We’ve just come out of the Easter season, which is always a mix of celebration, reflection, sombreness, gratitude, and victorious worship, as we travel from celebratory Palm Sunday, to heart-rending Good Friday, to triumphant Easter morning! Image via Pixabay Christianity is a religion steeped in victory (1Co 15.57). God is good, and God has won, and God will always win, and God is on our side, and so we believe that we will win in Him (Rom 8.31-39). So this... Read more
How many times did we hear the word “unprecedented” in the past 2 years? Image via Pixabay I will note, as we go through today’s column, that we are not “through” COVID entirely, and there is an unpredictability to this virus that makes it hard to gauge what the days ahead will look like. Still, compared to where we were at a year or even six months ago, things do feel better these days, and although there may be more... Read more
“Deconstruction” is a religious buzzword of our time. Image via Pixabay Although the term is modern, the idea is as old as the Christian faith itself. “Deconstruction” refers to a time of questioning, seeking, re-evaluating, and at times removing and/or rebuilding what one believes. For 2,000 years of Christianity, believers have gone through such times. The book of Acts is full of the “deconstruction” of classic Jewish theology in order to embrace the New Covenant in Christ. For centuries, Church... Read more
The ancient gods of Greek and Rome were majestic and powerful. They were also petty, using human beings as pawns in their feuds and jealousies with one another. But they were high and mighty, and untouchable, and often unknowable, unless you made them angry, in which case they were very good at making their anger known to you. Image via Pixabay When Jesus arrives on the scene, He arrives to show us God. John writes, “No one has ever seen... Read more
As we move into Good Friday, we enter into a time of reflection upon the suffering of Christ. Image via Pixabay Jesus was very clear at the Last Supper that we were to be people who did not forget what was done for us; we are to eat the bread and drink the cup of Thanksgiving and do what Jesus told us to do, which was to partake of these elements “in remembrance of Me,” (Lk 22.19). We refresh... Read more
As we kick off Passion Week, getting closer and closer to the Cross and Resurrection, we begin with reflections on Palm Sunday, the Triumphal Entry, the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem for the final week of His life before Good Friday and Easter Sunday changed everything. Image via Pixabay Here is the apostle John’s version of the story: 12 The next day the great crowd that had come for the festival heard that Jesus was on His way to Jerusalem. 13 They... Read more
God is mysterious, and He works in mysterious ways. Image via Pixabay I think in a broad sense, this can be true. His ways and thoughts are higher than ours (Isa 55.9), so we don’t always understand Him, and we may not understand everything in this lifetime. Yet in another way, God isn’t mysterious at all. He is fully accessible and approachable. And He has made Himself, His will, His nature, and His ways, very, very clear. How did He... Read more
It is a holy, sacred, and weighty thing to claim to speak for the Almighty. Image via Pixabay We call such people “prophets,” and both Old and New Testaments affirm the role of some believers to receive revelation from the Holy Spirit which is meant to be shared with the people of God in the Name of the Lord. In the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit was not given to everyone, but a choice few. Because of this, prophets were... Read more
Put simply, God’s righteous standard just crushes us. Image via Pixabay God’s Law shows us what He wants, and through it, we become aware of our sin (Rom 3.20). In other words, God’s Law makes clear God’s righteous standard, and when we read it, it becomes very clear very fast that we have fallen short of it. Scripture says we are cursed if we fail to uphold it (Dt 28). If we break one part of it, we are guilty... Read more
To be honest, I have a certain amount of compassion for the Pharisees. Image via Pixabay They are the villains of the Gospels, selfish and self-righteous religious hypocrites who worked to have Jesus killed out of their own jealousies (see Mt 23; Mt 27.18). When you say it like that, of course, they sound awful. And in many ways they were; Jesus was right to challenge them and call out their toxic leadership and their duplicity and their theological errors.... Read more
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