Thinking about God, Jesus and The Big Questions

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...

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 w...

Some people think that Jesus is just for certain people but not for them. Nothing could be further from the truth! Jesus came for all people. No-one is beyond salvation, no matter what they have said and done in the past, no matter their social standing, no matter how disliked or well-liked they are by others. If they believe in Jesus and repent of their sins, they are saved. Here are some verses that prove that Jesus came for all people . Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, I will gather others to them besides those already gathered. Isaiah 56:8 The above verse shows that even those who might consider themselves outcasts, or those who others might consider outcasts, are still gathered to God. Do not let the foreigner joined to the Lord say, ‘The Lord will surely separate me from his people’; and do not let the eunuch say, ‘I am just a dry tree.’ For thus says the Lord: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me...

If we read the Old Testament, we can see many examples of the Israelites disobeying God. God tells them not to do something, and they do it. Or He tells them to do something, and they don't do it. We feel like saying "Just listen to God!" It seems so simple to see what the right thing is to do. But we are also disobeying exactly as they are. Even if we don't have the voice of God speaking to us directly, or through the prophets, we still have the voice of God from the Bible. It makes it clear what God likes to see us do. Yet we too have the same struggles to do this. All too often we give into laziness or selfishness instead of doing what God wants.  This problem is expressed most clearly in the New Testament in Galatians: For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want.  Galatians 5:17  If someone who wasn't human (for example, an...

In the book of Revelation, the Bible says that at the End of Days there will be a powerful beast which will rule the world: I saw a beast coming out of the sea. He had ten horns and seven heads. There were ten crowns on his horns. On each head was an evil name that was displeasing to God. The beast I saw looked like a leopard. But he had feet like a bear and a mouth like a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power, his throne, and great authority. One of the beast's heads seemed to have had a deadly wound. But the wound had been healed. The whole world was amazed and followed the beast. People worshiped the dragon, because he had given authority to the beast. They also worshiped the beast. They asked, "Who is like the beast? Who can make war against him?"  Revelation 13:1-4 He opened his mouth to speak evil things against God. He told lies about God's character and about the place where God lives and about those who live in heaven with him. He was allowed to make war ...

In this high tech day and age, it's tempting to think we are enlightened. We like to think we keep an open mind. Almost everyone in this era believes in the existence of atoms. In part, of course, this is because of the large amount of evidence for atoms. This evidence has emerged as our technology has been able to produce instruments capable of testing hypotheses about the existence of atoms. But supposing we were able to somehow communicate without language barriers with a very intelligent Stone Age person. We could explain atomic theory to him or her. But no matter how well we explain atoms, and the lead-up to the discovery of atoms, and all of the scientific discoveries therein, the Stone Age person isn't very likely to believe in atoms. This is because he or she has no personal experience with atoms and no context in which to put this. They might think it's a conspiracy theory or a lie. Even if we describe the chemical process of combustion (for example in the case of ...

 This quote has been attributed to Christian writer Max Lucado: What if you woke up tomorrow and had only the things you thanked God for today? This is an amazing question! All too often we take for granted the everyday miracles - for example, our eyesight (however imperfect it is), our hearing, our loved ones, the food that we are eating, no matter how ordinary it is. There are countless things we take for granted that we really ought to thank God for because He is the one who put them there. What would you have if you woke up tomorrow with only the things you thanked God for today? You might be wondering at this point, what about all the bad things that might have happened to you? What about sickness and evil deeds? I have written before that when in doubt, I find it's safest at attribute the good things to God and the bad things to Satan or to bad choices made by myself or by others. So yes, it's completely OK to thank God whole-heartedly about all the things we're gra...

I have written before about the power of prayer and how it's in your interests to read the Bible and pray . This is because you get to know God better, and He is a marvelous counselor. You get better discernment in what to do in various life situations, big and small. In the past, I used to think that if I read the Bible and prayed, it would please God. It does please him, but you should be aware that it is YOU who receives the benefits of your Bible reading and your praying, not God. In other words, God is not improved by knowing you, but you are improved by knowing God. So even if you were being purely selfish, you'd still want to pray and read the Bible, because YOU get to reap the benefits of it (not God). If you found this post interesting, you might also like these related posts on this blog: If Jesus needed to pray, we have an even greater need to do it The power of prayer What happens to your prayers?

