own and said, never taking his eyes from hers, Where Walks the Fire goes,there will I go. Where Walks the Fire lodges, there will I lodge. Her people shall be my people. Her God shall be my God. Looking up,he said, "God who created all things.I thank you for sending Walks the Fire.I take her as my wife. I ask you to be pleased. You make all things.You make her heart sing for me.You make my heart answer back. You give your Son to die for us.We have no min-is-ter,but you know us.We are Lakota. We are husband and wife.We are yours.

Bible Passage: Proverbs 27:1-3   "Boast not thyself of to morrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth. Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth; a stranger, and not thine own lips. A stone is heavy, and the sand weighty; but a fool's wrath is heavier than them both."   ------------------------------------------------ People many times are inclined to boast about what they will or will not do and even to boast about when they will or will not do it.  But Solomon had warned about falling into that trap.  The simple fact as he pointed out is that no one knows for certain any part of the future.  One moment before having a devastating medical emergency, the individual that will have it probably has no clue about what will soon happen.  Similarly a serious automobile accident or some other kind of serious accident might be just a few moments away.  But the person or people that will suffer through that experience do not have any idea about that either.  As everyone knows, the unknown is simply a very big part of this life.

Whereas the Mosaic Law recognized only the reality of deeds, Jesus recognized the reality of inner psychic states. For example: You have heard that it was said to the men of old, "You shall not kill; and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment." But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment ...(Matt. 5:21-22, RSV) And again: You have heard that it was said, "You shall not commit adultery." But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (Ibid. 5:27-28) These passages have a major psychological import. They represent a transition from a kind of crude behavioristic psychology to one which is aware of the reality of the psyche as such without concrete actions. The gospel accounts abound in many other major psychological discoveries. Jesus formulated the conception of psychological projection two thousand years before depth psychology: Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your bother's eye with never a thought for the great plank in your own eye? (Matt. 7:3, New English Bible)

He did it for us. He took the form of man, took all our sins upon Himself, and died on a Roman cross two thousand years ago.” Sally examined the passage again. “So tell me: did it work?” Bernice leaned forward and said, “You be the judge. The Bible says that the penalty for sin is death, but after Jesus paid that penalty He rose from the dead on the third day, so something was different. He conquered sin, so He was able to conquer sin’s penalty. Sure, it worked. It always works. Jesus satisfied divine justice on that Cross. He bore the punishment in full, and God never had to bend the rules. That’s why we call Jesus our Savior. He shed His own blood in our place, and died, and then rose from the grave to prove He’d won over sin and could set us free.” Now Bernice started getting excited. “And you know what thrills me about that? It means we’re special to Him; He really does love us, and we . . . we mean something, we’re here for a reason! And you know what else? No matter what our sins are, no matter where we are or what condition we’re in, we can be forgiven, free and clear, a clean slate!

It is my contention that the popular misuse of “do not judge” reveals just how far the discipline of sound biblical study has slipped in recent years. More than that, it sheds light on the state of our culture, a culture that seeks to avoid accountability and responsibility for personal actions. This current trend and mentality runs counter to the teachings of Scripture. For the collective teaching of the Bible insists that those who are created in the image of God are morally responsible to God and to one another. So to use “do not judge” as a means of dismissing oneself from moral responsibility would be to interpret it in a way that pits it against the rest of Scripture. We should remember that “all Scripture is God-breathed,” or inspired by the Holy Spirit, and as such it is without error and never contradicts itself (because God never contradicts himself). Therefore, it is always wise to interpret a given passage of Scripture by comparing it with the principles and teachings found elsewhere in Scripture. This provides a healthy check and balance and helps us avoid misinterpretations, logical inconsistencies, and inappropriate applications.

Every church became a theatre, where orators, instead of church teachers, harangued, caring not to instruct the people, but striving to attract admiration, to bring opponents to public scorn, and to preach only novelties and paradoxes, such as would tickle the ears of their congregation. This state of things necessarily stirred up an amount of controversy, envy, and hatred, which no lapse of time could appease; so that we can scarcely wonder that of the old religion nothing survives but its outward forms (even these, in the mouth of the multitude, seem rather adulation than adoration of the Deity), and that faith has become a mere compound of credulity and prejudices—aye, prejudices too, which degrade man from rational being to beast, which completely stifle the power of judgment between true and false, which seem, in fact, carefully fostered for the purpose of extinguishing the last spark of reason! Piety, great God! and religion are become a tissue of ridiculous mysteries; men, who flatly despise reason, who reject and turn away from understanding as naturally corrupt, these, I say, these of all men, are thought, O lie most horrible! to possess light from on High. Verily, if they had but one spark of light from on High, they would not insolently rave, but would learn to worship God more wisely, and would be as marked among their fellows for mercy as they now are for malice; if they were concerned for their opponents’ souls, instead of for their own reputations, they would no longer fiercely persecute, but rather be filled with pity and compassion. Furthermore, if any Divine light were in them, it would appear from their doctrine. I grant that they are never tired of professing their wonder at the profound mysteries of Holy Writ; still I cannot discover that they teach anything but speculations of Platonists and Aristotelians, to which (in order to save their credit for Christianity) they have made Holy Writ conform; not content to rave with the Greeks themselves, they want to make the prophets rave also; showing conclusively, that never even in sleep have they caught a glimpse of Scripture’s Divine nature. The very vehemence of their admiration for the mysteries plainly attests, that their belief in the Bible is a formal assent rather than a living faith: and the fact is made still more apparent by their laying down beforehand, as a foundation for the study and true interpretation of Scripture, the principle that it is in every passage true and divine.

