A couple years ago Think-Biblically published a short series on getting through tough times. In the second article we uncovered three items that constituted a process for getting through the messes life brings: Rejoice, trust Jesus and live as a citizen of heaven rather than earth. This isn’t all saint Paul has to say on the matter, however. In his letter to the Colossians he gives us a discipline to help us prepare for the hard times that eventually come to everyone. What is that discipline? Cultivating peace and gratitude.
Yesterday we began our series with an old sermon of mine meant to overcome some of the arguments raised against the Bible by the best-selling book and movie, The Da Vinci Code. Today we turn to an opponent of the Scriptures with more staying power than Dan Brown’s work of fiction, Dr. Bart Ehrman. Dr. Ehrman has spent 30 years attempting to discredit the accuracy and proper preservation of the New Testament. Why the New Testament and not the Old, or the Bible as a whole? That is an interesting question.
In the book The Mark of the Christian Francis Schaeffer argues that the world has largely rejected Christianity because we do not bear the mark of Christ. What is the mark? Love. When we live in God’s love that element will spill over into our other relationships. Like a light on a hill that cannot be hidden, as Jesus said, the love of God ought to be seen by all. When it is we share the mark, that is we are identified as the people of God. It is what some call “lifestyle evangelism” but I simply call it obedience.
We have said it here many times before, that conflict with the world is inevitable for the practicing Christian. This simple truth may not be remarkable, but it seems that from time to time the body of Christ needs to be reminded of it. In this age of Islamic violence, however, it may serve our readers best to define what kind of conflict is permissible by Kingdom standards. Sometimes the best way to define a concept is to illustrate it.
In our ongoing series overcoming common objections to the preservation of the New Testament we come to a forked argument. One the one hand, it is argued that Jesus is not mentioned in any official Greek or Roman documents until 112AD – 90 years after Jesus’ death – and so we only have Christian documents to verify his life and ministry which seems suspicious if Jesus was such a well-known figure. The other side of the coin is that Christianity spread rapidly, so much so that within 30 years of Jesus’s death there were churches spread all across Asia Minor making suspect the proper communication of the true gospel message.
Patrick Greene is going blind, but a Christian woman sought her pastor and church’s help in bringing help and comfort to him and, as a result, all those questions he had about the inadequacies of his world view came into sharp focus and he found God. Yesterday we examined briefly the philosophical and intellectual arguments for the existence of God and concluded that the best affirmation of Elohim are personal ones.
The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming commentary on the book of Jonah to be published later this year. There are many methods of Bible study used to derive the most information and greatest understanding of the text. We have used several forms including traditional hermeneutics, literary analysis and observing other textual cues. To understand the verse-by-verse analysis of Jonah we felt it important to provide the reader with six steps of biblical observation. These steps will teach you the terminology used in the commentary and provide a foundation of biblical study that may be applied to any historic narrative in the Bible.
The primary textual critic of the New Testament is Dr. Bart Ehrman, which is why we are spending time overcoming his objections. The number of textual variants in the New Testament manuscripts, as we discussed last time, are numerous. Dr. Ehrman states the number could be as high as 400,00! In truth, the number of variant readings is all determined by how one defines a variant. In Ehrman’s case it’s any difference, which is why the number is so large. Let’s look at what “variant” means and determine if there is any validity to the objection itself.
We ended last week talking about the Mark of the Christian, which was identified as loving God and loving others. We learned how the Bible repeatedly commands us to love and how we must make this the primary pursuit of our Christian life. We got to that important discussion, however, from an article titled “Spiritual Clickbait”, which was defined as the kind of temptation that leads us away from God. Events in our lives or the lives of others can cause us grief and even depression and, sometimes, even threaten our faith. It’s time to come full circle.
Spend much time on the Internet and you’ll seen them. Usually they are marked as a “sponsored” link and they have enticing headlines like, “29 Rare Photos That Will Leave You Speechless”, or “The cameraman Just Kept Recording” and even “Type in your name - This is Addicting!” It’s called “clickbait” and is intended to get you to a website that contains pretty much nothing but advertisements that will draw you further in. It’s one thing to be tricked on the Internet, but when it’s applied to our spiritual lives its called something else: temptation.
Literary Analysis is a way of studying literature in general, not only the Bible. This method is founded on the belief that language works; that is to say that words, sentences and the like have meaning and are capable of communicating ideas to others. This might sound elementary as we demonstrate every day that language does indeed work every time we receive a request to do something at work or instruct a child to do their homework or even read a book or periodical.