Learning to pray for others is one of the first things we learn as Christians: we see it commended on every other page of the New Testament; we see it modelled in every other meeting of Christians; and Christian parents model it to their children from birth.
A brief meditation on Facebook, fear, and the love (fear) of men.
Unlike other books of the Bible, Psalms and Proverbs are overtly and easily recognisable as compilations of material.
As we read Psalms, we've been growing in our understanding of the Messiah: Jesus. In doing so, we’ve jumped quickly from the Psalm to the Psalm-as-about-Jesus. Strictly speaking, however, these Psalms come to us not independent of but through history.
In any text of the Bible one of the foundational questions we have to ask is ‘who is speaking?’ and ‘who is being spoken to?’ Identifying who the pronouns of a text belong to - and where we belong in that, if anywhere at all - is a key aspect to faithful reading.
Hebrew poetry leaves verbs behind. It still has them, but it has them far less frequently than it does in prose. In fact, there was a period of time where some scholars resorted to a statistical analysis of verbs in ratio to nouns to identify poetry vs prose!
What is poetry? More so, what is Hebrew poetry? While poetry is generally an easy genre to identify, and we tend to know it when we see it, what are the distinguishing features of Hebrew poetry?
Trinity Sunday appropriately comes after Pentecost (the Father’s giving of the Spirit through the Son). The appropriateness reflects the history of the church’s formulations of biblical doctrine, which took over three centuries to thrash out.
Many Christians feel the need to promote the Spirit’s personhood in terms of his uniqueness, else we ‘forget’ or ‘neglect’ the Holy Spirit. But the unasked question remains: does the Spirit himself feel the need to define his personhood in this way?
Co-Authored with Dan McKinlay. In this age of salvation, God not only brings us into his kingdom through Jesus, but gives us the joy of participating in the work of proclaiming that kingdom as well. What, then, is our responsibility before God?
What distinguishes Jesus’ crucifixion from every other performed by the Romans? Tens of thousands were crucified. And it doesn’t take much for us to remember Spartacus, where there was the mass crucifixion of 6,000 people along the Appian Way.
We have responsibility before God to work; we are not to be lazy. But what does this mean for the person who suffers from depression or anxiety? Because depression and anxiety can outwardly resemble the all characteristics of laziness.