I decide that candor is probably best, that I will never see this woman again after this month. “I’m honestly not sure why I’m here, other than I feel like I could use some spiritual direction in my life.” This is the truth. “Why do you feel that way?” Nora asks. I sit for a few seconds, because this is a good question. I’m not terribly sure, other than my soul is weary, my usual recipe of prayer and reflecting on passages from the Bible isn’t inspiring me, and I sense a gaping, run-ragged hole in my soul where mature wisdom should be. Also, I don’t know where my home is, where I might really belong. Years have passed since I last felt poured-into, I tell her, and I have not bothered to seek it out. I have embarked on this year of travel, at age thirty-seven, feeling less confident than I did a decade ago about what I believe to be true, and how that truth intersects with who I am. I am weary from game playing and formulaic answers, and the evangelical-Christian hat that I have worn daily with every outfit since I was fourteen feels too small, headache inducing. I fidget daily in its discomfort, but I don’t know how to exchange it, how it should be resized. Perhaps I can stitch a new hat from scraps I find scattered around the globe, I suggest. Perhaps she could be my milliner, maybe help me find the first scrap, floating somewhere along the sidewalks of old Chiang

Shortly after I returned home from the Ukraine, I became severely ill with what doctors believed was a parasite. I couldn’t hold my food down and lost a lot of weight. Different doctors kept prescribing me antibiotics, but none of them seemed to help. For a couple of months, I was poked and tested in a variety of ways, only to have more questions surface than answers. Then I was sent to an ear, nose, and throat doctor for an evaluation. I was sitting in a waiting room with a bunch of toddlers, when my name was called. By the time I got into the examination room I knew I’d had enough. “Hey, I’m outta here,” I told the doctor. “I’ll take my chance with the resurrection.” Well, a couple of weeks later, my insurance agent called me. He was one of my lifelong friends and sounded concerned. “Hey, Jase,” he said. “Your insurance company wants you to see a psychiatrist.” Apparently, the ear, nose, and throat doctor recommended I undergo a full psychiatric evaluation based on my refusal to be examined, along with my speech on the resurrection! Apparently, he thought I was crazy. I convinced my buddy that I didn’t need a psychiatrist and eventually got over my illness. I would later read a passage of scripture in the Bible that caused me to smile in reflection on the entire ordeal. Second Corinthians 5:13 says: “If we are out of our mind, as some say, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you.

THE “ROSEBUD” OR “EMBRYO” OF FAITH By itself what was said above does not suffice to explain precisely how a rudimentary faith can be substantially the same as explicit Christian faith. The answer lies in St. Thomas's exegesis of Heb 11:6. The verse reads: “Whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.” For St. Thomas, this verse already contains the whole “substance of the faith” that is mentioned in Heb 11:1: All the articles are contained implicitly in certain primary matters of faith, [namely] God's existence and His providence over the salvation of man, according to Hebrews 11: “He that cometh to God, must believe that He is, and is a rewarder to them that seek Him.” For the existence of God includes all that we believe to exist in God eternally, and in these our happiness consists; while belief in His providence includes all those things which God dispenses in time, for man's salvation, and which are the way to that happiness: and in this way, again, some of those articles which follow from these are contained in others: thus faith in the Redemption of mankind includes belief in the Incarnation of Christ, His Passion and so forth.7 For St. Thomas, all that is essential to the Christian faith (the Resurrection, the triune nature of God, the moral law, etc.) is rooted in the two primary “matters” (credibilia) of faith mentioned Heb 11:6, namely, God's existence and his providence. In his insightful reflection on this passage from St. Thomas, Charles Journet explains that the Trinity is already involved in the more fundamental revelation of God's existence and is contained therein as a rose in its bud.

Americans struggle with silence.  It seems we must have the radio blaring in the car or a TV on in the house, even if no one is watching.  We can't handle solitude very well.  Yet, solitude is the one thing a deer hunter craves and anticipates.  There are a few times when the woods get so quiet you feel like you are the only living creature around.  It's life-changing!  People are most like themselves in nature.  You can get down to the real you—no veneer, no facade, no masquerade— and it is there that God can do wonders on us.  I like thinking of it as an anesthetic that puts everything to sleep so that surgery can take place. Jesus knew the power of time alone with God, and we also need to know it — by experience.  He would often slip away (Luke 5:16).  The disciples would awaken, look around, and discover that Jesus was gone.  He loved the early morning moments before the world came alive and began buzzing with activity (Mark 1:35-39).  He knew that soon everyone would wipe the sleep out of their eyes, and He would be in high demand.  So, He placed high priority on those private, devoted moments, in order to escape and be alone with His Father.  He didn’t just squeeze in prayer and meditation between all His preaching and miracles.  Someone once said, “Jesus went from place of prayer to place of prayer with teaching and miracles in between.”  I like that.               Those who hunt know the adrenaline rush caused by the crunching leaves as a whitetail slowly approaches.  There is also such a surge when the word of God is read.  I hope you will enjoy both as you read this book.  My greatest satisfaction would be to know that you have found yourself a quiet place to read this book and contemplate the spiritual lessons in it.  When you have even more time, get your Bible and turn to the passages cited and read them more fully.  It will deepen your understanding.

1. Commit to take the lead in the godliness of your relationship. Read the Bible's passages about how men and women and all Christians should treat one another. Especially take the lead in establishing boundaries that will keep you from sexual sin. Assume that this woman is going to be your wife or the wife of some other Christian brother (who might be currently dating your future wife). Treat her as the precious sister in Christ that she is. 2. Decide in advance whether or not you are willing to love a woman in the self-sacrificing, nurturing way the Bible describes. Until you are ready to faithfully hold a woman's heart in your hand, do not enter into a dating relationship. 3. Realizing that God wants you to learn to put her interests ahead of your own, ask her the kinds of things she likes to do and be eager to spend time doing them. 4. Be willing to talk about the relationship. Initiate honest dialogue about how you feel. Do not resent her desire to have the relationship defined, but protect her heart by making your level of commitment clear and thereby making clear the appropriate kind of intimacy to go along with that commitment. 5. Pay attention to her heart. Ask her about her burdens and cares. Seek ways to minister to her and to make her cares your own. Instead of being critical of her, speak words of encouragement and support. 6. Do not be shy in ministering the Word of God to her. Do not preach, but exhort her and call to mind God's promises and God's love for her in Jesus Christ. Make it a primary goal that she will be spiritually stronger by having been in a relationship with you. 7. If something about her bothers you, think about how you can encourage her in that area. Realize that none of us is without flaws. Pray for her weakness and try to strengthen her in that area. If your concerns are enough to deter you from wanting to marry her, let her know in a forthright manner while being as considerate as possible.

