word | spirit | world | church
Have you ever noticed that in Genesis chapter one, the days are the wrong way around? When I say the wrong way around, I mean backwards to what we expect, and before you rush off to compare the order of creation and question whether it means anything meaningful that the sun and moon come so… Continue reading Evening, then Morning
Getting your head around the sacrificial system in the Old Testament can be difficult. Here’s my attempt to briefly summarise the various sacrifices. I’ve been helped by Leithart’s summaries in In Earth as it is in Heaven in this, but I haven’t followed him entirely (mistakes mine etc!). Tribute Offering The first sacrifices we find are the minchah or… Continue reading The 7 Sacrifices of the Old Testament
There’s this strange moment in Noah’s life where he gets drunk, falls down naked, his son Ham sees him naked, and then he curses Ham. It leads to the frequent accusation that Noah was a drunkard, which at best might be true but is missing the wood for the trees. You can read the story… Continue reading What happens with Noah & Ham?
When trying to describe sin and how it lives and corrupts our hearts, people often come up with “all sin is” statements. “All sin is idolatry” is a common one. The other day I said to a friend, “all sin is taking, isn’t it.” The very next day I found myself saying to someone else, “all sin… Continue reading A Bestiary of Sin
In a previous post I quipped that the Bible was written by Jesus, to Jesus, and about Jesus. It’s a neat bit of rhetoric but needs some unpacking to communicate clearly. It’s possible to get the wrong end of this. The Bible is written by Jesus Let’s start with what I’m not saying. I am… Continue reading The Bible is by, to, and about Jesus
There’s a video of John Piper doing the rounds as I write; Piper offers some cautions for Biblical theology during a panel discussion. You can watch it here. Piper reflects on James Hamilton and others showing him connections all across the Psalter, and other parts of the Bible, that he’d never seen before. He’s delighted… Continue reading Why John Piper is (mostly) wrong on Biblical theology
Just before the Hebrews cross the Jordan, Joshua sends a second round of spies into Jericho. As best we can tell they don’t discover anything useful to the disposition of the troops during the upcoming siege—particularly because that disposition involves walking around the walls of the fort while blaring loudly on ram’s horns—but they do… Continue reading Underneath the linen boughs
You are what you eat, said St Augustine. Well, he said ‘you become what you consume’ in the context of teaching on the Lord’s Supper. Nevertheless, the point is important. Consumption of the Supper has a formative effect into Christlikeness. The how and the why might be interesting, and I suspect Augustine and I part… Continue reading We become what we behold
When you first touch biblical languages one of the first things you learn is that words have a semantic domain. What that means, in the simplest terms, is that a given word means different things in different contexts; you look up a word in a lexicon and that doesn’t mean it carries all of those… Continue reading Symbolic Domain
Obvious enough, except we’re increasingly wired to treat it like one. Technologies change the boundaries of what is possible for us and they effect the frame of how we approach the world. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you also have screwdrivers, you’re able to distinguish the difference… Continue reading The Bible isn’t a smartphone.
nuakh 