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.
If you read Think-Biblically.com regularly, you have an interest in reading and studying the Bible but would you say you love the Scriptures? Do they bring greater delight than your favorite food? Maybe our favorite passages such as those that inspire or comfort us, but how about the law? Does reading Leviticus make you joyful? King David thought it should. He thought so because God’s word is a lot like God himself: reliable, wise, fair, pure eternally enduring, trustworthy and just. If spending time with God brings us comfort and joy, shouldn’t his word do the same?
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.
Last week we asked if you love God’s word. We asked if you like reading God’s word more than eating your favorite meal – even the tough to read passages about the law. In the passage above Paul links these two concepts together in an elegant way. Regardless of the number of laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy there is one simple way to obey them all – Love your neighbor. It is a simple, life-giving formula: Loving God leads you to love God’s word, loving God’s word leads you to love others, loving others leads you fulfilling God’s law. Is there a better reason to study God’s word?
Demon possession takes many forms and results from a myriad of practices. The danger is that the practice may not have been with the permission of the one who is afflicted (as is the case in Luke 9, where the “child” was under his father’s authority). If the demonization occurs at an early age, the victim may not ever recall the events that brought them this spiritual inhabitant. The Luke 9 incident strikes a parallel in an account related by Dr. Koch:
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.
I was 15-years old and at a Christian camp, sitting around the campfire with others from our church youth group and paying more attention to the girl I was crushing on than to the discussion leader. That is until he read a Bible passage and wanted to go around the circle with each student answering the question, “what does this mean to you?” Yes, red flags went full sail in my Bible-geek mind. I was about half-way around the circle, so my challenge to this exercise should have been delivered tactfully. It wasn’t.
Matthew, Mark and Luke record a great many instances of demonic possession, and is a veritable harvest field of information regarding these spirit entities. John, on the other hand, contains no stories of demons at all. No study of demons could be considered complete, however, unless it contained a study of the demoniac of Garasenes. Doctor and respected author Kurt Koch relates eight symptoms of demon possession as discovered from the passages on this particular case:
