Thinking about God, Jesus and The Big Questions

To say that Jeremiah had a difficult life is no understatement. God tasked him with telling the people of Israel what God had to say. Much of it was warnings. Jeremiah did this, but the people wouldn't listen to him. Instead they persecuted him. None of this stopped Jeremiah though. He remained faithful to the Lord and did everything that was required of him. Indeed, he even went what most people would consider above and beyond - he interceded for the people to the Lord as shown in the Bible: Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, look around and take note! Search its squares and see if you can find one person who acts justly and seeks truth— so that I may pardon Jerusalem. Although they say, ‘As the Lord lives’, yet they swear falsely.  O Lord, do your eyes not look for truth? You have struck them, but they felt no anguish; you have consumed them, but they refused to take correction. They have made their faces harder than rock; they have refus

This question had puzzled me for a long time. If Solomon was the wisest man who ever lived, why did he later stray from God? Surely being so wise, he could see that it was important to be close to God? Luckily, our pastor happened to work this question into a sermon.  Yes, Solomon was wise, but he was human just like the rest of us. All of us are temped to stray away from God. And all of us are able to resist that temptation - when we ask for help from God. In fact, the question of why Solomon strayed from God is not even the right question. In reality, we should be asking ourselves "If Solomon is so wise yet strayed from God, then how do we, as less wise people, avoid straying from God?" It is clear from the Bible that Solomon did not wake up one day and say "OK, from now on I'll disobey God." It wasn't sudden like that. It was a gradual slow ignoring of God, by degrees. He married wives who followed other gods, which influenced his views gradually. This w

With so much misinformation floating around, it's important not to unwittingly repeat things we may have heard if we don't know they're true. Indeed, much of the advice of Solomon in the book of Proverbs can be readily applied to today's problem of misinformation, which I have mentioned here . But it's not only in Solomon that we can find warnings about lies and misinformation. Take a look at this passage from Jeremiah: They bend their tongues like bows; they have grown strong in the land for falsehood, and not for truth; for they proceed from evil to evil, and they do not know me, says the Lord. Jeremiah 9: 3   The book of James also shows how powerful the tongue is: If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small membe

Some people might be scared of accepting the free gift of eternal life in Heaven that Jesus offers us. This is in many ways a normal (but not a good) reaction - the fear of the unknown. You might wonder if there is a long list of things you need to do as a Christian, or other constraints upon your life.  To untangle all of these things, the main things you can do (that you maybe didn't do before) are to  read the Bible pray This is so you can get to know God better. But God won't strike you down if you don't do it.  This is for your benefit, not God's! In other words, God isn't improved by getting to know you - YOU are improved by getting to know God. You can find out more about that here . Those 2 things aren't so onerous, especially when you think about the fact that you probably like the idea of getting to know God better. Reading the Bible and praying are the best ways to do that. There's not really a bunch of obligations you need to do. Yes, you should

In the Bible, there were examples of Jesus healing on the Sabbath. The Pharisees of the time saw this as heretical because they had interpreted the keeping of the Sabbath to mean doing no work at all, even in the case of dealing with emergencies or healing. In this Bible verse, we will see an example of Jesus healing on the Sabbath and what ensued. We can see that the Pharisees clearly thought of this as Jesus trying to make an exception to the rules: He left that place and entered their synagogue; a man was there with a withered hand, and they asked him, ‘Is it lawful to cure on the sabbath?’ so that they might accuse him. He said to them, ‘Suppose one of you has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the sabbath; will you not lay hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a human being than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the sabbath.’ Then he said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ He stretched it out, and it was restored, as sound as the other. But the Pharis

I was reading in the news media about someone who had betrayed someone else. If I had been the victim, I confess I would have had difficulty with keeping my focus on the main thing (God and Jesus). It would have been all too easy to fall into the trap of bitterness and misery in that situation.  Even if I make a conscious effort to rise above the bitterness and misery to keep my focus on God and Jesus, I would still have not liked the person and would have avoided them. Which is OK! Christianity says you should forgive the person, but you need not continue any relationship with them (I talk more about that here ). Your forgiveness is in your heart, between you and God. There is no requirement for you to see the person again or for them to know of your forgiveness. You can cut off contact with them for the sake of your future physical and/or mental health, even if you have forgiven them. Forgiving someone for a specific past event does not equate to you needing to place any trust in the

I'm in the middle of reading the New Testament, and in the past I had never bothered to consider word choice. But this time around, I posed the question: Why did Jesus use the phrasings that He used? To get His meaning across in anything He said, He could have chosen between different phrasings. Yet He phrased it a certain way.  Of course, we should be cautious how much importance we put into this. After all, the Bible was written in Hebrew and Greek. It was not written in English, so what I am reading in English is a translation. Inevitably, something winds up having to be approximated in a translation. Also, certain translations of the Bible are more focused on word for word while others are more focused on meaning for meaning.  If you are wondering about phrasing, then use a word for word translation (e.g. Good News Translation), since a meaning for meaning translation might wander further from the original words used. Nonetheless, it's still a fascinating exercise to ask wh