Many of our towns are overflowing with churches. If you’ve ever tried to find a new church, you know how many options are typically available.
You can choose based on denomination: Baptist, Presbyterian, Evangelical Free, Assembly of God, Foursquare, Brethren, Methodist…you name it. And many of these broad categories actually...
I’ve written a bit on Halloween in the past, and I’ve even engaged in a very gentle debate with some of my coworkers on whether or not it’s appropriate for a Christian to Trick-or-Trick (here). Some people can be dismissive about this issue (myself included), but there are significant...
Having read several reviews of Vines’ book over the last 24 hours, let me begin my critique on a different note. I don’t assume that Vines is reading his view into the text. Last time I checked, I’m not God and I don’t have direct access to his interpretive...
With this series of blog posts, I want to help you better understand the way in which the Bible was written so that you can get more out of your Bible reading. Specifically, I will be exploring the different literary genres in which the Bible was written.
Perhaps that sounds...
Genealogies are lame. Admit it. Only Bible college students pretend they’re interesting. And yet the Bible is full of them. For those readers who are unfamiliar with the term “genealogy,” these are the long lists of names that you skip through as you’re reading different sections of your Bible....
Yesterday, I introduced the topic of suffering. Specifically, I raised the age old question, “Why does God allow his children to suffer?” And although I have spent a lot of time looking into the Bible’s answer to this question, in yesterday’s post I explored one of three similes that...
A student once asked his Rabbi, “Teacher, why does the Lord allow evil in the world?” The Rabbi responded, “With such a good question, my son, why would you want to ruin it with an answer?” Despite the Rabbi’s clever response, the question “Why does God allow his children...
If we simply follow what Jesus said about same-sex relationships, we’re going to be a bit disappointed. In all of His commands about how we should live or not live, many of which included sexual behavior, one thing is unambiguously clear: Jesus never mentioned homosexuality. He neither condemned it...
In the last two posts, I’ve explored the ancient Roman context of homosexuality. This, of course, will help color in the borders of the portrait that the New Testament paints—and yes, we’ll get to the New Testament in due time. I don’t want to attempt to broadcast what the...
I often hear in recent discussion about the Bible and homosexuality: “Since homosexuality as a sexual category was unknown to Paul, he could not have critiqued it.” The implication is that when Paul talks about same-sex activity in Romans 1 and elsewhere, he must have had something more specific, something...