word | spirit | world | church
We don’t like the ten plagues in Exodus, they feel like exactly the sort of thing we secretly wish wasn’t in the Old Testament because they afflict our innate sense of fairness and our unexpressed desire for God to be kind to everyone—even those who hate and afflict his people. Our affections there are out… Continue reading Thinking about Plagues
The Exodus 'motif' is one the Bible's recurring patterns or 'jokes.' We're supposed to spot it when we see it. The Biblical authors often play with the literary shapes they employ and they want us to notice when they subvert our expectations as well as use them. Jonah is a case in point: the author… Continue reading Jonah’s Backwards Exodus
The Bible is music. Or so Alastair Roberts and Andrew Wilson claim in the introduction to their superb Echoes of Exodus. I don’t know a lot about classical music, but the crux of the point is that we see various themes in the scriptures, and they are picked up and repeated by repeating stories or… Continue reading Repost: The Bible is Music
We don’t think much about the Ten Commandments in my corner of the Christian world, which some of us would think is exactly as it should be—“we’re a people of grace!”—and I fit in the other camp when I wonder if our resistance to the commandments as law means we lose them as wisdom. It… Continue reading On Names and Naming
We are a people of the Exodus. Our lives are exodus movements. I’ve written before around the edges of the idea of cosmic geography and about the way the sea was viewed in the Old Testament as the place of chaos and death. When the climactic act of Yahweh’s saving power happens at the beginning… Continue reading Our Emotional Exodus
Small details matter in the Bible. They often tell the story that’s under the story, or draw out a minor aspect or theme in a greater whole. One of the details that can often matter is what a scholar might call cosmic geography. Which is the idea that some of the geographical references in the… Continue reading An East Wind
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,… Continue reading Ten Kinds of Sin
There’s a principle in the Bible that’s foreign to our Protestant intuitions. When the people of Israel were dramatically saved by the Lord, they built a monument. Or at least, sometimes they did. The two famous examples would be at Gilgal in Joshua 4 or at Ebenezer in 1 Samuel 7. In Joshua 4 the… Continue reading A monument of gift
The Bible starts with seven words. Then the second sentence has fourteen words. Then there are seven paragraphs each describing a day in this week of seven days. The seventh of these includes three parallel seven word phrases. None of this is an accident. In our modern day with our modern eyes it can look… Continue reading Carving Time
A friend contacted me recently to say that she’d re-listened to a message I preached a couple of years ago on idolatry from Exodus 32, when the Israelites built themselves a bull to worship. You can listen to it here if it takes your fancy. She then asked me an intriguing question, “what does idolatry… Continue reading Idols in Lockdown
nuakh 