Yesterday I taught Numbers 14 in which the Israelites rebel against the Lord and lose the kingdom. I want to go beyond Moses’s day now and identify an important parallel that may provide some clarity in thinking about Jesus’s ministry. To refresh on Numbers 14, the Israelites listened to their leadership (ten spies) in refusing… Read More »
Near the end of Jesus’s ministry, he came to the town of Bethany where his friend Lazarus had recently died. The dead man’s sister Mary said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:32). A few months later, Jesus is back in Bethany for a dinner in… Read More »
Matthew, Mark, and Luke are similar in many ways, but the Gospel of John is quite different. It is the same Jesus, of course, but John knows those stories are well known to the churches and his readers, and so he chooses other stories. His main point: Jesus is God. In the first part of… Read More »
“I find myself aware that in reading the Hebrew scriptures [the Old Testament] I am handling something that gives me a closer common link with Jesus than any archaeological artifact could do.” Christopher Wright, Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament (IVP Academic, 1992), ix.
While Luke tells the same basic story of the life of Jesus that Matthew and Mark do, he has some particular emphases. One is that Luke was a doctor, so he sometimes gives more details about medical issues and he doesn’t say bad things about doctors like the other writers do. Another is that he… Read More »
What makes Mark’s gospel different? First, it is shorter than the other Gospels. That means he doesn’t include things like Jesus’s birth and childhood. Second, Mark is action-packed, moving from one event to the next. Third, Mark doesn’t have most of the long speeches of Jesus that Matthew records (like the Sermon on the Mount).… Read More »
After a break, I think it’s time to start the Bible reading guide for the New Testament. As I said before, I wrote this for one of our sons. Here’s Matthew: There are four books about Jesus, but they are not unnecessary. Each one presents not only different events in Jesus’s life, but also a… Read More »
Read this slowly and determine who said these words. I am telling you now before it happens, so that when it does happen you will believe that I am He. Clearly this could be no one but God. This conclusion is obvious when you see what the Lord said in Isaiah. Who then is like… Read More »
A professor of mine made this insightful observation about the stories in John 3-4. I would have treated Nicodemus like he treated the woman at the well, and I would have treated the woman at the well like he treated Nicodemus. Why? Because I am a legalist. Jesus does it the opposite.
If you ‘re planning to do much work in the Gospels, you might want to take a look at this commentary compiled from the Church Fathers by Thomas Aquinas. Until Friday, this 8-volume work is available for Logos for only $16. On Sunday they blew up the old Dallas Cowboys stadium and my friend Eric… Read More »