The God of Exodus and the prophets is a warrior God. My rejection of this God as a liberating image for feminist theology is based on my understanding of the symbolic function of a warrior God in cultures where warfare is glorified as a symbol of manhood and power. My primary concern here is with the function of symbolism, not with the historical truth of the Exodus stories, with questions of how many slaves may or may not have been freed, nor by what means, nor with questions of the different traditions that may have been woven together to shape the biblical stories. Since liberation theology is fundamentally concerned with the use of biblical symbolism in shaping contemporary reality and the understanding of the divine ground, this method is appropriate here. In a world threatened by total nuclear annihilation, we cannot afford a warlike image of God. The image of Yahweh as liberator of the oppressed in the exodus and as concerned for social justice in the prophets cannot be extricated from the image of Yahweh as warrior. In Exodus Yahweh is imaged as concerned for the oppressed Israelites. Exodus 3:7-8 is a good example. ‘Then Yahweh said, ‘I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters: I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians.’ People in oppressed circumstances and liberation theologians find passages like this inspiring. I too have been profoundly moved by the image of a God who takes compassion on suffering, but this passage has a conclusion I cannot accept. The passage continues ‘and to bring them up out of the land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.’ Here Yahweh promises ‘his people’ a land that is inhabited by other peoples. In order to justify this action by Yahweh, the inhabitants of the land are portrayed in other parts of the Bible as evil or idolators (a term that itself bears further examination). More recently liberation theologians have portrayed these other peoples as ruling-class opponents of the poor peasant and working-class Hebrews. However that may be, the clear implication of the passage is that Yahweh intends to dispose the peoples from the lands they inhabit.

In 1786, Jefferson, then the American ambassador to France, and Adams, then the American ambassador to Britain, met in London with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the ambassador to Britain. The Americans wanted to negotiate a peace treaty based on Congress’ vote to appease. During the meeting Jefferson and Adams asked the ambassador why Muslims held so much hostility towards America, a nation with which they had no previous contacts. In a later meeting with the American Congress, the two future presidents reported that Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja had answered that Islam “was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Qur’an that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.” For the following 15 years, the American government paid the Muslims millions of dollars for the safe passage of American ships or the return of American hostages. Most Americans do not know that the payments in ransom and Jizyah tribute amounted to 20 percent of United States government annual revenues in 1800. Not long after Jefferson’s inauguration as president in 1801, he dispatched a group of frigates to defend American interests in the Mediterranean, and informed Congress. Declaring that America was going to spend “millions for defense but not one cent for tribute,” Jefferson pressed the issue by deploying American Marines and many of America’s best warships to the Muslim Barbary Coast. The USS Constitution, USS Constellation, USS Philadelphia, USS Chesapeake, USS Argus, USS Syren and USS Intrepid all fought. In 1805, American Marines marched across the dessert from Egypt into Tripolitania, forcing the surrender of Tripoli and the freeing of all American slaves. During the Jefferson administration, the Muslim Barbary States, crumbled as a result of intense American naval bombardment and on shore raids by Marines. They finally agreed officially to abandon slavery and piracy. Jefferson’s victory over the Muslims lives on today in the Marine Hymn with the line “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we will fight our country’s battles on the land as on the sea.” It wasn’t until 1815 that the problem was fully settled by the total defeat of all the Muslim slave trading pirates.

1. Divine Writing: The Bible, down to the details of its words, consists of and is identical with God’s very own words written inerrantly in human language. 2. Total Representation: The Bible represents the totality of God’s communication to and will for humanity, both in containing all that God has to say to humans and in being the exclusive mode of God’s true communication.[11] 3. Complete Coverage: The divine will about all of the issues relevant to Christian belief and life are contained in the Bible.[12] 4. Democratic Perspicuity: Any reasonably intelligent person can read the Bible in his or her own language and correctly understand the plain meaning of the text.[13] 5. Commonsense Hermeneutics: The best way to understand biblical texts is by reading them in their explicit, plain, most obvious, literal sense, as the author intended them at face value, which may or may not involve taking into account their literary, cultural, and historical contexts. 6. Solo Scriptura:[14] The significance of any given biblical text can be understood without reliance on creeds, confessions, historical church traditions, or other forms of larger theological hermeneutical frameworks, such that theological formulations can be built up directly out of the Bible from scratch. 7. Internal Harmony: All related passages of the Bible on any given subject fit together almost like puzzle pieces into single, unified, internally consistent bodies of instruction about right and wrong beliefs and behaviors. 8. Universal Applicability: What the biblical authors taught God’s people at any point in history remains universally valid for all Christians at every other time, unless explicitly revoked by subsequent scriptural teaching. 9. Inductive Method: All matters of Christian belief and practice can be learned by sitting down with the Bible and piecing together through careful study the clear “biblical” truths that it teaches. The prior nine assumptions and beliefs generate a tenth viewpoint that—although often not stated in explications of biblicist principles and beliefs by its advocates—also commonly characterizes the general biblicist outlook, particularly as it is received and practiced in popular circles: 10. Handbook Model: The Bible teaches doctrine and morals with every affirmation that it makes, so that together those affirmations comprise something like a handbook or textbook for Christian belief and living, a compendium of divine and therefore inerrant teachings on a full array of subjects—including science, economics, health, politics, and romance.[15]

