These posts involve looking more closely at a Biblical passage to understand its meaning
At times a call is made to reach out to those who might follow Christ, but who struggle with unbidden sexual desires that contradict Christ’s call. The call is to deal with those unbidden desires with understanding and mercy. This is a good call. While Christ calls people to take up their crosses and follow Him, He does so while bearing their burden. But then, we need to be truthful about what understanding and mercy are.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s aim was to elevate the status of women and, strangely, she saw the Bible as a prime enemy of that goal.
What is the terrible sin of “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit,” and why did Jesus say that it won’t be forgiven? This is what Bible-readers always want to know upon reading Matthew 12. And they spend hours talking about it. Some even wonder if they have committed this sin inadvertently and are therefore beyond Divine favor. The key to what is really going on is seeing that this is about the Trinitarian relationships.
In his passionate 2013 book, Fully Alive, page 35, Larry Crabb makes a highly significant point. He notes how, when God created us in Genesis 1:26, The Creator said, “Let us make man in our image.” As Dr. Crabb points out, “it is only when God made male and female human beings that he introduced Himself as persons-in-community.” In other …
Ever notice how God delights in turning someone’s weakness into a strength? So God takes a man who cannot speak well, who was “slow of speech and of tongue” (Exodus 4:10), to speak some of the most important words ever spoken. These were captured in something called the Pentateuch. This God appointed the man, Moses, to a position requiring many …
It is fun to see the ways Jesus loved women, emphasizing their equality, all the while upholding the asymmetry between the genders. It makes me want to honor women likewise, as He did. Read Matthew12:46-50 closely: While he was still speaking to the people, behold, his mother and his brothers stood outside, asking to speak to him. But he …
A Lover or A Mother or What? Especially for a woman, what she does, and so who she is, can change radically from one phase of life to the next. A woman in different phases of life has different needs. Proverbs 31, the Old Testament chapter, describes the “virtuous wife” as a super-woman who seems to do so many different …
You might expect that the funny Greek word that means meekness, πραῢς, (pronounced something like pra-oose’), would appear a lot in the New Testament, since it sounds like such a Christian virtue. Not so. The word only appears four times in the New Testament, three of those times in the gospel of Matthew. (There is a related word, but that …
To help explain how gender operates, I offer a few excerpts from enGendered, chapter 12: Specialties are things we all might do sometimes, but the specialist focuses on especially doing them. We may do many things for each other that are the same, but the gender magic happens when we lean into the asymmetries. Just as, physically, both males …
The Hebrew Scriptures show us three great venues of covenant community leadership. When things got going, leadership resolved into three offices, authoritative ministers to shepherd, supply and save His people: Prophet, King and Priest. One of the glaring asymmetries between guys and gals in the Old Testament is how God called only men to the latter two offices. God’s masculine …
