Jeremiah’s third confession is a monologue, mainly (or all, depending where we think it starts) addressed to God. Complaint is the dominant tone, and Jeremiah asks for vengeance on his opponents. So this text raises interesting questions about the nature of Scripture, and how God might read (some parts of) the Bible… ...
To my mind this passage provides a nice example of what Paul was on about in the previous reading, many people get hung up on the picture of Christ descending from heaven, and the possibility of people rising to greet him, and spend their time constructing imaginative and creative theologies and multi-million dollar businesses writing [&hellip...
This passage, which begins and ends with Paul’s suffering, centres on Scripture. It contains the verse which in Evangelical circles is probably the second best known (after John 3:16) Bible reference of all (more rightly it should be two verses, since one cannot understand 2 Tim 3:16 without the purpose declared in 2 Tim 3:17). [&hellip...
Sometimes it is the very people who respect the Bible most who are moost tempted to censor Scripture. This passage is a fine example of how we are tempted to massage Scripture to remove “difficulties” and make it sound more like something our world can understand. Why does our reading begin at v.3? The chapter [&hellip...
Oh, boy! Oh, boy 🙂 What a chapter!? This chapter, full of the minutes of, or rather a report on, the first recorded business meeting of the Christian church, both raises and solves a huge problem Christians have with Scripture, and comes close to, but avoids two of the commonest contemporary (in New Zealand Baptist [&hellip...