It was passages like these, where there is a clear mocking of literalist readings of Scripture, that had brought me back around to Christianity after a long stretch, following college, when my notion of God and Jesus had grown, to put it gently, tenuous. During my sojourn in ironclad atheism, the primary arsenal leveled against Christianity had been its failure on empirical grounds. Surely enlightened reason offered a more co­herent cosmos. Surely Occam’s razor cut the faithful free from blind faith. There is no proof of God; therefore, it is unreasonable to believe in God. Although I had been raised in a devout Christian family, where prayer and Scripture readings were a nightly ritual, I, like most scientific types, came to believe in the possibility of a material conception of reality, an ultimately scientific worldview that would grant a complete metaphysics, minus outmoded concepts like souls, God, and bearded white men in robes. I spent a good chunk of my twenties trying to build a frame for such an endeavor. The problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning — to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That’s not to say that if you believe in meaning, you must also believe in God. It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn’t have any. In other words, existential claims have no weight; all knowledge is scientific knowledge. Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue. Between these core passions and scientific theory, there will always be a gap. No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience. The realm of metaphysics remains the province of revelation (this, not atheism, is what Occam argued, after all). And atheism can be justified only on these grounds. The prototypical atheist, then, is Graham Greene’s commandant from The Power and the Glory, whose atheism comes from a revelation of the absence of God. The only real atheism must be grounded in a world-making vision. The favorite quote of many an atheist, from the Nobel Prize–winning French biologist Jacques Monod, belies this revelatory aspect: “The ancient covenant is in pieces; man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance.” Yet I returned to the central values of Christianity -- sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness -- because I found them so compelling. There is a tension in the Bible between justice and mercy, between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And the New Testament says you can never be good enough: goodness is the thing, and you can never live up to it. The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.

In Romans 12:4-8, Paul writes about gifts: “For as we have many members in one body, but all the members do not have the same function, so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another. Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, let us prophesy in proportion to our faith; or ministry, let us use it in our ministering; he who teaches, in teaching; he who exhorts, in exhortation; he who gives, with liberality; he who leads, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness.” “Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, let us use them.” Recognize that the gifts inside you are not only for you; just as the gifts inside other people around you are not only for them. We are meant to help each other. God designed us this way on purpose! All being members of one body, our successes are shared — there is no need to be threatened by another person’s gift. Use your gifts, and encourage the people in your life to use their gifts as well. You will be blessed as a result! Unfortunately, one thing that keeps us from asking for help or taking advantage of the talents in people around us is pride. Never allow pride to keep you from asking for counsel when it is needed! 1 Corinthians 12:20 is another passage about gifts: “now indeed there are many members, yet one body. And the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’; nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’ ” We need each other, and joining our gifts together will result in a much stronger body. If you have time, read 1 Corinthians 12:4-20. Reflect on how there can be unity in the diversity of gifts if we use our different gifts properly. Determine that you will not be threatened by anyone else’s gifts! Esther was not afraid of the gifts in the people around her. Let’s see how she responds to the wisdom of others today. And every day Mordecai paced in front of the court of the women’s quarters, to learn of Esther’s welfare and what was happening to her. Esther 2:11 Every day, Mordecai goes to the palace gates to inquire after Esther and learn of what was happening to her. He goes to the palace gates with purpose. He paces in front of the women’s court until he has learns the day’s news about Esther. Even though she is no longer under his roof, he stills feels a strong responsibility toward her, and acts accordingly. He is a faithful man, and has set a great example before Esther. The news that he hears concerning Esther daily must be good: her inward beauty and submission to authority are two of the many wonderful traits that God placed in her so that she will be effective in Persia. Even though Esther is in an unfamiliar place and experiencing “firsts” every day in the palace, God is making sure she has what she needs. Esther did not need to feel nervous! She needed wise counsel; it has been provided for her in Mordecai and Hegai. She needs a pleasant and patient personality; that has been being developed in her by the Lord for many years. In your own life, you are constantly undergoing change and growth as you are submitting to the Lord. Whether or not you can see it, God is continually preparing you for what lies ahead so that you will have what you need when you need it. The God who loves you so much knows your future, and He is preparing you today for what you will experience tomorrow. Esther is receiving what she needs as well. She is in the palace undergoing her beauty preparations — a twelve month process! Even through this extended period of time, Mordecai is still at the palace gates every day (the Bible does not say that he stopped his concern for her at any point). It is an entire

1.     Where do you see a precedent for what you hope to do? What word are you hearing from God that is inspiring you to take this action? 2. Can you point to something you are hearing in prayer or a passage from the Bible which feels like a direct word for you? 3. What is your kingdom dream? Where and with whom do you dream of seeing Jesus reign and be glorified? Write down the story or stories that have led you to this point. What were key moments and discoveries that you can point to from that story? Think of someone who loves Jesus and loves you, who might want to step out in faith to do something new and brave. Write down their name as a potential team member:

I remember when I first became a believer in Jesus. I somehow thought it was my duty to change people for the sake of spreading the gospel. I would rejoice when people would find hope in Christ but would feel like a failure when someone would decline the invitation to know Jesus as Lord and Savior. It was a little discouraging. But that’s because my understanding of how God works in my life was off. I say this because I believe many of today’s Christians put too much pressure on themselves to bring people to Jesus. It’s our job to love people, not change them. Only the Holy Spirit has the power and authority to do such a thing. Our calling is to simply share the gospel in love and truth, showing the character of Jesus through our everyday lives. When you let yourself off the hook for being solely responsible for somebody’s soul, you will find a totally new sense of freedom: the freedom to love. You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to know all the right things to say. You don’t have to have all the answers. And if your message is totally rejected . . . it’s not on you. It’s between that individual and God. Maybe you’ll get another opportunity to try, but it’s not your job to change him or her. Our job is to simply be available for those who are looking to know more about God, take opportunities to be vocal about our personal relationships with him, and continue to point people back to God with every question they may have. I didn’t understand this in the early years of my faith, and I put way too much pressure on myself when it came to people being transformed. Why? Because we live in a performance-based culture, and yes, even pastors have a tendency to fall captive to its pull. Like me, you probably feel pressured from multiple angles. We’re told by advertising that we need to be attractive, by parents that we need good jobs, by teachers that we need good grades, by friends that we need to give more time. Jesus isn’t like that. He doesn’t make irrational demands and point a finger at us for not living up to the expectation. The only thing Jesus wants from us is our love. And when we learn to offer him that love, we long to obey him and live in the better way he has for us as well. It’s a beautiful thing. As we learned from Jesus in Matthew 25, we can love God simply by loving others. Whether that love produces a change in their lives is up to God. We don’t have to stress about it. Only the Holy Spirit has the power and authority to change someone’s heart. Our calling is to simply share the gospel in love and truth, showing the character of Jesus through our everyday lives. This alone is the calling of a Christian. This alone is a weighty yet fulfilling purpose for all who choose to pick up their crosses daily. If we were to scour the Bible, we’d see there isn’t a single passage that states we are called to change people ourselves. Why? Because it’s not our job, and it was never intended to be. We must take a step back and realize that God’s job is to be God and our job is to lead people toward the door that is hope. Once we’ve done this, we must let go and allow the one who created the world to take care of the rest. If we had the power to change people, the transformative love of God wouldn’t be needed. Don’t waste your time trying to change people. Instead, focus on loving well.

