In The Word

(HT:Reformed Geek)

The heart is so hard, the will is so obstinate, the passions are so furious, the thoughts are so volatile, the imagination is so ungovernable, the desires are so wild, that the man feels that he has a den of wild beasts within him, which will eat him up sooner than be ruled by him.

-C.H. Spurgeon - All of Grace

Ben Witherington, an author I know best from his books New Testament History: A Narrative Account and The Gospel Code: Novel Claims About Jesus, Mary Magdalene and Da Vinci has a wonderful post entitled Hermeneutics— A Guide for Perplexed Bible Readers

1) ‘What it meant is what it means’. Meaning comes contextually not from just having words in isolation but words in conjunction with one another in a specific sentence or larger context.

. . .

2) ‘Context is king’. One of the great, great dangers in modern interpretation of the Bible is proof-texting. What this amounts to is the strip-mining of certain key terms and ideas, linking them together with similar or the same words in other texts and contexts, and coming up with a meaning which none of the original texts had.

. . .

3) Genre matters. Before we can interpret a particular type of literature we need to understand what literary type or kind of literature it is. Prose should be interpreted according to the kinds of information prose is meant to give, poetry should be interpreted as poetry, historical narrative as narrative, parables as the literary fictions that they are, and apocalyptic prophecy must be interpreted as the highly metaphorical literature it is, and so on.

Good stuff! Be sure to check out the whole article. It’s short, to the point and informative.

(HT:Participatory Bible Study Blog )

I got this update from biblicaltraining.org a few days ago:

We have just added a new leadership level course on Buddhism from Dr. Timothy Tennent. There are a few lectures we are missing, but we will recorded them the next time he lectures.

We also posted our financial number for the year 2006 and our numbers for January through July, 2007. We trust you will see we are using your giving wisely.

As far as the future is concerned, we are on track to finish the core curriculum for the Foundations courses by December. These ten to eleven classes will also be used in our mp3sforJesus program. We have joined forces with New Directions, a missions organization that has been serving in the two-thirds world for 35 years, to distribute the classes. Their goal is 1,000 units in 2008. It is exciting to think that BT materials will eventually train thousands of lay church leaders in the bush areas of the two-thirds world. We solicit your prayers and ongoing support so we can finish this project.

Michael Patton over at the Parchment & Pen responds to this Atheism poster:

With His Own:

Nice work Michael!

Incedently, if you haven’t been through the materials Michael and Rome have put together at www.reclaimingthemind.org  . It would be well worth your time to check it out.

I haven’t been posting much lately as I’ve been quite busy with work and preparing for my first preaching opportunity, which I delivered today!  What a gracious God we have! Last night and early this morning I was at the end of my rope and quite sure that I was going to forget everything I had studied as I was standing before the congregation.  But all went well my I was able to read scripture clearly and deliver the message without too much trouble.  Thank you for all of you who were praying for me!

I shared the pulpit with my very good friend Mark Seitz. He spoke on Galatians and I spoke on Colossians.  After church I spent some The Pilgrims Progress and just happened to be in the section on legalism:

Therefore Mr. Worldly Wiseman is an alien, and Mr. Legality is a cheat; and for his son Civility, notwithstanding his  simpering looks, he is but a hypocrite, and cannot help thee. Believe me, there is nothing in all this noise that thou hast heard of these sottish men, but a design to beguile thee of thy salvation, by turning thee from the way in which I had set thee.

What a wonderful book, you can read it online or pick up the cheater’s version (in modern English) … which I must confess I’m reading and enjoying very much.

One thing that greatly concerns you, as you would be a happy people, is the maintaining of family order.
We have had great disputes how the church ought to be regulated; and indeed the subject of these disputes was of great importance: but the due regulation of your families is of no less, and, in some respects, of much greater importance. Every christian family ought to be as it were a little church, consecrated to Christ, and wholly influenced and governed by his rules. And family education and order are some of the chief of the means of grace. If these fail, all other means are likely to prove ineffectual. If these are duly maintained, all the means of grace will be likely to prosper and be successful.
-Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume One: A FAREWELL SERMON

THE DAY GOD CRIED, a STORY of NOAH

(And the Lord regretted that He had made man on Earth and His heart was saddened.)

What happens sometimes when we feel this sad? Does God cry? Perhaps he tried to contain his great sadness but, as person after person refused to listen, the tears kept building up inside more and more. But even though we had hurt Him so much, He wanted to save us and God just kept trying and trying until finally someone listened, Noah.

And what a thing God told Noah to do. Build a boat, the biggest boat in the world. In the middle of the desert build a huge boat.

No matter what he thought of the idea, Noah obeyed God. All his neighbors laughed at him and all that gopher wood and pitch sure cost a lot of money but Noah obeyed. We can picture him building the ark step by patient step as perhaps God even put pictures in his head to show him how do things just right. You see, God will tell us how do things right, if we listen to His Word.

(…Noah found favor with the Lord.)

Finally, Noah finished building; then he had an even harder job. You see, God loved the animals, too. He made them just before he made man. The animals had done nothing wrong because God hadn’t given them a sense of right and wrong. So Noah listened again and gathered up the animals in pairs, seven pairs of each clean kind and one pair of each unclean kind. And he had to hurry. G-d’s sadness was building and he could only give Noah a week for all that work. But Noah did as God asked and He promised Noah his whole family: himself, his wife, his three sons and their wives would all be safe in the ark with the animals.

And then God cried. His sorrow was so strong that He cried for forty days and forty nights. His sorrow was so deep that His tears covered the whole Earth, even the highest mountains.

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	The Resurrection (Unabridged) by Leo Tolstoy
	Tolstoy based Resurrection, the last of his novels, on a true story of a philanderer whose misuse of a beautiful young orphan girl leads to her ruin. Fate brings the two together many years later and the meeting awakens the man’s moral conscience

When Judgment Day comes, we will regret the waste of a single moment not used for the glory of Christ. We will, However, not regret one moment we spent diligently studying God’s Word and hiding it in our heart. We will only wish we’d spent more moments doing this.

-Dr. Andrew Davis from An Approach to Extended Memorization of Scripture