word | spirit | world | church
There is no one who is higher than the Lord Jesus. He is Yahweh, God of gods, King of kings, Lord of lords. He is seated on the throne in the heavenly temple and the train of his robe fills the place. There are winged fiery lightning snakes that attend his person and serenade him,… Continue reading High and Lifted Up
“He’s no longer in the land of the living,” we say with great solemnity as we pronounce that our friend has fallen asleep on the sofa. It’s a phrase we use fairly commonly, either to mean prosaically, “they’re dead”—which is actually uncommon because we prefer cleaner euphemisms that hide the reality entirely—or to refer to… Continue reading What is the ‘Land of the Living?’
The Bible exists in a symbolic world where particular images are common: trees, tables, bread and wine, mountains, the sea and its denizens, the creation week, and many more. These have specific meanings developed across the canon that they take with them (progressively) and that can be read backwards to fit texts within the Bible’s… Continue reading Isaiah’s trees
I suspect to many readers of the Bible this is a silly question. Honestly, who cares? The idea that I constantly want to convey is that we should ask the questions we find curious about the scriptures, assuming that there are answers deeper than the obvious. We can, of course, become enamoured of all sorts… Continue reading Why does Jesus eat so much fish?
Have you ever noticed that every great act of redemption starts with a childless woman? The obvious one is that Jesus’ story starts—in Matthew and Luke’s tellings, at least—with Mary, before Jesus walks onto the page. We start with a young woman with no children, in her case an unmarried virgin. While Mary is the… Continue reading The Shape of Stories
The Tabernacle, and the Temple, are a picture of the cosmos. Or, perhaps, the cosmos is a tabernacle. We know this because Moses tells us so in his structure. We see this first in the structure of Genesis 1. We have a two panelled story in 3 sections. What I mean is that day 4… Continue reading The Tabernacle and the Cosmos
The Bible is full of little details and comments that don’t seem to mean very much. You can feel all at sea and wonder what’s going on. Perhaps it’s tempting to think ‘this is a cultural reference I don’t understand.’ That could be true. However, I’d like to suggest a different approach to Bible reading.… Continue reading Let the Bible interpret the Bible
In a previous post, one of my most read, I explored what happened between Noah and Ham in Genesis 9. There are two particular possibilities, both plausible, though I come down on one side in that post. However, I’d like to nuance what I said previously, by exploring Noah’s relationship with wine. Noah sometimes gets… Continue reading Noah’s Vineyard
In Acts 1 we read of the ascension of Jesus, up there among the five most earth-shattering events in human history, along with the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and gift of the Spirit. Immediately after the disciples trudge back down the mount of Olives, reversing the journey they took exactly six weeks before, arriving at the… Continue reading Structure Before Power
Jesus in the Tabernacle VIII The last thing described in the tabernacle instructions in Exodus, is the bronze basin that sits in the courtyard. It’s a large basin made of bronze, on a stand, that is placed between the tent of meeting and the altar. Essentially that means that as you enter the courtyard you… Continue reading The Sea
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