What people have I read about, and what have I learned about them? What places have I read about, and what have I learned about them? If the place is not mentioned, can I find out where it is? Do I know its position on the map? Does the passage refer to any particular time in the history of the children of Israel, or of some leading character? Can I tell from memory what I have just been reading? Are there any parallel passages or texts that throw light on this passage? Have I read anything about God the Father, or about Jesus Christ, or about the Holy Spirit? What have I read about myself, about man’s sinful nature, or about the spiritual new nature? Is there any duty for me to observe? Any example to follow? Any promise to lay hold of? Any exhortation for my guidance? Any prayer that I may pray? How is this Scripture profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness? Does the passage of Scripture contain the gospel? Is there a main verse of the chapter or passage? Can I repeat it from memory?

The deep happiness that marriage can bring, then, lies on the far side of sacrificial service in the power of the Spirit. That is, you only discover your own happiness after each of you has put the happiness of your spouse ahead of your own, in a sustained way, in response to what Jesus has done for you. Some will ask, “If I put the happiness of my spouse ahead of my own needs—then what do I get out of it?” The answer is—happiness. That is what you get, but a happiness through serving others instead of using them, a happiness that won’t be bad for you. It is the joy that comes from giving joy, from loving another person in a costly way. Today’s culture of the “Me-Marriage” finds this very proposal—of putting the interests of your spouse ahead of your own—oppressive. But that is because it does not look deeply enough into this crucial part of Christian teaching about the nature of reality. What is that teaching? Christianity asserts, to begin with, that God is triune—that is, three persons within one God. And from John 17 and other passages we learn that from all eternity, each person—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—has glorified, honored, and loved the other two. So there is an “other-orientation” within the very being of God. When Jesus Christ went to the cross, he was simply acting in character. As C. S. Lewis wrote, when Jesus sacrificed himself for us, he did “in the wild weather of his outlying provinces” that which from all eternity “he had done at home in glory and gladness.” 6 Then the Bible says that human beings were made in God’s image. That means, among other things, that we were created to worship and live for God’s glory, not our own. We were made to serve God and others. That means paradoxically that if we try to put our own happiness ahead of obedience to God, we violate our own nature and become, ultimately, miserable. Jesus restates the principle when he says, “Whoever wants to save his life shall lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16: 25). He is saying, “If you seek happiness more than you seek me, you will have neither; if you seek to serve me more than serve happiness, you will have both.

his enemies in chapter 19 as the “great supper of God” where the birds of prey eat the flesh of his defeated foes (19:17). While Leviathan is not included in this Revelation passage, it is the same kind of nature banquet motif as described in Psalm 74: creatures feasting on the flesh of the enemies of God. The “banquet of flesh” was a common way of symbolizing deliverance from and victory

See how blessed we really are? We’re comforted knowing there is nothing entered anywhere in the records of eternity that stands against any soul that truly believes in the Lord Jesus Christ! This includes us!” Pastor Lau grimaced and shook his head. “The same is true that every promise God made in the Bible to those who reject Him regarding their demise, will come to pass exactly as it was written… “For proof of this, all we have to do is continue on in the passage. Our Lord went on to say in verse forty-one: ‘Then He will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’ “In verse forty-six, Christ went on to say, ‘Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.

But I rather like it. This swift change of scene, this blending of motion and experience-it is much better than heavy, long-drawn-out kind of writing to which we are accustomed. It is closer to life. In life, too, changes and transitions flash by before our eyes, and emotions of the soul are like a hurricane. The cinema has divined the mystery of motion. And that is greatness. "When I was writing 'The Living Corpse,' I tore my hair and chewed my fingers because I could not give enough scenes, enough pictures, because I could not pass rapidly enough from one event to another. The accursed stage was like a halter choking the throat of the dramatist; and I had to cut the life and swing of the work according to the dimensions and requirements of the stage. I remember when I was told that some clever person had devised a scheme for a revolving stage, on which a number of scenes could be prepared in advance. I rejoiced like a child, and allowed myself to write ten scenes into my play. Even then I was afraid the play would be killed. "But the films! They are wonderful! Drr! and a scene is ready! Drr! and we have another! We have the sea, the coast, the city, the palace-and in the palace there is tragedy (there Is always tragedy in palaces, as we see in Shakespeare). "I am seriously thinking of writing a play for the screen. I have a subject for it. It is a terrible and bloody theme. I am not afraid of bloody themes. Take Homer or the Bible, for instance. How many bloodthirsty passages there are in them- murders, wars. And yet these are the sacred books, and they ennoble and uplift the people. It is not the subject itself that is so terrible. It is the propagation of bloodshed, and the justification for it, that is really terrible! Some friends of mine returned from Kursk recently and told me a shocking incident. It is a story for the films. You couldn't write it in fiction or for the stage. But on the screen it would be good. Listen-it may turn out to be a powerful thing!

