Tag: Understanding the Scriptures

Morning Musing: Joel 3:10

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“Beat your plows into swords and your pruning knives into spears. Let even the weakling say, ‘I am a warrior.’” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the things critics of the Scriptures like to do is find apparent contradictions and use them to argue against their reliability. This is one of those places. This verse is set against Isaiah 2:4 where the prophet talks about just the opposite: beating swords into plowshares. Is this really a contradiction of that? What are we supposed to do with places like this?

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Strange Fire

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This past Sunday morning we continued our series, Bible Stories to Make You Squirm, with what I think is about the hardest story in the whole of the Scriptures. I didn’t want to write this sermon. But if all Scripture is God-breathed, then we need to be able to deal with this part of it too. Check out what makes it so hard and what we should do with it below. Thanks for reading.

Strange Fire

I didn’t want to write this sermon.  Can I say that out loud?  I didn’t want to write this sermon.  Have you ever felt that way?  I mean, probably not about a sermon, but maybe about something else you’ve done.  You did it.  You had to do it.  It needed to be done.  But you didn’t want to do it.  Maybe you were helping somebody out and you knew it was going to wind up being a lot of effort for you for a little gratitude from them.  Perhaps you were given some task at work that you knew was just not going to be a pleasant undertaking—and you were right, by the way—but the boss asked for it and you were stuck with it.  You may have experienced this kind of feeling in yet some other way.  I don’t know what your experience was.  All I know is that I didn’t want to write this sermon. 

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The Cleansing Flood

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This week we continued our series, Bible Stories to Make You Squirm, by looking at one of the most well-known stories in the whole Bible. What could possibly be problematic about a story that every knows and is used in baby nurseries all over the place? When you look more closely, a whole lot. But, when we look more closely, as before, we’ll find that there’s more here than meet’s the eye. Keep reading to see how this all unfolds.

The Cleansing Flood

Have you ever gone back as an adult and watched a TV show you remembered from your childhood only for it to seem like a totally different show than you remembered? Over the years with our boys I’ve tried a few times to take them back into my childhood with some of the cartoons I loved to watch. Some of these have been enduring classics like Looney Toons or Tom and Jerry. Scooby-Doo was a hit for a while with them. But on occasion, as I have tuned into something with them, I’ve been left wondering what my parents were thinking letting me watch this or that. More probably they just didn’t know I was watching it.

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Digging in Deeper: Isaiah 55:8

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“‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways.’ This is the Lord’s declaration.”‬‬ (CSB – Read the chapter) 

Context is king when it comes to understanding the Scriptures well. This morning we started talking about a popular bumper-sticker verse out of Isaiah and then talked about the different contexts we need to take into account when examining a particular verse. Let’s put all of that into practice.

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Morning Musing: Ephesians 4:31-32 Part 3

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“Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.”
– ‭‭Ephesians‬ ‭4:31-32‬‬ (ESV – Read the chapter) 

We have so far covered the fact that we need some kind of a foundation for our efforts to be good beyond simple convenience, and that as Christians, citing the Bible as that source is problematic. It hurts both our walk and our witness. It hurts our walk by making us legalistic since a text doesn’t love you, it just tells you what to do. It hurts our witness by leaving us in a position of having to rigorously defend every single part of the Bible or risk losing all of it. Incidentally, the defense of the Bible is a big industry in Christian circles even as looking at it critically is a big industry in skeptical ones. We need—and have—a better foundation than this. Fortunately, we do have one: Jesus. 

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