The parable of the Prodigal Son is one of the most well-known parts of the Bible. It's a story that Jesus taught about a son who asks for his inheritance early, leaves home, squanders his inheritance, is left in abject poverty, and then realizes he would be better off working as a servant for his father than where he currently is right now. So he travels to his father, who greets him with open arms and prepares a feast for him.  The prodigal son's brother, however, is jealous. The brother reminds his father that he has always lived with his father yet the father has never prepared a feast for him and his friends. Let's take a look at this often-overlooked part of this parable - the father's response to the brother: Then the father said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.”’ Luke 15: 31-32 In this parable, we ar...

One of my favorite verses of the Bible relates to what happens to your prayers. This was about the devout centurion named Cornelius. In this Bible passage, it tells us exactly what happened to the prayers of Cornelius: In Caesarea there was a man named Cornelius, a centurion of the Italian Cohort, as it was called. He was a devout man who feared God with all his household; he gave alms generously to the people and prayed constantly to God. One afternoon at about three o’clock he had a vision in which he clearly saw an angel of God coming in and saying to him, ‘Cornelius.’ He stared at him in terror and said, ‘What is it, Lord?’ He answered, ‘Your prayers and your alms have ascended as a memorial before God. Now send men to Joppa for a certain Simon who is called Peter; he is lodging with Simon, a tanner, whose house is by the seaside.’ Acts 10: 1-6 In the above passage we can see that his prayers and alms have ascended as a memorial before God. Wow!  That is not only exciting but ...

The Bible is like spiritual food. We need it daily. Although I had been reading the Bible daily for years now, I didn't "see" this analogy to food or exercise until recently. While out on a run, I contemplated how convenient it would be if I could front-end my year's exercise into a big daily run for the first 3 months and then no more exercise for the rest of the year. I realized sadly that exercise simply does not work like this, any more than food does. You can't just eat lots and lots of food early in the year and then stop eating for the rest of the year. The Bible is exactly like food or exercise in that way. You would be hurting your own spiritual health if you just stop reading the Bible, in the same way that you'd be hurting your physical health if you stopped eating or exercising. You would still be physically alive without reading the Bible, but you would miss out on all the benefits of having your own wise counselor right there (God). You would mis...

In the Bible verses about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, God made provision for Lot and his family's safety. This was because God was happy with Lot: he was the only good man in the city. When God decided to destroy these cities, he sent 2 angels to do this. They appeared as normal men, and Lot invited them to stay in his house with him. The angels explained of the destruction that was about to happen, and that Lot's family was to be spared. Here is the Bible passage: With the coming of dawn, the angels urged Lot, saying, “Hurry! Take your wife and your two daughters who are here, or you will be swept away when the city is punished.” When he hesitated, the men grasped his hand and the hands of his wife and of his two daughters and led them safely out of the city, for the Lord was merciful to them. As soon as they had brought them out, one of them said, “Flee for your lives! Don’t look back, and don’t stop anywhere in the plain! Flee to the mountains or you will be swep...

What are the end time prophesies in the Bible which I most want people to know about? There are 2 very specific prophesies in the Bible whose events can't easily get mistaken for anything else. The first prophecy is that Greece and Iran will go to war, and Greece will win. The second prophecy is that people will need to get a mark on their forehead or right hand in order to buy or sell anything. It's extremely important not to get that mark, since the prophecy in the Bible tells us that it's the mark of the enemy. The mark could be an implantable chip, a bar code tattoo, or some as yet unknown technology. You can read in more detail about the first prophecy, the one from the book of Daniel about Greece and Iran going to war . You can also learn in more detail about the second prophecy, the one from the book of Revelation about the Mark of the Beast . These prophecies are both quite specific and are unlikely to get confused for anything else.  For example, war in general cou...

This past autumn, I was cutting down annual plants which had finished producing and placing them on top of the soil to eventually decompose.  I was rejoicing that this decomposition process would improve the soil. I thought to myself "Decomposition into existing soil improves it so that it is much better than soil that has never been used."  This struck a memory for me of a quote from C.S. Lewis: "For God is not merely mending, not simply restoring a status quo. Redeemed humanity is to be something more glorious than unfallen humanity would have been..." - C.S. Lewis, Miracles 1947, in Chapter 14 "The Grand Miracle". In other words, C.S. Lewis believed that man who is redeemed through the death of Jesus is somehow intrinsically better than unfallen man. I found it a bit easier to see this viewpoint using the gardening analogy. It's not a great analogy, but it was concrete enough to help me. Soil that has never been used is never going to be as good ...