Most slaves achieved status within the black community by winning the respect of their fellow slaves, not their owners. Indeed, slave leaders generally secured their high standing by virtue of opposing their owners, not collaborating with them. Many were connected with the new religiosity in the quarter, as preachers, shamen, and conjurers - men and women who could join the natural and unnatural worlds together, whether through African folk rituals or biblical injunctions. Others were healers and midwives, and still others earned the respect of their peers in the field or workshop. A few secured a bit of book learning and were able to read the Bible. All were enmeshed in the expanding web of kinship and spirituality - connections of blood, marriage, and belief - that bound slaves together. While they may have exhibited some personal quality, such as courage, intelligence, honesty, or piety, that their compatriots found attractive, it was kinship - a sense of belonging to a common family, on this earth or in heaven hereafter - that carried them to the top of black society and provided the basis for solidarity. Whether their social position rested on knowledge of the cosmos or the key to the corn crib, whether their authority derived from the Big House or the quarter, it was to these men and women - not their owners - that slaves turned first in moments of distress. And few crises shook slave society as deeply as the transfer from the seaboard to the interior. Annealed in the furnace of the Second Middle Passage and the cotton and sugar revolutions, a new generation of leaders struggled to express the collective aspirations of a people who were often divided by their multiple origins, diverse expectations, and increasingly differential wealth.

passages in the Bible that contradict the “ten lost tribes” myth, but I digress.)

The saints are the true interpreters of Holy Scriptures. The meaning of a given passage of the Bible becomes most intelligible in those human beings who have been totally transfixed by it and have lived it out.

Research for this book has made me aware of aspects of Christianity I find disturbing. During the past several years, rereading the gospels, I was struck by how their vision of supernatural struggle both expresses conflict and raises it to cosmic dimensions. This research, then, reveals certain fault lines in Christian tradition that have allowed for the demonizing of others throughout Christian history—fault lines that go back nearly two thousand years to the origins of the Christian movement. While writing this book I often recalled a saying of Søren Kierkegaard: "An unconscious relationship is more powerful than a conscious one." For nearly two thousand years, for example, many Christians have taken for granted that Jews killed Jesus and the Romans were merely their reluctant agents, and that this implicates not only the perpetrators but (as Matthew insists) all their progeny in evil. Throughout the centuries, countless Christians listening to the gospels absorbed, along with the quite contrary sayings of Jesus, the association between the forces of evil and Jesus’ Jewish enemies. Whether illiterate or sophisticated, those who heard the gospel stories, or saw them illustrated in their churches, generally assumed both their historical accuracy and their religious validity. Especially since the nineteenth century, however, increasing numbers of scholars have applied literary and historical analysis to the gospels—the so-called higher criticism. Their critical analysis indicated that the authors of Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source from which to construct their amplified gospels. Many scholars assumed that Mark was the most historically reliable because it was the simplest in style and was written closer to the time of Jesus than the others were. But historical accuracy may not have been the gospel writers’ first consideration. Further analysis demonstrated how passages from the prophetic writings and the psalms of the Hebrew Bible were woven into the gospel narratives. Barnabas Lindars and others suggested that Christian writers often expanded biblical passages into whole episodes that “proved,” to the satisfaction of many believers, that events predicted by the prophets found their fulfillment in Jesus’ coming.

Part of our confusion over the meaning of love arises from our use of one word for many kinds of love. We can love a passage of Scripture, song, family member, sport, pet, chocolate candy, or success—and use the same word for all of them. If there were different words for all the kinds of love that we speak of, however, the dictionary would be considerably more complicated. According to the Bible, love is a deep, meaningful action that God intends as a unifying factor in our lives. By love we are drawn together and united as one in spirit (Col. 3:14). Have you explained true, unconditional love to your children? They talk about it, but do they know your version—which I hope is God’s version? Do you know how to tell them? Have you modeled it for them? When you say, “Honey, I love you,” do you mean “I like the way you look today” or possibly “You did a great job with that task”? Yes, love has different meanings.

In those early days, members of the Platteel group would advise everyone what passages to read from the Bible, what scriptures we should consider when we were trying to reflect morally about our new national situation.

UnClobber is my attempt to say, in one word, that I do not believe that God stands opposed to those who are attracted to the same sex, or that God withholds divine blessing from a same-sex relationship. UnClobber came out of my desire to reverse the damage of the so-called “Clobber Passages.

However, Sha’ul’s point throughout the passage, and indeed throughout Romans, is that for Jews and Gentiles alike there has never been more than one route to righteousness, namely, trusting God; so that the Torah is built on trusting God and from beginning to end has always required faith.

Together they read plays and poems by William Shakespeare and Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, and Bianca translated some of Ovid's poetry for her as well as parts of Homer's great works. They relished the poems of Andrew Marvell, John Dryden and John Milton. They read excerpts from the King James Bible, as well as passages from books of history, gardening, medicine and more. The closet wasn't much, but it was Rosamund's, especially now it bore no resemblance to its former owner. It was her cave in which, like Ali Baba, she kept her trove of treasured ideas and growing knowledge, but could open and close it at will with the key hanging around her neck. It was in this room that Rosamund finally started to feel a sense of belonging.

Furthermore, as letters emerging from an ancient Greco-Roman context, the Epistles presume certain cultural norms, like patriarchy, slavery, and patronage, and reflect the unique concerns of a minority religious sect in an imperial context. They expect women to wear head coverings (1 Corinthians 11:6), men to have short hair (11:14), and everyone to “greet one another with a holy kiss” (16:20). They wrestle with the age-old question of how to live as citizens of the kingdom of God in the shadow of the empire, as well as specific questions about whether Christians should buy discounted meat after it has been sacrificed to Roman gods. As a result, many passages carry a timeless, universal quality—“God is love” (1 John 4:16), while others reflect the unique challenges confronting followers of Jesus in the first century—“Eat anything sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience” (1 Corinthians 10:25). As Pastor Adam Hamilton explained, “When you read one of Paul’s letters, or any other New Testament letter, you are reading someone else’s mail. Christians often forget this. They read Paul’s letters as though he wrote just for them. This works fine most of the time; Paul’s instructions, his theological reflections and his practical concerns are amazingly timeless. But they become most meaningful, and we are least likely to misapply their teaching, when we seek to understand why he may have written this or that to a given church.

