I have held tightly to your testimonies;Don’t let me be put to shame. It’s quite possible to translate the second half of this verse as “don’t put me to shame.” Have you ever felt that God was calling on you to take a certain stand, or act in a certain way, and you hope you’re…
Deceitful ways turn aside from meand graciously give me your instruction [Torah]. It’s hard to read this verse when we use “law” as the English gloss for Torah. Graciously give me your rules? Graciously let me live in your rules? But that none of those are actually bad translations. Law or instruction, and the Torah…
An alien am I on the earth.Don’t hide your commands from me. I frequently teach that there are two elements to the Christian life: Identity and Mission. It’s easy to go off the rails on the side of identity, trying to separate ourselves from the crowd. On the other hand, we can become so much…
Open my eyes and I will seeWonderful things from your Torah. In my infographic on Seven Barriers to Hearing the Word the third barrier is making your Bible study a scholarly, rather than a spiritual pursuit. Now let me be clear that I’m not against scholarship. Reading biblical languages and understanding various scholarly areas of…
On your precepts will I meditate;I will look at your ways. There’s a big difference between meditation and biblical exegesis. I tend to use exegesis to refer to extracting the meaning from a text in the narrow sense of what a particular author meant by a particular statement or passage. Hermeneutics generally refers to the…
Blessed are you LORD.Teach me your statutes. Mark Twain said, “Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions.” Or something like that. I’ve found a number of variations, all attributed to Twain. The prayer, “Teach me!” is one that is pretty much guaranteed an answer, positive at least in the sense that…
In my heart have I hidden your Word,That I might not sin against you. I was introduced to Psalm 119 in elementary school. I had read a fair amount of Bible before that time, but hadn’t read it through. I went to a small Christian school where Bible memorization was a key component. We memorized…
It is critical to note that the signs Jesus’ gives his disciples are general and vague and always contemporary. War and suffering, famine and earthquakes, persecutions and false Messiahs have not only been prevalent throughout history; they are the also to be witnessed and experienced in the present, and they will be encountered in the…
I’ve been working my way through Ezekiel with my Sunday School class, at their request, since I have frequently said that Leviticus, Ezekiel, and Hebrews are the books most formative of my own theology. When this is done, I will have been through all three books with this group. One major difficulty in teaching through…
This review is of a Bible I received as a #BibleGatewayPartner. When I set out to review a Bible, I find it difficult to determine precisely what I should discuss. There is the translation it is based on, the nature and extent of the notes, the theological positions that drive those notes, and elements of…