A verse in a letter addressed to Titus illustrates this perfectly. Angered by some of the false teachings emerging from the island of Crete in the Mediterranean, which Titus is busy trying to fix, the apostle Paul declared, “One of Crete’s own prophets has said it: ‘Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.’ This saying is true” (Titus 1:12–13). Believe it or not, I’ve never once heard a sermon preached on this passage. And yet, if these words are truly the inerrant and unchanging words of God intended as universal commands for all people in all places at all times, and if the culture and context are irrelevant to the “plain meaning of the text,” then apparently Christians need to do a better job of mobilizing against the Cretan people. Perhaps we need to construct some “God Hates Cretans” signs, or lobby the government to deport Cretan immigrants, or boycott all movies starring Jennifer Aniston, whose father, I hear, is a lazy, evil, gluttonous Cretan. I’m being facetious of course, but my point is, we dishonor the intent and purpose of the Epistles when we assume they were written in a vacuum for the purpose of filling our desk calendars with inspirational quotes or our theology papers with proof texts. (For the record, Paul told Titus to find among the Cretans leaders who were “blameless,” “hospitable,” “self-controlled,” and “disciplined,” so obviously he didn’t apply the stereotype to all from the island.) The Epistles were never intended to be applied as law.

Philippians 4:6–7 (NKJV), the scriptures on which this book is based, is one of my favorite Bible passages: Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.

The scenes depicted were mostly of a religious nature illustrating passages from Turgan, the Phundahlian bible, and, for the most part, were a series of monotonous repetitions. There was one, which appeared again and again, depicting Turgan creating a round, flat Mars and hurling it into Space, that always reminded me of a culinary artist turning a flap jack in a child's window.

Matthew has also juggled the most favorable readings from various avail able editions and translations of the Old Testament to arrive at a reading of each prophecy that will best match the "fulfillments"! [...] Matthew quotes the Greek Septuagint translation of Isa. 7:14 ("Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name Emannuel"), already a complex and redacted passage in Isaiah. In Isaiah's context the oracle evidently means to assure the chicken-hearted King Ahaz that God would intervene on behalf of Judah in a matter of a very few years, no more than required for a child, soon to be conceived, to grow to the age where he can decline baby food he doesn't like. Assyria will by then have wiped the allies Samaria and Syria off the map. Obviously Isaiah cannot have intended this prophecy to predict events in the life of Jesus more than seven centuries later. Matthew cannot have thought that he did. Like the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, he must have imagined the verse contained a hidden message, only newly discernible in light of the advent of Jesus the Messiah. [...] And in this context, it is important to know that the word translated "virgin" in the King James and New International Versions is the Hebrew almah and means the same as the ambiguous word "maiden," not necessarily innocent of sexual intercourse, [...] Matthew, though, chooses to quote not the Hebrew but rather the Septuagint Greek version where the word parthenos is used. This Greek word is usually thought to have the narrower meaning "sexually virginal." Since Matthew seems to want to tell us that Jesus was conceived virginally, miraculously, he prefers using a version of the Bible that seems to contain an appropriate prediction.

If my mother had one goal, it was to free my mind. My mother spoke to me like an adult. She was always telling me stories, giving me lessons, Bible lessons especially. She was big into Psalms. I had to read Psalms every day. She would quiz me on it. “What does the passage mean? What does it mean to you? How do you apply it to your life?” That was every day of my life. My mom did what school didn’t. She taught me how to think.

Reading the Bible as the church’s book means that passages cannot be abstracted away, because the church is a community made possible by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ; sustained by the Holy Spirit; oriented toward seeking the flourishing of God’s creation while awaiting final restoration. Theologian John Webster identifies “the isolation of the text both from its place in God’s revelatory activity and from its reception in the community” as one of the central disorders of the theology of the Bible.

I’m not terribly sure, other than my soul is weary, my usual recipe of prayer and reflecting on passages from the Bible isn’t inspiring me, and I sense a gaping, run-ragged hole in my soul where mature wisdom should be. Also, I don’t know where my home is, where I might really belong.

Scholars had generally concluded that in all but the Supper scene, Paul was not quoting sayings of Jesus from his ministry. Rather, he was engaged in a practice common throughout early Christian preaching. Paul and his fellow charismatic missionaries of the Christ were relaying directives and revelations which they believed they had received directly from heaven, through inspiration, through visions and interpreting glossalalia (speaking in tongues), or simply through a study of scripture. [...] Others admitted that Paul had no sense of Jesus as an ethical teacher, but saw himself as the mouthpiece for a Christ in heaven who operated on earth in the present time of faith, through God’s Spirit. The footnote pointed to a couple of passages by way of illustration. One of these was 1 Corinthians 14:36-38: ‘Did the word of God originate with you? Are you the only ones it has reached? If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that what I am writing is also done by the Lord’s word.” [...] Paul’s world seemed to be one of inspiration and revelation directly from God—and a competitive one at that. Once again, the atmosphere created by the early documents, by the voices of those who had been the heart and soul of the apostolic generation, was curiously out of sync with the picture crafted by the later evangelists.

The page is torn from Deuteronomy in the Bible, and the circled passage reads, For the LORD your God is he who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies, to give you the victory.

For example, most editions of the Old Testament, intended for a Christian readership (obtained from a Greek translation of the original Hebrew), will translate Isaiah 7:14 to state that "a virgin shall conceive . . ." The English translation of the original Hebrew, used in the corresponding passage in the Hebrew Bible, states that "a young woman shall conceive. . . .

J. C. Ryle[69] (1816-1900) wrote the following: “For many centuries there has prevailed in the Churches of Christ a strange, and to my mind, an unwarrantable mode of dealing with this word ‘Israel.’ It has been interpreted in many passages of the Psalms and Prophets as if it meant nothing more than Christian believers. Have promises been held out to Israel? Men have been told continually that they are addressed to Gentile saints. Have glorious things been described as laid up in store for Israel? Men have been incessantly told that they describe the victories and triumphs of the Gospel in Christian Churches. The proofs of these things are too many to require quotation. No man can read the immense majority of commentaries and popular hymns without seeing this system of interpretation to which I now refer. Against that system I have long protested, and I hope I shall always protest as long as I live.”[70] He continued saying: “The word ‘Israel’ is used nearly seven hundred times in the Bible. I can only discover three senses in which it is used. First, it is one of the names of Jacob, the father of the twelve tribes; a name specially given to him by God. Second, it is a name given to the ten tribes which separated from Judah and Benjamin in the days of Rehoboam and became a distinct kingdom. This kingdom is often called Israel in contradistinction to the kingdom of Judah. Thirdly and lastly, it is a name given to the whole Jewish nation, to all members of the twelve tribes which sprang from Jacob and were brought out of Egypt into the land of Canaan. This is by far the most common signification of the word in the Bible...That Israel, which God has scattered and will yet gather again, is the whole Jewish nation.

Psalm 34:4, which she had committed to memory, popped into her mind: "I sought the LORD, and He heard me, and delivered me from all my fears." Then she though of Psalm 37:5 "Commit thy way unto the LORD; turst also in him: and he shall bring it to pass." She'd found that passage in Grandma's Bible and had quoted it often as a reminder that she should trust the Lord in all things, while she committed her way unto him.

The Value of Private Prayer When you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites who love to pray publicly on street corners and in the synagogues where everyone can see them. I assure you, that is all the reward they will ever get. But when you pray, go away by yourself, shut the door behind you, and pray to your Father secretly. Then your Father, who knows all secrets, will reward you. Matthew 6:5-6   Jesus is our pattern and example for prayer, not only in giving us the Lord’s Prayer but also in the way he practiced prayer himself during his life on earth. He often left the multitudes and his disciples and went apart to pray alone with his Father in heaven. He didn’t just flash an eloquent prayer heavenward to impress his followers; he spent solitary, extended times talking and listening to God. In this passage he exhorts us to do the same. Jesus tells us not to pray like the Pharisees, whose goal was to impress others with their prayers, but to get alone with God and to “shut the door” behind us. That means setting aside our work and tasks, separating ourselves from family, from a spouse, and even from our prayer partners at times, in order to have intimate conversation with our Father in heaven. Then God, who sees and knows all secrets, promises to reward us.   LORD, my heart longs to hear your voice just as Jesus did. Help me to draw away from this frantic and busy world to be alone with you. Open my eyes to see what you want to show me, my ears to hear what you desire to tell me. Then and only then will I know what to pray in secret as I respond to your heart.

We may find ourselves in a situation where jealousy seems to be a justified response, but if left unchecked such negative emotions will grow until they take over our thought life. Several Bible passages include jealousy or envy in a list of sins that believers need to guard against (see Gal. 5:20–21). We can’t afford to take our feelings of jealousy lightly; we need to confess these thought patterns to God and ask for his help. That way we won’t be in danger of doing something we never dreamed we’d do.

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.

Ideally each sermon is the explanation, interpretation, or application of a single dominant idea supported by other ideas, all drawn from one passage or several passages of Scripture.

As she talked of the church, I thought of your grandfather, the one you know, and how his first intellectual adventures were found in the recitation of Bible passages. I thought of your mother, who did the same. And I thought of my own distance from an institution that has, so often, been the only support for our people. I often wonder if in that distance I've missed something, some notions of cosmic hope, some wisdom beyond my mean physical perception of the world, something beyond the body, that I might have transmitted to you.

parallel to all other ages, not a chronological series of events. Indeed, one of the great marvels of God’s gracious activity toward us is that it occurs in real time without being prejudiced in favor of any particular age. Just because we are the latest does not mean we are the best. The effects of sin prevent any age—including ours—from being “golden,” at least in the spiritual sense. Every Christian generation learns equally the lessons of Revelation—that God is in control, that the powers of the world are minuscule when compared with God, that God is as likely to work through apparent weakness and failure as through strength and success, and that in the end God’s people will prevail. Revelation is the last book of the Bible. It reveals important truths about the end times. But it is also last in another important sense—it calls on all the hermeneutical courage, wisdom, and maturity one can muster in order to be understood properly. In many ways it serves as a graduation exercise for the NIV Application Commentary Series, an opportunity to fully apply the many lessons we have learned in the Bridging Contexts sections of previous volumes. God’s time is his, not ours. The story of God’s gracious activity on our behalf will be fulfilled in a great and glorious conclusion. But all Christians, everywhere and at all times, have equal access to the time. That access has been and is made possible by God’s message in the book of Revelation. Terry C. Muck Author’s Preface AS A NEW CHRISTIAN recently converted from atheism, I eagerly hurried through Paul’s letters, reaching Revelation as soon as possible. Once I reached it, however, I could hardly understand a word of it. I listened attentively to the first few “prophecy teachers” I heard, but even if they had not contradicted one another, over the years I watched as most of their detailed predictions failed to materialize. Perhaps six years after my conversion, as I began to read Revelation in Greek for the first time, the book came alive to me. Because I was now moving through the text more carefully, I noticed the transitions and the structure, and I realized it was probably addressing something much different from what I had first supposed. At the same time, I catalogued parallels I found between Revelation and biblical prophets like Daniel, Ezekiel, and Zechariah. I also began reading an apocalypse contemporary with Revelation, 4 Ezra (2 Esdras in the Apocrypha), to learn more about the way Revelation’s original, first-century audience may have heard its claims. Yet even in my first two years as a Christian, Revelation and other end-time passages proved a turning point for me. As a young Christian, I was immediately schooled in a particular, popular end-time view, which I respectfully swallowed (the